OSGeo UK Local Chapter

GoFundGeo

Supporting Open Source Geospatial software development in the UK

Every year at our AGM (November) we use surplus funds from FOSS4G:UK conferences (and other funds) to support Open Source Geospatial software projects that will have an impact in the UK.

We formalised this process in 2022, and are aiming to continue to do this each year. In 2022 we supported 5 projects with £3,878.52 (details below) and we have approximately £6000 available for support this year.

We are looking to use this money to fund relevant projects in the range of £500 - £1000 each.

We would like to hear from you - what project(s) do you think we should fund?

We are making this as simple a process as possible, so please submit your ideas to by Mon 13th Nov 2023 (one week before the AGM on Mon 20th Nov 2023). We will need a short paragraph that covers what is being funded, why it is useful, who will do it and how much you are applying for. We will share these for discussion at the AGM.

We have funding guidelines and briefly we only fund open source projects, our preference is to support discrete pieces of work, or to meet specific sponsorship levels, and we are focused on items that will benefit the UK community.

We will discuss the submissions at the AGM, and decide which ones to fund.

I am also very pleased to confirm that the RGS-IBG GIScience Research Group who provided funding of £250 in 2022 have agreed to provide £250 again in 2023.

If your organisation is interested supporting future funding, please email osgeouk@gmail.com.

Any questions, please do ask.

Some testimonials from previous funding recipients:

The funding from OSGeo:UK has been pivotal to the development of Terra Draw. The funding came around the time of Terra Draws inception, and has allowed us to achieve all the goals we set out in the initial proposal and more. Now a year or so later, Terra Draw has gone from 0 external contributors to 6 and has accrued 250+ stars on GitHub. Interest is growing and we are gradually seeing increased usage across the ecosystem. We are grateful to OSGeo:UK for helping enable this.

James Milner, Terra Draw

“OSGeo:UK has been behind several of our development efforts and funded many of the works for improving QGIS. It is a very active and vibrant community and we enjoy participating in the annual FOSS4G:UK.”

Saber Razmjooei, Managing Director, Lutra Consulting

“The generosity of the group in directly funding the software projects is greatly appreciated, and helps maintain the ongoing sustainability of QGIS”.

Nyall Dawson, Director, North Road

“QGIS is the most popular Desktop Open Source GIS and offers tools not only for traditional GIS users, but also for serving data on the web, collecting data in the field, manipulating (geo)data with automated workflows and as a toolkit for developers.

With the growing size of the QGIS project and community there are new challenges and growing pains as a result of this success. Sustaining memberships, such as the one provided by OSGeo:UK, ensure that QGIS.ORG can finance projects, people and infrastructure in order to overcome these growing pains and meet these challenges. They help us to offer an ever improving QGIS for at least another 20 years to our users.

Sustaining membership income is used primarily for bug fixing, quality assurance, infrastructure, documentation, system administration, software packaging and the QGIS grant program. The grant program helps to improve QGIS under the hood: code refactoring, polishing of existing tools, infrastructure work, etc. Financial reports of QGIS.ORG can be found in the QGIS finance section.”

Andreas Neumann, QGIS.org Treasurer

2021-22

As agreed at the 2022 AGM:

With thanks to the RGS-IBG GIScience Research Group who have provided funding of £250 to support the above projects. If your organisation is interested supporting future funding, please email .

Additional donations have been made previously. See past donations for details of these.

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