Some places are more than a dot on a map. For OPENGIS.ch, Laax is one of them.
Laax is home to OPENGIS.ch, and it is where QField was born. So when it came time for this year’s Hackfest, there was really only one place to go. In October 2026, our ninjas travelled from across Switzerland and around the world back to the mountains where it all began. And this time, we didn’t come alone.
Closing a circle ➰
This year Laax also welcomed the QGIS User Conference and the 29th QGIS Contributor Meeting, organised by OPENGIS.ch and the Swiss QGIS user group. For the QField team, the symbolism was hard to miss.
QField exists because of QGIS. Every map, every form and every symbol a field worker sees on their phone is designed in QGIS and drawn by the QGIS rendering engine. QField is what happens when a community spends two decades building a world-class desktop GIS in the open, and then someone asks, “what if we took this outside?” Welcoming that community to the very village where OPENGIS.ch and QField started felt like closing a circle.
Marco, QField’s creator, captured it in the title of his conference talk: “QField, From Laax with 💚”. He told the story of a project that left these mountains and found its way to fieldwork sites on every continent. He also shared where it is heading next, with on-the-fly project creation, COGO tools, NTRIP support for RTK accuracy and 3D data collection.
At the outdoor QField workshop, participants collected real data in the Alpine landscape, syncing it through QFieldCloud as they went. Other ninjas spent the onboarding day helping new contributors take their first steps into the QGIS codebase, or working on different projects for OPENGIS.ch. Many stayed on through the Contributor Meeting to work on QGIS itself. We don’t just build on QGIS. We help build it, and this week we got to do it side by side with the people who make it possible.
More than software 🥷
People sometimes describe open source as a licence, or a way of distributing code. For us it has always been something bigger. It is our reason for being.
Look around the room when the OPENGIS.ch ninjas get together and you see what we mean. There are developers, designers, consultants, project managers, administrators and support specialists. They come from different countries, speak different languages and bring very different backgrounds. On any given day, they work on different things: a new QField feature, a QFieldCloud improvement, a fix deep in QGIS, the development of GEORAMA by a fast-growing web team, the preparation of our upcoming courses, or a tailored solution for a client with a tough problem to solve. Not to mention Team 42, who keep things running behind the scenes.
And they all share a stubborn belief that the best tools are built in the open, and that hard problems get solved faster when everyone can see the work and pitch in.
All of us are better than any one of us.
That belief shapes how OPENGIS.ch works every day. We are a distributed team spread across many time zones, and most of our collaboration happens the open-source way: in public repositories, in issue threads and in code reviews. That works remarkably well. But a week together in Laax is a reminder that the real foundation of open source is people, and the trust between people who choose to build something together.
A hackfest in the mountains was bound to produce a few stories. Our CEO flew down the mountain instead of taking the gondola, then stayed on as DJ until the very last moment. 🪂 Our lead QField developer celebrated his birthday with all the ninjas singing around a raclette in a mountain chalet. 🧀 And some squatted and climbed their way to the perfect portraits for our website, because dedication to the shot is a team sport. 🏋📷
Out in the field 🗺️
Fittingly for a team that builds tools for fieldwork, we spent a lot of the week outdoors. Our users work on muddy trails, steep slopes and remote plateaus, so it does us good to get our own boots dirty now and then.
The October weather was on our side. Groups rode the cable car above Flims and hiked across the Segnes plateau, a broad golden plain beneath a jagged wall of limestone peaks, with waterfalls pouring off the cliffs. Others wandered forest paths down to the turquoise Caumasee, or looked out over the Rhine Gorge from a viewing platform high above the river. It is hard to walk through country like that without wondering how you would map it. Once a field person, always a field person.
Back in the village, the lobby of the Riders Hotel became our co-working space for the week. 🧑💻 It was a happy mix of laptops, coffee and the kind of quick conversations that are so much easier in person. A question that might take a day of back and forth over chat gets settled in ten minutes at a shared table. We also set aside time to talk about how we work together and where we want to go next, filling a few walls with sticky notes along the way. When heads needed clearing, the football table saw some fiercely competitive matches.
Long tables, warm evenings 👥🕯️🍽️🥷🪩💬
If one image sums up the week, it is a long table full of people.
We walked through the forest together to Tegia Larnags, a wooden mountain restaurant, for an evening with the whole OPENGIS.ch crew. There was good food, plenty of laughter, a few surprises, and a dance floor that stayed busy late into the night. Some of us had worked together online for months, or even years, without ever sharing a meal. Those conversations, about QField, about life, about the next big problem to tackle together, are where a team really grows.
Some of the best moments were unplanned: a BBQ under a clear mountain sky, a busy bar on a cold night, and a team photo in matching OPENGIS.ch hoodies. For those who stayed on into the weekend, the village celebrated the return of the cattle from the high summer pastures with a traditional festival. It was a lovely reminder that Laax is a real mountain community, and that we are lucky to call it home.
Why it matters
Hackfest is how we stay a team, and a stronger team makes better things. The trust, energy and ideas from a week like this flow straight back into our work. They show up in QField and QFieldCloud, in the projects we deliver for our clients, and in the code we contribute to QGIS.
In the end, the people who benefit most are the ones using what we build, out in the field, every day. What is good for our team is good for our users, and good for the open-source community we are proud to be part of.
This year it meant even more. We came back to the place where QField was born, with the whole OPENGIS.ch team together in one place. We left with full notebooks, tired legs, new friendships and a renewed sense of why we do this. It is about people from all over the world working together in the open to build tools that anyone, anywhere, can use to map what matters to them.
Thank you 💚🫂
A huge thank you to everyone who made this week possible. Thank you to Anna for organising travel, accommodation and every detail in between, including warm clothes for the ninjas arriving from warmer climates. Thank you to the Swiss QGIS user group and everyone behind the QGIS User Conference and Contributor Meeting for bringing the community to our home. And thank you to the Rocks Resort and the Riders Hotel for being such great hosts.
From Laax, with 💚.
See you at the next Hackfest! 🥷
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