Introduction and QGIS US Meeting announcement

[Rachel Gugler]

Hello all,

Thanks for letting me join! I'm in Hood River, Oregon, so still Cascadia though not Seattle. I do take the train up to Seattle now and then, so hopefully I could make a meeting up there sometime. I went to a Geomatics meetup in Victoria, BC last year that was pretty fun. 10/10 recommend the float plane to get there. I attend PDXOSGeo meetings when I can, but that is still a 120 mile round trip drive, so I'm actually mostly active with OSGeoUS and this year I am a Community Co-Chair for the FOSS4G North America Conference that will be in Sacramento November 2-4. 

My day job (or rather night job) is as a sensor operator mapping wildfires from airplanes. In the past I've mapped fires across West and Midwestern states supporting the USFS NIROPS program and sensor enhanced air attack platforms, but my current contract I started supporting last year has so far been limited to Montana. I have surprisingly little contact with other geospatial folks in my job, so being active in the community is nice. I actually didn't know the open source geospatial community existed until I attended the 2023 FOSS4G NA in Baltimore solely because it was outside of fire season and I had professional development funds I needed to use or lose.

QGIS Meeting

The QGIS US group has an online meeting at 9am May 19th next week. The guest speaker is Saber Razmjooei, a co-founder of Lutra Consulting in the UK. Lutra Consulting has been a main driver for many new features to QGIS and also the company behind Mergin Maps. The meeting link is on the announcement on the website.

https://www.qgis-us.org

FOSS4G North America

The FOSS4G North America Community planning group meets at 10am May 19th, if you want to get involved with conference planning! More information is available in the OSGeoUS Community channel on Slack. I believe there is also a Program meeting later that day too, if that is more your interest. The Call for Proposals is out and some have already come in for people to start reviewing.
Slack Invite 

Thanks again for the join, and I hope to meet up in person sometime!

Rachel