This week we’ve had Kurt Menke in the office (of Bird’s Eye View GIS) providing a guided training workshop for QGIS, the canonical open source GIS suite.

#qgis workshop selfie @spatialnetworks ... a great group hard at work! pic.twitter.com/fp1jNsQMFL

— Kurt Menke (@geomenke) May 28, 2019

It’s been a great first two days covering a wide range of topics from his book titled Discovering QGIS 3.

The team attending the workshop is a diverse group with varied backgrounds. Most are GIS professionals using this as a means to get a comprehensive overview of the basics of “what’s in the box” on QGIS. All of the GIS folks have the requisite background using Esri tools throughout their training, but some of us that have been playing in the FOSS4G space for longer have been exposed to and used QGIS for years for getting work done. We’ve also got a half dozen folks in the session from our dev team that know their way around Ruby and Python, but don’t have any formal GIS training in their background. This is a great way to get folks exposure to the core principles and technology in the GIS professional’s toolkit.

Kurt’s course is an excellent overview that covers the ins and outs of using QGIS for geoprocessing and analysis, and touches on lots of the essentials of GIS (the discipline) and along the way. All of your basics are in there — clips / unions / intersects and other geoprocesses, data management, editing, attribute calculations (with some advanced expression-based stuff), joins and relates, and a deep dive on all of the powerful symbology and labeling engines built into QGIS these days¹.

The last segment of the workshop is going to cover movement data with the Time Manager extension and some other visualization techniques.