OSGeo UK Local Chapter
GoFundGeo
Supporting Open Source Geospatial software development in the UK
Every year at our AGM (each 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.
At our AGM on 20th November 2023, we agreed to fund a total of £5,633 across 7 projects.
- pgRouting Gold Sponsorship, $1200/£963 per year
- QGIS Sustaining Membership small level, €1,000/£870 per year
- James Milner, development of Terra Draw, up to £1,000
- North Road/Nyall Dawson: QGIS layout background formatting, £1,000
- GISRUK GoFundGeo: - Flexurba £200
- Dorset Code Sprint: £600
- qgis2web: Supporting Andrea Ordonselli to take on and develop gis2web, £1,000
- As a result of sponsoring OSGeo Projects with a total of £1,833 / $2,317, we are now an OSGeo Silver Sponsor.
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.
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.
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
- Funding for Patreonship of Regina Obe : $60 per month inc VAT [£638.52 per year]
- QGIS Sustaining Membership, small level : €500 per year [£440 per year]
- James Milner, development of Terra Draw : £800
- Lutra Crowdfunding: Point cloud processing in QGIS : £1,000
- North Road/Nyall Dawson QGIS HTML formatting in labels : £1,000
- Potentially about £1,000 remaining for allocation at a later date.
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.