Thank you to our sponsors and contributors

The QGIS 2009 hackfest was a great success in a large part due to the various people and institutions that aided us.

We would firstly like to give our heartfelt thanks to Otto Dassau who organised the event and ran around making sure that everything ran smoothly for the event, and to thank Larissa Junek who kept 10 hungry hackers plied with delicious apple pie and cake.

The hackfest was held at Institut fur Umweltplanung (Environmental Planning Institute), University of Hannover. The institute sponsored the venue, audiovisual equipment, kitchen facilities and internet access. We are extremely grateful to them for helping us to make the QGIS 2009 hackfest turn from a dream into a reality.

We would also like to thank the German OSGEO Chapter, FOSSGIS e.V for sponsoring the hackfest with 500 Euros.

Thank you also to the many people who have donated sums large and small to the QGIS project. The money from donations was put to very good use funding the travel of some of the participants of the hackfest.

We would like to thank the virtual hackfest particpants present on IRC, the hackfest was all the better for having your comments, testing and insights. Lastly, a great big thank you to Andreas Neumann, Marco Hugentobler, Otto Dassau, Horst Duester, Juergen E. Fischer, Borys Jurgiel, Martin Dobias, Carson Farmer, Tim Sutton and Werner Macho who donated their time and energy to attend the hackfest and make it such a great occasion.

Without the contribution of the people and organisations mentioned above, the hackfest would not have been able to take place.

Summary of what happened at the hackfest

Firstly I should mention that that greatest part of the time was spent in discussions. Meeting face to face gives us an opportunity to discuss the minutae of the project in a way that is imply not possible in our virtual discussions. The discussions also gave us a good chance to plan what should be the priorities for the next major release of QGIS (Version 2.0) and the technical and logistical hurdles that need to be overcome in order to realise the QGIS 2.0 release. More details on that further down.

We had 10 people attending (though not all could be here for the full duration). Here are some of the things they looked at:

Horst Duester - Looked at German translation of website and the establishment of a German QGIS list. Will discuss with Martin integration of his SQL Editor into the postgis manager.

Martin Dobias - gave presentations of the work he and his group had been doing on QGIS Mapper project. Worked on bugfixing and intregration of new table class into trunk. Helped with integration of plugin installer into plugin manager.

Juergen Fischer - Fixed bugs and reviewed some out of SVN code he has. For Postgres they did performance testing and looked at places the performance can be improved. Also help with OSGEO4W work.

Borys Jurgiel - fixes to the installer and improvements. Updating themes to work on all plugins. Completed Polish translation.

Otto Dassau- Split of the manual into separate parts. Website and manual updates and translations,

Tim Sutton - Integrate WMS search patch. Bug fixes and ui cleanups. Helped on analysis branch.

Carson Farmer - Worked on the analysis branch and updates to QgsGeometry,

Werner Macho- Bugs fixing and worked on getting QGIS website. Updated stable german translation to 100%. Wrote script with Juergen to automatically generate translation progress status.

Plans for the next hackfest

Proposed Venues:

Venue: University of Osnabruck - Otto to investigate
Venue: Barcelona after FOSS4G - Carson to investigate
Venue: Prague - Martin Dobias to investigate
Venue: Vienna - Werner Macho to investigate

Proposed Dates:

Last week of October or first week of November 2009
or
Osnabruch, April 2010

Accommodation: We will aim to get a location where we can stay and hack at the same locations

Funding - we will aim to get $500 USD funding per person attending

Who should attend: Definately good idea to include non coders and contributors.

Internet: We would like a venue with good bandwidth. Having ustream live video streaming was a great addition and the next event we should try to have better microphones available.

Plans for 1.1

Feature freeze end March, Code freeze 10 April, Release 15 April

Plans for 2.0

Code:

We allocated names to items - it doesnt neccessarily mean that person will do all the work, but that they are the contact point if others wish to hack on that area.

Analsysis library -> Carson and Tim
Keyless tables -> break API Juergen and Martin
Table joins -> break API? Martin
Field caclulator -> add/change API Martin and Carson
Scale bar and North Arrow in core -> no API change -> Tim
First run wizard -> Borys
Plugin installer -> change notification Borys

Community:

German website and other languages
Success stories on web site
Manual reorganisaton and updating for each release and final version for 2.0
Establish local mailing lists e.g. German
Same look and feel for wiki, blog, forums

Release Dates:

QGIS 2.0 Stable March 2010
QGIS 1.1 Mid April 2009