I'm back from my first QGIS hackfest and it was wonderful.
It was really interesting as I met a lot of nice people and we did good networking.
I didn't knew first as what to expect as I hadn't met anyone in person before and I was the only Romanian attending (actually the first to a QGIS hackfest). Nothing further from the truth as the community is great and the majority if not all the community members like to get in touch with newcomers.
Basically, we had great communication and we went out each night to grab a beer and we stood quite late each time.
I think that a good connection was also enabled by the nice setup in Gran Canaria, with lots of things to do, and warm weather although it was the beginning of November. Having the possibility to staying the nights in t-shirts (more that 20 degrees) certainly contributed to a nice setup.
What really amazed me is that there were lots of people attending that were involved with GIS/Hydraulic modeling in the water/wastewater industry but somehow, they hadn't connected before and they didn't knew about each others interests.
I already knew of course about the common interests of Denis Rouzaud and Matthias Kuhn whom with we're working along in the QWAT and QGEP projects.
I met David Erill and Carlos López Quintanilla that had strong ties with the giswater project but there were also others that had similar interests.
Even the organizers from the Office of Free Software of the University of Las Palmas, represented by Pablo Fernández Moniz, were working along with students on practical projects for the local water company, which is a tremendous thing.
On a side node, it's a pity that we don't have tight collaboration between Romanian universities and companies that are involved in the matching industries. Some collaborations may exist, but to the best of my knowledge, they're the exception.
We did talk about combining our efforts and about the possibility of merging projects, data-models and so on. It would be very nice and productive for everyone to build a bigger water community around QGIS so that the knowledge, coding and all the efforts are centralized.
