The developers of QGIS came to Vienna on the weekend of 5th November to 9th November to meet at the University of Agricultural Sciences in Vienna, Austria  to solve problems in personal interaction. After an ongoing collaboration over the Internet, this was a welcome opportunity to personally get to know each other and discuss various problems and possible solutions locally and to clean them out.

Also, the use of modern communications, that has kindly been provided by the University have been fully exploited, and so not only personally Volunteering active participants but also those who could not make it to Vienna could take part. These happend via video streaming of lectures and presentations, and directly integrated into the event via IRC. So bugs occurring could be passed to the developers directly.

The work in detail

A central component of the Hackfest were the presentations, lectures and demonstrations in which the participants presented the new features that may soon find their way into QGIS core.

On special features that were introduced are set out below::

• The Symbology NG branch from Martin Dobias and his implementation of an improved labeling engine.

• The Google Summer of Code project by Massimo Di Stefano of the integration of ossimPlanet in QGIS

• Two projects which were presented by Alexander Bruy (GIS Lab)

• A high quality dataset of Ukraine and Russia

• A plugin for the management of protected areas to be protected, including occurring species.

• Martin was also his Gismapper project in which a normal car is used to use GPS, compass, a camera mounted on a computer, and the road can be tracked.

Discussions revolved primarily around the following themes:

• Improved SVG support in QGIS

• What will it do everything in QGIS 2.0?

• Improved Plugin Management

New integrated / improved features that have been worked on:

• User Interface, which has undergone a consitent look and feel and the usability has (hopefully) been improved.

• New icons provide a clear operation of the functions

• Improved plugin manager by Borys Jurgiel

• The ftools by Carson Farmer converted into a library (to run faster and make available for everyone else)

• Documentation

• Website (French added, improved usability)

As a summary we can say that it is very impressive, if slightly more than 20 people 4 days focuses on a project work and (at that time even though it is very short) the tremendous things which can be achieved.

Finally, the team would like to thank  FOSSGIS eV and  OSGeo for the financial support that has enabled this Hackfest and the University of Natural Resources and Applied Life Sciences, Vienna and the Institute of Surveying, Remote Sensing and Land Information (IVFL) for kindly providing the place to meet and the fast internet connection.

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