Quantum GIS (QGIS) is really taking off as a free, open source Geographic Information System (GIS) package across the environmental (and other!) industries.  We’ve trained 123 people in it since offering the training, from all sorts of industries (as shown in the interactive map below), and it really can make a significant cost saving for an organisation using GIS – as well as meaning that you can provide it to a range of your staff that you normally couldn’t due to licence costs of other software.

The current QGIS training we’ve done – showing locations and trainees

Here at Gaia Resources we have implemented QGIS to help a range of organisations – particularly the Natural Resource Management (NRM) community and environmental consultancies.  We have a few organisations that we’ve worked with using QGIS that have reduced their costs for GIS software (especially in conjunction with our GRID product and ongoing support plans), enhanced the productivity of their teams and we have seen the use of GIS really starting to become a mainstream requirement of many environmental positions.  We even use it a lot ourselves (although we also remain software agnostic and have most of the main GIS packages here for our use).

To help support this demand, we are running additional training courses for the end of the year, and this includes our first offering in Brisbane as well!  The courses we run here in Leederville cost $1,000 (ex GST) per person for the two day course (you can see the outline here) – and this includes a whole afternoon of you “bringing your own problem” to the course.  We run the courses with a minimum number of five people attending, and then we open the course up to students at the lower cost of $100 (ex GST) per person to fill it up (in Perth, to a maximum of eight).

The upcoming dates for our courses are:

• Perth – 18th/19th of October, 2016 – We are looking for a few more people to confirm the course, and we won’t run another one this year in Perth, so this will be your last chance for a few months.  Get in touch with us soon to book your place.
• Bridgetown – 9th/10th of November, 2016 – this training is being run in conjunction with the Virtual Innovation Hub for capacity building in NRM. Priority is given to NRM practitioners however if you are interested please get in touch via us, subject to availability you may be able to be accommodated.
• Brisbane – early December, 2016 (date and venue are still TBC) – we are travelling across to Brisbane regularly these days and we are looking to run our first QGIS course in Brisbane!

If you are interested in any of these courses, either give me a call directly on (08) 9227 7309, email me at james@archive.gaiaresources.com.au or feel free to leave us a note on Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn!

James