Today was a great day. Gavin Fleming (http://www.afrispatial.co.za/), Horst Duester (visiting FOSSGIS guru in residence) and myself presented a one day mass QGIS workshop. There were around 110 people present! It was a feat of logistics on the part of Gavin, his wife Bridget and the IT staff and students from the Bridge House school (which played host for the day). 60 pcs running Windows were set up and had Jurgen Fischer’s excellent all-in-one windows installer for QGIS installed on them. People sat ‘two up’ at each computer and watched us walk QGIS through the process of loading vector and raster data, digitising data, doing some simple analysis, and producing a print ready map.

A nominal fee or R150 (around USD15) was charged to cover lunch and tea. The remaining profits were donated to the school to sponsor the purchase of some sensors for monitoring river water quality in a local river. The presentors and organisers all donated their time. Those attendees that couldn’t afford the R150 charge were admitted for free.

To be honest when Gavin proposed admitting around 80 people into the day workshop rather than the originally planned 20 Horst and I thought he was mad (little did we then know the actual turnout would hit 110). But I have to say Gavin and Bridget did a brilliant job and it was such a thrill to look out over a sea of interested and attentive faces all absorbing every morsel of knowledge about QGIS and FOSSGIS they could glean. It definitely left me feeling like it was a worthwhile experience and feeling positive about the demand and interest for FOSSGIS in the Western Cape.

I am off to crash for the night now after a long day, but I will leave you with these pics:

(above photo courtesy H. Duester)