On the leap day of this year, 29 February 2020, the first QGIS Indonesia (QGIS ID) meet up is held in Yogyakarta, Indonesia. In this first meet up, there are 62 participants and 5 speakers. It is really not a bad start for the first meet up :). Thanks to the local sponsor and the donation from the QGIS ID T-shirts sale, this event is free!. In this event, there are talks from open source development in Indonesia, introduction about GRASS, the use of machine learning and cellular automata on land use, and practical use of QGIS on forest management and village mapping.
Besides that, there are also a sharing session about QGIS activity, QGIS bug reporting, and QGIS Bahasa Indonesia translation. If you understand Bahasa Indonesia, you can read this blog post about the whole meet up. You can also watch the whole meet up in this YouTube video.
In this meetup, I gave a short sharing session for the QGIS activity and the QGIS bug reporting. The first one is about a story behind the QGIS itself. Spoiler: there are a lot of things happening behind QGIS. Starting from its history, the people behind the project, the organization (QGIS.org), the activities like user group and QGIS hackfest, and challenge for QGIS. You can find the presentation here (also in Bahasa Indonesia, heavily adapted from Andreas Neumann’s slide).
The second one is about bug reporting in QGIS. In this part, I show how to do bug reports on QGIS (spoiler: we use Github). I also put some tips on how to report a bug that will help a developer to fix it. You can find the presentation here. I took most of the content from the QGIS bug reporting page and from my previous experience.
Now, the side story :). This is my first time doing an online presentation. I did the presentation from Germany, that has 6 hours difference to Indonesia. It’s scheduled at 13:00 West Indonesia Time or 7 mornings in Germany. It’s already a challenge since it’s not even sunrise. Thankfully, I woke up before it. We use a video call to do the presentation. It is really different from the onsite presentation. I can’t see the feedback/expression from the audience and less interaction between us. So, it is like recording a tutorial for a YouTube video. Anyway, I hope it is useful for them :).
I think online talk/presentation is different compared to the offline one. The online one made me less nervous but on the other hand, less interaction with the audience. I still prefer offline one though as I can see the presenter in person, which has different aura compared to see from the screen. It also offers after presentation discussion and gets in touch with the people. The online one has benefits like less cost and more opportunities for busy people. Another one is it is suitable for a conference in the virus spread like the Coronavirus currently. I hope the virus ends soon!
Anyway, it is an interesting experience for me. I hope it helps the initiation of the QGIS Indonesia user group. You can learn more about the QGIS Indonesia user group in https://qgis-id.github.io.