Year in Review ¶

It’s been another awesome year for our Team. We have come a long way since establishing Kartoza in 2014, building many different software products, making friends and working with existing and new clients. Forming a company around an open source friendly business model presents many challenges but is also extremely rewarding. Here is our 2018 year end review that we would like to share with you!

Event Highlights ¶

FOSS4G ¶

FOSS4G is the annual conference for Open Source geospatial practitioners and enthusiasts. This year FOSS4G2018 was held in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. Team Kartoza were there in force. We were Silver Sponsors for the event and were the only sponsoring African open source geospatial solutions company. Tim Sutton was also on the local organising committee. Kartoza was further represented at the event by Gavin Fleming (Kartoza co-founder), Christian Christelis, Admire Nyakudya, Anita Hapsari and Rizky Nugraha. It was a fun-packed week of learning and sharing.

A highlight of the event was the awarding of Honorary QGIS Project Steering Committee (PSC) Membership to Kartoza co-founder and long time QGIS contributor, Tim Sutton.

UR2018 ¶

The Understanding Risk (UR) Forum was another milestone event of 2018. This took place in May in Mexico City. Kartoza shared learnings using and building open source geospatial solutions for disaster risk reduction (DRR). For the last six years Kartoza has been actively developing tools like InaSAFE to support DRR efforts. Kartoza was represented at the event by co-founder Gavin Fleming and Ismail Sunni.

QGIS ZA Meet-ups ¶

Kartoza is actively involved in the development and support of the local QGIS user community in South Africa. Kartoza team member Admire Nyakudya is also the QGIS Country Representative for the South African user group. Regular presentations are made to the user group meet-up. It is really great to see growing interest in the use of QGIS and FOSSGIS in South Africa! Meetings are currently held every few months in Cape Town and Gauteng.

GeoNode Summit ¶

Gavin Fleming represented Kartoza at the GeoNode Summit in Torino, Italy in March. Kartoza presented work on adding the QGIS server backend to GeoNode as a GeoServer replacement and work in core QGIS to add a GeoNode provider, which arrived with QGIS 3.

Geekulcha MediHack ¶

Gavin volunteered at this hackathon at the University of Limpopo in August, where students competed to build apps with free and open health-related data. Many tried to do non-spatial apps like determining which clinics have stock of needed medications, but several groups solved questions like “how can an ambulance reach a patient in a deep rural area or informal settlement with few formal roads or addresses?”. Kartoza staff participate in and support events such as this which promote open data and transparency while promoting skills and entrepreneurship.

Key Projects ¶

At Kartoza we feel immensely honoured to have worked with incredible partners to create Open Source Geospatial Solutions for socially uplifting projects. These are some of project milestones of 2018:

InaSAFE ¶

2018 saw the completion of a contract with DFAT / Government of Australia to develop InaSAFE. InaSAFE is a tool to help disaster managers prepare for disasters. It represents the culmination of 6 years of engagement with InaSAFE work in Indonesia. During that time many versions of InaSAFE Desktop and InaSAFE Realtime (which delivers near real time hazard impact reports) have been delivered. The InaSAFE plugin is available in the QGIS plugin manager and now runs on QGIS 3.x.

GeoSAFE ¶

With support from the World Bank GFDRR, Kartoza built a web interface to InaSAFE that integrates with GeoNode and uses a headless InaSAFE running on QGIS server to perform analyses and produce reports. A production instance was delivered to the National Disaster Management Agency of Mozambique.

MyFarmWeb ¶

Kartoza continues its successful relationship with AgriTechnovation, ongoing since 2015. AgriTechnovation initially supplied customers with hardcopy and PDF reports on soils, pests, crop health and other precision farming inputs. They wanted to put these resources online so farmers could access them easily and see historical analyses in context, with an interactive map of their fields at the centre. A solution was built around Django, QGIS server, QGIS desktop, PostGIS and OpenLayers that achieved this goal. As usage and performance requirements increased, parts of the system moved to the cloud (AWS). MyFarmWeb has become a key product for AgriTechnovation, with thousands of users in South Africa and beyond. The app is available only to AgriTechnovation customers.

BIMS - Limpopo & FBIS ¶

Through partnerships with LEDET (the Limpopo Provincial Government Department of Economic Development, Environment and Tourism) and the Freshwater Research Centre, Kartoza developed a new web platform for managing and visualising biodiversity data. Many plans exist for new features and improvements to the platform over the course of 2019.

MapCampaigner ¶

Kartoza worked with the Humanitarian OpenStreetmap Team (HOT) to develop a new version of MapCampaigner. “The OSM Campaign Manager project aims to bring field data collectors and campaign managers together on a single platform. Campaign managers are able to set up specific campaign types to evaluate the progress of field campaigns. Remote mapping projects can also be connected to campaigns.”

Cape Town Marathon ¶

Kartoza supported the organisers of the Cape Town Marathon and Cape Town Carnival to do their planning in QGIS and PostGIS.

Other News ¶

GIS BOX ¶

GISBOX was launched a few months prior, described as an on-premise, managed open source GIS server packed with ready-to-use data.

Training Courses ¶

Several courses were presented throughout the year covering various FOSS GIS technologies. Admire presented a QGIS course at the Johannesburg office.

Limosa Open Source GIS Support ¶

Kartoza provides QGIS and FOSS GIS commercial support to businesses and individuals across South Africa and the rest of Africa. The support team has a mix of friendly first- and second-line support staff to ensure efficient responses to support queries.

Fun, of course ¶

The team enjoyed memorable moments across various global locations, including team gatherings, adventures near office locations, and collaborative work in international offices.

Thank You

We would like to thank all our collaborators and invite new partnerships in the coming year. Seasons Greetings from the Kartoza Team.