This year, OPENGIS.ch celebrated its 10th anniversary in Bern, with an afternoon full of workshops attended by clients, long-term friends, and colleagues. Here, we will give a glimpse of QField: its vision, where it’s headed, and the exciting features future users can look forward to.
QField was created on June 8th, 2011, with its first commit titled “added first script”. Since then, it has grown into a powerful tool with a clear vision for the future: to empower people to map and understand the world, tackle daily challenges, and address global issues. Over the next ten years, QField aims to make this vision a reality for everyone, everywhere.
Layers of cake, designed by QField ecosystem’s leading team members, were explained with 2034 in mind: intuitive and accessible to anyone wanting to map our world, while pioneering an innovative and collaborative app for the geospatial community. And last but not least: building strong and engaged communities to drive further adoption of the QField ecosystem.
This vision is taking shape through the forging of strategic partnerships with geospatial stakeholders: hardware manufacturers, ambassadors, trainers and technological partners. For the team, it is clear that good collaboration is key to building a healthy and sustainable ecosystem. Community as well as financial sustainability can become a strong reality with user groups, sponsors and crowdfundings.
And then it became reality: In the summer of 2024, heavy rains caused severe flooding in Switzerland and, suddenly, QField became a vital tool for supporting emergency response through data surveys and photo documentation.
With this emotional story, the technical lead, Mathieu took over and shared other QField success stories and several mapping use cases with partners in Finland and Tonga. But seamless fieldwork wouldn’t be possible without QFieldCloud, so Ivan provided an insight into the last years’ QFieldCloud enhancements, before diving into the busy server-side roadmap for 2025, which includes many new features related to the authentication, security, internationalization and performance. Finally, Zsanett shared QField product news and updates, including new storage capacities like WebDAV and new packaging capabilities. Last but not least, the new Fangorn version introduces new features developed by the evolving QField Community.
Building communities by sharing thoughts and ideas for the ecosystem is now possible through the ideas.qfield.cloud platform, open to everybody to suggest new ideas for QField.
The final topping of the (layer) cake: the new QField plugin framework was presented to the workshop attendees by Mathieu, who explained how the field workflow can be enhanced and optimized through the development of plugins – unique extensions that further personalize QField. For example, with the Routing Plugin, users can compute optimal ways between locations directly in QField using an external API. To make team efforts in the field even more efficient, the Live Location Plugin allows each team member to see the location of other members on the QField map, preventing debilification in the field.
Last but not least, the workshop ended with a Q&A session, where several topics were addressed such as virtual reality, AI, machine learning, etc. This was followed by a happy and cheerful welcome drink with OPENGIS.ch partners. 🍻
