Horst Duester and I spent the week in Johannesburg (South Africa) doing FOSSGIS training. As I mentioned in a previous article, Horst is visiting South Africa on a sabbatical. He has kindly donated his time to provide training services in order to promote and facilitate the use of FOSSGIS. We badly need more people evangelising FOSSGIS here – there are many people looking for low cost and good GIS solutions and few people with the time and know-how to show them how to proceed.

We drove up to Jhb from Swellendam in one day – 1400km – a first for Horst who calculated that with an equally long trip from his home town he would have landed up in Russia!

Our first port of call was at Wits University (the University of Witwatersrand, Jhb). Devlyn Hardwick convened the course at Wits and kindly provided us with accommodation for the week. We spent the monday afternoon installing the Ubuntu VMWare image we had prepared onto all of the computers in the lab. At the end of the day it was a real thing of beauty to see so many Ubuntu workstations.

From Tuesday to Thursday we (ok mainly Horst) presented an enlightening overview of QGIS and GRASS to the participants. He covered the process you need to follow to produce a professional quality map – from importing or digitising your date, to symbolising that data to conducting an analysis and finally culminating in the use of the QGIS map composer to create a great map. Much of the development of the map composer was funded by the SO!GIS group at Solothurn and it was really great to revisit just how far QGIS has come along in its ability to produce a high quality map.

Training at Wits University

Devlyn and Horst enjoying sumptuous fare at the Ethiopian restaurant

Horst putting QGIS through its paces

On friday our activities moved to the CSIR Meraka institute in Pretoria (which is very close to Johannesburg). At Meraka we held a one day PyWPS workshop which was convened by Graeme McFerren. During the workshop we walked the participants through the process that you need to follow to get PyWPS set up on your server, and then followed that with some examples of how to write a PyWPS process. The workshop was quite technical in nature. Those particpants with less technical knowledge were given an understanding of what the OGC WPS standard sets out to facilitate, while those with deeper technical knowledge left with the building blocks they needed to go off and deploy their own PyWPS processes.

PyWPS training on the go

One of Horst’s motivations for spending his sabbatical here in South Africa was to improve his English. So it was quite a feat on his behalf to conduct his training sessions entirely in English for four days straight.

All in all it was a great and successful week and we are now en-route back to the Cape – though we are breaking up the trip with an extremely pleasant stay over at the Karoo National Park. In true geek fashion we are sitting in our chalet using e2fsck to repair Horst’s dodgy hard disk which seems to have thrown a wobbly after being exposed to our South African electrical system.

Horst taking a break from riding through the desert on a horse with no name

As an aside for those interested, the way to check your disk under Ubuntu / Linux and mark bad sectors so they don’t get used is this:

e2fsck -c /dev/sda5

In the weeks to come Horst will be presenting more free and commercial FOSSGIS training workshops here in South Africa. Hopefully in the future others who feel like a break from the daily grind will come and pay a visit to South Africa and follow suite – the effort is greatly appreciated here!