FOSS4G 2022 general tracks

"Géocommun" [ʒeokɔmɛ̃] : is it the latest buzzword in France or a large movement towards more openness in the geospatial realm ?

The French National Geographical Institute (IGNF) recently started communicating its vision towards the development of Geo-commons. This sounds like a strategical change in the way the institute apprehends geo-data and geo-software production.

In this presentation, we first try to give a definition of what a "geocommon" is. Then we review the initiatives currently being deployed by various actors in France to transform this word into a reality.

We study the roots of these actions and their links to opendata, opensource and opengov movements.

We also try to provide a mindmap of involved actors, and how they interact together : administrations, data-oriented communities or software-oriented communities.

Then we anticipate the impact on free and opensource software for geomatics, and how it could affect technologies and communities in this area.

Developing a plugin for QGIS is both as simple as one of the countless tutorials and as complicated as a software engineering job facing with the dynamism of the project (maintenance requirements), the size of the APIs and constraints that need to be taken into account (Windows, etc.).

At Oslandia, we create and maintain many plugins for our clients, which leads us to streamline their development... and especially their maintenance! Historically, many extensions were created using the amazing Plugin Builder and the underlying tool (pb_tool) but it no longer fit our needs.

We present here our QGIS Plugin Templater, based on Cookiecutter and the related work on developer tools (tests, documentation, code structure, formatting, linter...). We will also mention the other tools we are using or following closely (the 3Liz toolbelt, the other template from Gispo Coding...).

Yet Another Plugin Generator? Probably but we think it's worth it!