420 people on a mountain, and what stayed with me
Last week we brought the QGIS User Conference up to 2222 metres. Four hundred and twenty people from more than thirty countries and five continents got into a gondola in Laax and came up to Crap Sogn Gion, and for two days the Galaaxy was full of talks, six keynotes, twelve short workshops and a lot of coffee. It is the biggest conference that has ever happened on this mountain. A week later I am still a little bit amazed that it worked.
But the logistics are not what stayed with me.
We did not put digital sovereignty on the programme as a track, and still it was everywhere. Gerhard Andrey opened on Monday morning with Switzerland and open source, and from there it simply did not go away. For the people from public administrations in the room this is not philosophy. It is a line in a budget. They have data they must keep readable for thirty years, and tools whose conditions can change from one year to the next.
The conversation I keep thinking about was with a man who used to sell proprietary GIS licences for a living. At some point he did the maths on what his country, which is not a rich country, pays every year for software it will never own, and he decided the money would do more good building something his country actually controls. So he quit. Now he works on open national geospatial infrastructure. He did not tell me this like a big story. He told it like you tell someone you changed job.
That one stayed with me for the rest of the week.
Lorenz Hurni came after Andrey with maps as instruments of power, which is a good reminder for anyone who still thinks a basemap is something neutral. Anita Graser 🌻 talked about AI in the QGIS ecosystem, Johannes Kanonier took us through fifteen years of QGIS at the State of Vorarlberg, and Ivan Minčík, Lova Andriarimalala and Tim Sutton made the least glamorous and most necessary point of the week, which is that somebody has to maintain the infrastructure and that somebody needs to be paid.
Here is the thing I keep coming back to. Open source does not give you sovereignty by itself. If you download free software and then nobody in your country can fix it, extend it or answer for it, you have only changed the shape of your dependency. What makes it real is what happened in those corridors, where the people who pay for the software and the people who write it were standing in the same line waiting for lunch.
And that is not a nice image, it is literally what happened. On Wednesday we ran ten full-day workshops down in the valley with 120 people, on point clouds, data processing, plugin development, automation, collaboration and field data infrastructure. Seventy-one people spent the QField Day walking around Laax in small groups collecting data. From Wednesday to Friday the 29th Contributor Meeting put developers, translators and documentation people around the same tables, and some of what was discussed on Monday was already a commit by Thursday. Three days from a problem on somebody’s desk to a fix in the code. That loop is the real product.
📷 Contributors Meeting
And around all of that there was the other programme, the one that never appears as a session in any schedule. On Sunday, before the conference even started, ninety people walked the Ruinaulta and the Segnes plateau with guides. On Monday and Tuesday whoever took the first gondolas could do yoga at eight in the morning on a terrace at 2222 metres, or a short walk, or a QField crash course, or a crash course in Romansh. There were trail runs on Wednesday and Friday for the people who consider six or ten kilometres before breakfast a reasonable idea. And on Tuesday, when the conference was over, a few of us did not take the gondola back down. We flew. Launching off Crap Sogn Gion next to Régis Haubourg from the PSC was how a dream that had come true finally closed.
I am fairly sure more friendships came out of those hours than out of any session.
Thank you to HAPPY SURVEY Sagl, EBP Schweiz, Lutra Consulting, arx iT (GIS Consulting, Implementation and Training), OW Ocean Winds, the Province of South Holland and our other sponsors. Because of you a student and somebody from a cantonal office could sit in the same room. Thank you to Flims Laax Falera Management AG and the Weisse Arena Gruppe, who let us put a conference on top of a mountain without blinking. Thank you to the volunteers, scanning badges at seven in the morning, sending four hundred people to the right gondola and the right lunch table, carrying boxes up and down the mountain. To all the speakers, to my team at OPENGIS.ch, and to everybody at QGIS.org Association and QGIS User Group Switzerland who gave their free-time to this.
The most heartfelt thank-you goes to Anna Randegger, who kept the whole thing running while I was enjoying being on a stage and to my family, who put up with a whole year of me being half somewhere else even when I was sitting at the table with them. Thank you for the patience and for the support, I know it was not always easy.
Finally to everyone who was in the Hangar on Tuesday evening. I still get goosebumps and a knot in my throat when I think back to that standing ovation.
You made a year of work dissolve into tears of joy.
One last thing that makes me smile every time is that one of the next QGIS releases will be called LAAX. Over twenty million application starts every month, each one carrying the name of a village of fifteen hundred people in the Surselva where by now I know every single walkable path. Word of the father of a five month old 😉
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