OSGeo UK Local Chapter

GoFundGeo

Supporting Open Source Geospatial software development in the UK

Every year at our AGM (in 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. In 2023 we supported 7 projects with a total of £5,633 and in 2022 we supported 5 projects with £3,879.

This year we have a budget of £6,150 and will be making the decision about which projects we support at our AGM on Mon 18th November. Come along and have your say!

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

We have now closed applications and are in the review stage. We will discuss the submissions at the AGM on Mon 18th Nov, and decide which ones to fund.

The submissions are currently listed in Google Docs. Please add your comments.

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

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 are happy to confirm we have secured £150 from RGS-IBG GIScience Research Group to support GoFundGeo projects. If your organisation is interested in supporting this, please email .

If you have any questions, or need any more information please email or come along to the AGM on Mon 18th Nov at 1pm.

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

Flexurba: GISRUK & OSGeo:UK GoFundGeo Award

GISRUK and OSGeo:UK have co-funded a GoFundGeo grant of £500 that has been offered to one GISRUK presenter who presents a tool or technique that has potential for wide uptake in the open source geospatial (OSGeo) community. The purpose of the grant is to help the recipient to make their approach easily adoptable through the provision of open source code repository and/or tool (e.g. a QGIS plugin).

It gives me great pleasure to announce that the 2024 Award goes to Céline Van Migerode for Flexurba: An Open-Source R Package To Flexibly Reconstruct The Degree Of Urbanisation Classification.

Flexurba, in a library written in R with the first open reconstruction of the Degree of Urbanisation algorithm to classify cities, towns, and rural areas. The package offers enhanced flexibility and facilitates constructing alternative versions of the classification by customising the minimum population size required for a city, and more ‘hidden’ implementation details including contiguity requirements and smoothing rules. The package enables a broad range of analyses beyond the Degree of Urbanisation’s original application, such as evaluating alternative urban delineations, sensitivity analyses and comparative research.

Flexurba’s source code be explored here, and the documentation is included on this website. Céline’s paper at GISRUK is available here.

2022-23

At our AGM on 20th November 2023, we agreed to fund a total of £5,633 across 7 projects.

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 .

We have around £500-£1000 remaining for allocation at a later date, so if you do have a project that might qualify, please check out funding guidlines rules and let us know, via or the email list.

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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