 Hello, welcome everybody. Welcome on my YouTube channel. And today I'm very happy to have this live webinar for you, where we are going to talk about using merging maps in education, both in academic education or in GIS training. So maybe you are a trainer or an educator, then this is the right place for you. Also, if you're not, then you will see a lot of interesting things. We have some guests today, so I'm going to make a little round. So we start with Lena. Lena, can you please introduce yourself? Yes. Hello, Lena Fischer, University of Copenhagen. I work from the Forrester College in Nüddeburg. So perhaps some of you already know the version Nüddeburg that was a long time ago. We use Mergin for all our students. So it's more than 200 students every year who is encountering Mergin. Great. Hi, Kurt. Please introduce yourself. Hi, Kurt Menke. I'm a GIS consultant with Septima in Copenhagen. And we're a geospatial open source company in Denmark. And I do a lot of teaching and spatial analysis and cartography. Thanks, Kurt. Hi, Peter. Can you introduce yourself? Hello. I'm Peter Petrik from Lutra Consulting. We are main developers of Mergin Maps and I'm leading Mergin Maps project for the last two years. And I'm doing a lot of stuff around open source GIS and QGIS for a few years already. Thanks. Great to have you all here in the webinar. Different experiences and even the developers of Mergin Maps. We also have in the chat on YouTube, CyberRasm Julie and Jan and maybe some others from Lutra Consulting from Mergin Maps answering your questions. In the end, we will have time to answer your questions live in the webinar with the panel here. So feel free to ask your questions in the YouTube chat. And also feel free to introduce yourself. So we're going to start with a short presentation about what Mergin Maps is. That's a bit short introduction. And then I will show some use cases from IHE Delft. Then Lena will take over with her experiences in using it and teaching. And then there's Kurt. After that, we will have a little panel discussion and then we'll take your questions. So feel free to post them and we'll get started. So I'm going to start with a little introduction to Mergin Maps for the people who don't know it. And Mergin Maps is a great ecosystem in fact to share your data from QGIS to the mobile phone to collect data in the field using that same QGIS project and share it back. And also to work with a team to collaborate in data collection. And therefore it's really a great tool to use for a field data collection. So it exists of a mobile app that you can use, which synchronizes with a web application where you can manage your projects. You can share it with other users with your team. And there's a plugin in QGIS that can be used to synchronize between your mobile phone and QGIS through that Mergin Maps web application. So it has a seamless integration with QGIS. You can set up your layers that you want to use in the mapping project in the field. It can be online layers or offline layers. You can create forms using widgets for your attribute table that you make. And you can then synchronize that with the cloud and use these forms that you made in QGIS in the field. Also the styling is taken over. And every time people collect data in the field and synchronize or use QGIS with the same project, the web application keeps track of the versioning and the changes that are made even at the level of the features that are edited. You have the possibility to connect an external GPS receiver to have more accuracy. You can collaborate. And it's very user-friendly. There is a special plan for academia and non-profit, which is a free plan. And for the academia plan, you can have unlimited amount of users and projects. And you'll have 200 megabyte storage and access to the API. And similar for non-profits, if you have an annual budget below 25,000 euros, you also can have unlimited users and projects, 500 megabytes of storage and access to the API. For companies, there are paid plans of different levels. I'm going to start with some examples from IHE Delft. That's where I work. IHE Delft Institute for Water Education. And besides my work with IHE Delft, I also have my own company CrossGIS for open source GIS consultancy. And I'm also an official partner of Mergin Maps. And I will start with a bit of unconventional use of Mergin Maps. We had, of course, the pandemic some years ago. And we had our master students who couldn't travel to IHE Delft. So we have them using Mergin Maps to map themselves and to fill in a few funny questions. So they had a remote way of getting in touch with each other. And we configured it in such a way that they were a drop on a map because we are a water institute. And then with QGIS2Web, we created a little interactive website where the students could click on a drop and see a picture of that student and read the answers to the questions and already get used to each other. And that worked quite well because of privacy reasons I cannot show you those results. But we used it again in the Vapor Hackathon, which is running now. Tomorrow is the finals of this edition. And there we asked the participants also to map themselves because we thought that would be useful if they need to form teams. And they in Mergin Maps are also a drop on the map. And if you tap on a drop, you can see a picture. And they could also answer some questions there on why they are participating in the Hackathon and how they can be contacted if you want to be in a team with them. And this is then a map generated from that result. So if you have time tomorrow, follow us at 10. There's a live stream on the Water Accounting YouTube channel with the results of the Vapor Hackathon. The five shortlisted teams will have their videos screened and the winning team will be selected by a jury. Now in class, I also use Mergin Maps. Last year, we had a brand new course on precision agriculture. And there we had the participants of the class setting up a project in QGIS using all this fancy data that we have available in the Netherlands through the PDOC service plugin in QGIS. It gives you access to high resolution aerial photographs, the parcel map, and these all online services. And we have a tutorial where the students can make a Mergin Maps project out of that and synchronize it with their phone. Now if you use Mergin Maps for teaching and you are in a classroom or you teach online from your desk like I'm doing now, then you need to spoof the GPS signal to simulate that you're somewhere in the field to really test and to demonstrate it. So what you can do is there are apps for that. This is an example of an app. It's a free app. It comes with some annoying commercials. But anyways, it can spoof your GPS signal. You just say where you want to be and then it takes over the GPS from your mobile phone. And then you can use it indoors. Then the next thing you need to do is share your phone screen to the projector or the online tool that you use. And now Windows comes with a nice native tool. This happened also when I prepared it one moment. So this is the way to share your phone on Windows 11. You just use the phone link app and then you can share the screen of your phone. And here we go, accept it, click continue and then have Mergin Maps. And here's the project that we used in class with the parcels. And then you can use it and demonstrate that and test it in class. And after testing, it's time for fieldwork. That's the fun part of GIS classes where you have field data collection and we go with the students into the field and then they can map the parcels. We have two survey layers in this project. One with the parcels where they can update the crops that are growing there, as you can see here in the animation. And so here they can change the current crop that they encounter in the field, but they could also add their observations. We have map teams defined here. So they could choose different layers. For example, an infrared autofoto, which comes from PDOC through the PDOC services plugin, Mergin Maps just takes over that online map. And here we have the RGB high resolution image. And if you have a low GPS position accuracy, it will give a message, of course. There's also a survey form where they can fill in all kinds of things that they find in the field, the data and the time, and they can take a picture. And then after the field, they get back into class to process this data. You can see that the few conditional fields are used here. So they can only choose the crop type if crop length is chosen. So if it's a water body, then it says with a message that the expression is not met. So we work here with some expressions. But students have made this and used it in class and it worked really nicely. So if you want to learn more about this specific application, you can find a tutorial at GIS Open Corsair. Just go to GISOpenCorsair.org. And this is on the second page of the course page of the platform. And you can choose this course for precision agriculture. And you find the Mergin Maps tutorial here to make that tool. And it comes also with a video. So that was my presentation. And I'm going to invite Leine to present her presentation. As soon as it's on a full screen, I'll put it on the screen, Leine. Yeah. Thank you, Hans. And your lectures are quite similar to ours. We don't have that much international students. So we keep it locally in Denmark. I have a single class with international students. So most of my lectures will be our endangies. So that's a huge difference. And we are on site. So I will put on my presentation here. Great. I'll put it on the screen if you're ready. Yes, I'm ready here. There it goes. Go ahead. We have students for years at our faculty and mostly is bachelor's students. At first year, actually the first week, we introduced them to GIS and we used Mergin for that project. We hand out simply a zip file with a project and with layers and layout, all that stuff. So they just have to use it. But still, we say to them, you have to add data into lookup tables so they get introduced with the tables. They are installing plugins and create a Mergin user. And then they are creating a new Merging project. All that we tell them how to do that made a simple YouTube video. And they find it interesting. They come from high schools. So they are used to use computers and phones. So they don't find this difficult. Then they start collecting the data on the phone and synchronize. And we have a QGIS Atlas. So they are synchronizing and print an Atlas. I'm going to show you later. And this is for trees. Of course, we are a forestry college. So they have to get to know 100 different trees and bushes and make a herbarium. And some of this data is going to be used with photo because it's conifers. I'm going to show you this project here. This is a project which they download. You can see they have a single layer with points. And we have used OpenStreetMap as background. And then we have a lookup table. And this is the first they see here. Okay. They don't know anything about GIS before they start here. So we have set all this up here. So the lookup tables look like this. They have the first column with the FID values. That's a no-go for changing that. They have learned that by the hard way, some of them. And then they have the Danish name. We have filled in all that. And then they have to fill in and look up the family name and the scientific name for all these tree species. This is only for carnifer. The broadleaves, that's the most simple one. But still 100 different. So they have to fill in here. And then they are going to put up the project which they easily go to create the project here. No, I'm not going to do that right now because this is already made as a project. But this is what they get and how they are going to install stuff. So I go back here again. Then they are collecting the data on the phone. They synchronize it. And it's only a single owner and single users. In this project, we don't encourage them to start to share projects. It's their own project. And we have made it a little bit more advanced simply by putting it up to a layout in Inform A3. And it's made with an Atlas. So with this Atlas here, they can take the next. I'm sorry, I just made one. I'm just going to need to put one more in here at the location. Right now, I don't use my phone here. You can see it's put up with a lookup table. This is a lookup table here. I'm going to choose this one. And then it should automatically get with the family and scientific name. They can fill in a place and then they can fill in all the images. It looks like this on the phone. So they have this fill in form with a name, family, scientific name, and then they can take a photo. So with automatically, also, we have a tab where it's put in the date and the Merging User Name here. So it looks like this here. And I press OK. Now I have two different saving this and going to the layout layout here. This was the first one. I have not filled out the second one with any images. You show me just do it here. So this should become with number two. Sorry, I have to synchronize it. Of course, it does not work right now when we are online, sorry. But then they get 100 different images and they print it out for the herbarium like this here. This is the first project. They make the second one. We make it as a group project. They're collecting three dimensions, diameter for breast height and height of the trees. And thirdly, a value for is going to be a permanent tree or is it going to be harvested? So one student in the group are going to unzip the project, create new projects, set up, and then they're going to invite the group to participate. And all the students collect data and just one reporter is handed in. So in this case, they're learning how to collect data in a group. And the third one is a community project where we have risk trees for the condition of the trees. And we invite students as users to go and collect data and to see how the trees are evolving and are they going to be cut down or anything else is going to happen. So they see three different ways of using these projects here. So first year is handed out projects. When we come to the second year, we have the GIS class, which is eight weeks with 12 hours per week. And here's Merchant, one of the projects. Now they already know Merchant. So when we come two weeks into the class, they are creating own QGIS projects where they create layers and geo packages, including lookup tables, symbolize and makes forms. And that they do all by themselves. You can see in this project where we were having symbol here, you can see the forms are set up with name where they look up and they have look up with a filter expression. So it's quite advanced what they are doing at the second year. Sorry, I'm going to take this down here. And it's also a part of the exam in GIS. They have a week number three, they are setting up a huge digitizing project for a cemetery. And in that perspective, they get the exam point layer. So you can see every single grave, is it free or is it occupied? And they have to visualize it both with color and label. And they're going to put in Merchant username and date and all that kind of things. And in the end, they are going to create a user guide for new users. So they say, okay, how are the gardener, which are not used to make anything about maps at all, but used to use a phone, how can the gardener use a project like this? And that's really difficult for the students because how are they going to tell others to use something like this? So that's one of the obstacles. We also have students which have left the school and now they are out working real life. And this is another project. Actually, it's a huge project. This is a west coast of Denmark, where we are now having new high voltages cables set up. And this is a project which is taking right now is starting. And we have a forester out saying, okay, you need to harvest and cut down all the trees down here. And people are going to get compensated. And he's now out making reports. And then he use both, I'll have to zoom in here, sorry. And here you can see the photo. He takes the photo and all the photos, he then come back work at his office and using merging as collecting data and using with the entire QGIS interface here. So it's not only small student projects, actually also huge enterprise projects, which the students use afterwards. So what's the positive knowledge about this? Yeah, for my students, it's easy for them to use. It's fun collecting data when they as a startup assignment. First week, new students, new friends and they're going to make this startup. They very fast understand the workflow from computer to cloud to phone and back again. And they learn about attribute data for further analysis and for visualization. And they use it as a GIS data in real life workflow. They can see how they can incorporate it in future works. That's very positive for us. We also have challenges because simple things as login emails, when we are signing up and when they are signing up, we encourage them to use their email as a username. And we tell them that it is case sensitive. Keep it simple and take notes in logbooks because they forget and they have many other things in their heads. So that's actually an obstacle. For us, workspaces are fantastic, but for the students, it's very difficult for them to understand workspaces. We just started here so they don't understand how many different workspaces they can have. And then some of the students don't always follow the instructions. So they just put a project on the desktop and then they find out we're not allowed to use the desktop and then they are moving it and that gives really an obstacle. So we tell them, delete what you have on your computer and download it from the cloud. And a very simple thing. We work on the root of the C folder on the computer. We actually make a folder called C and then GIS and we say to the students, keep all the GIS data in that specific folder. That's not specific for Meridian, but that's GIS in total. And then we have different GPS results on the devices. Some are very poor and it can be 100 meters, which are wrong. So some students have real difficulties using the devices. And as I said in the beginning, the trial period expires too fast. The students can't read the very simple mail you send out and say it's difficult for them to upgrade. And then there's just one single thing and that's at the second year. It's difficult to understand the path spelling when you use variables with project home and then you have to put not a backslash but this forward and then the field name. That's difficult for them to understand too. But that's nothing. Taking into comparison what we can when we use these data collecting apps, then it's amazing. So just start if you're a lecturer. It's fun. So that was all from me. Thanks, Lena. That was really great to see these examples from your work. So I think we will have some questions maybe later about it. For me it was very inspiring to see how you use Meridian maps and I also recognize some of the challenges. Maybe we can address some of those challenges also in the discussion later with Peter to see how things are improved with Meridian maps with newer versions that come up and the roadmap. I'm going to move now to Kurt who's the next speaker. So I'm going to put Kurt on the screen and let's see how Kurt uses Meridian maps in his trainings. Okay, thanks so much. So yeah I am again I work for Septima which is a consulting firm. So we're not a purely educational institution but we are Meridian maps partners which is one of our biggest links to Meridian maps for this webinar. And so in terms of our consulting we support mostly Danish municipalities and agencies in the use of Meridian maps where we will provide support how to initiate a QTIS project for use in Meridian maps. Hosting a lot of our customers are using data in a post-just database and need help connecting their project to the database. We also offer services like serving the data that they collect and backing up data as we host our own Meridian map server if people want to use that. So that's a little bit about how we are using Meridian maps in our company and we also teach a variety of online courses. So I've developed an online course on Meridian maps which I teach two or three times per year and I have learned been teaching that a lot of the same lessons that Hans and Lena discussed. But for some examples I'm going to go back to something that kind of goes back to some of the earlier days of Meridian maps actually. When I was still in the United States before I moved to Denmark I helped develop this program called Community Health Maps with the US National Library of Medicine and this was a program that was focused on empowering people working with underserved and minority communities in the US and working with public health data and they had organizations that need to collect spatial data but were dealing with a community of people who are not GIS specialists and not trained in the field and so they need very easy to use tools to get their work done. And so through the years of this program we used a variety of tools for field data collection but in the last year in 2019 Meridian maps was already getting to be a really nice tool and at just at that point become available for both Android and Apple phones and so we started using it in this last year of this program and so I'm going to run through some of the things that we some of the communities we taught to use Meridian maps and QGIS. So one was the John Burns School of Medicine in Hawaii and so this is they have a Department of Native Hawaiian Health and so we are working with the Native Hawaiian community and they were interested in obesity in Native Hawaiian communities. So we first had them delineate their study areas around the Native American communities so we had them build these purple buffers which were the going to be the study areas to survey for anything that could impact the obesity positively or negatively in their communities and we just did a one-day training and then supported them as they went out and collected data and began using QGIS with the results. So this was the result of the first weekend of data collection in this community named Kahala and so they went out and identified things that could be positive factors for the issue of obesity like exercise facilities but they also did surveys of supermarkets and food availability and restaurants in the community. So there's a lot of attributes that you're not seeing on this map this just shows the type of places they collected but they collected a pretty full suite of attributes behind this to use to figure out some of the trends that are going on in their community. Another community that I worked with was in South Carolina there's a outside of Charleston there's a sea island called Johns Island and it's an island that has a lot of black and Hispanic populations on it and I gave a workshop in Charleston and the teacher for the school attended and invited me out the next day to show his students how to use merchant maps. So here I did it was simply a one-hour training because I had already set up a QGIS project for them to use they just had to access it via their merchant maps account and start collecting data with their phones. So students take to smartphones and apps very quickly so within an hour of showing them how to use the mobile app they were pretty excited about it and they ended up going much further than anyone expected they spent the entire summer collecting information about food and water sources on their island like where food is grown or where the water comes from and this kind of got them thinking about all kinds of things including one day running into a migrant farm a farm that was being worked by migrants and they were interested about how these migrant workers have access to health care so they started interviewing them and then mapping where the nearest hospitals were and they were doing a lot of the desktop mapping via their teacher who was their mentor but they really just being empowered by collecting their own data was pretty exciting for them and the third one I'll just quickly show is documenting king tides in Miami so king tides is basically just a word for the largest tides of the year and they're usually in the fall and Miami has a unique problem with the water table where the Miami sits on a porous soil and so when there's when the high tide comes in not only does it affect the coast but it percolates up through the ground into communities that are low lying so there was already a team of organizations working in this area the new florida majority of the florida international university and the unitarian church and they had developed a test kit shown in this picture here for collecting data on the flood waters that were coming into communities and so they were testing they had test kits for the salinity taking a sample to test for fecal coliform in the water and then also just measuring the depth so they already had a protocol in place what we did was hook this up to a QGIS project and trained people in the community to use this on their phones so again they didn't have to deal with a lot of the technical setup they just were using the end result so these people shown in this picture here were just people in the community that saw us out there that day and they're aware of the problems since they live there and got really interested in how they get help and so we ended up having a whole team of just volunteers from the community collecting data and entering into the the pool of data on their phones so it was pretty exciting to see have people who had never even heard the word GPS or GIS out there using this to collect data and improve the map of their neighborhood so just to give you an idea of what these king tides are like this is a before and after picture at a one intersection where we were standing so at 9 a.m at low tide it looks like this picture on the upper left less than two hours later it looks like the picture on the right where it's over your knees deep and so we were collecting data on this because people's children obviously walk through this on their way to school and it's just a you know there was a playground nearby which gets flooded twice a day and so we were able to go out and collect data and put it on a map I did the data management for them this first weekend and then we trained a volunteer there to be the data manager for the project and keep it going into the future but we are here looking at flood depth for the waters in this neighborhood at different locations and then we also were able to get the data on salinity that we collected and we could see that there was a big difference in salinity and and the flood waters in different parts of the neighborhood and then later on we also had data on the fecal coliform and over 95 percent of the samples came back positive for fecal coliform and then this community could take this to the city council and show them the real data on what's going on in the neighborhood and you know at that point they have better data than the city does and it was a pretty empowering experience for them so those were a couple interesting projects that I worked on using margin maps which again even four years ago was was a very useful tool and has only improved in the year since and I think the remainder of the slides are about some books that I want to talk about near the end but I'll turn this back over to Hans. Thanks Kurt for your presentation really is another nice use case of using margin maps. I'm going to put the other members of the panel on the screen so we can start a bit of a discussion and I think my first question well first we have around 80 people watching this live now so if you have any question feel free to put it in the chat I see that Saber is very active in already answering questions there so that's great but there's one particular question that came up here about the academic license we'll just put it here on the screen from Igor just read the margin website and that the academic plan can be used for one academic year free and prove academic status for extension maybe Peter you can elaborate a bit on the conditions yes it's so if you apply for academic plan you get it for one year free but then next year you can again apply for the next year so for students it is for for one year and it is enough to have like university email or you can send us some proof that you are student and for teachers I believe it's for three years now but and also if you are teacher then you can ask for but say more storage or some other conditions we'll give you whatever you need for your for your teaching yeah yeah that sounds like a good deal well I can also imagine that some people who are watching are wondering like hey Hans you normally do open source stuff and now there's also paid plans how does this work and well merging maps is open source so Peter could you also explain a little bit how that works yes so it is the whole stack is open source there are some private modules for bigger companies enterprise modules but everything is usable as open source stack and the paid plans are for companies or companies that doesn't want to deploy their server on their servers and maintain it and host it but rather to pay a software as a service service to Lutra Consulting who is we are hosting the the instance for for public or companies so it is free if you want to maintain or deploy and it is or you can pay us to host your data on the cloud so that sounds very flexible and depending on on your skills your facilities what kind of plan you choose or host it yourself I have a question for for Gerd first so there are a lot of trainers maybe watching this live stream what do you suggest them if they and they're new to merging maps how do you start oh I think well first of the documentation for merging maps is fantastic so they can simply go to the the merging maps webpage and read there's some great getting started links there first off some familiarity with QGIS is very helpful so people do need to know the basics of using QGIS don't need to know a lot but you need to know the basics but then you can install the plugin for QGIS for merging maps and you can install the app on your phone and you can set up a basic project they even have some basic projects that you can start with and you can actually even create a basic project on the mobile via the app on your phone or via the merging maps website your account on the website so you can do a very simple project setup just to see how it works and start collecting data and I think people will see how intuitive it is once you have a basic project to work with sounds like a good tip to start with I agree also that the documentation is very complete and and very useful I've been using the documentation a lot also for my tutorials and I actually have one more thing there actually I mean not only is it a great data collection platform but it's also a great platform for sharing QGIS projects and so an example of that is it in the a lot of the workflows that are covered in the merging maps documentation they'll have a sample project for example taking multiple photos per point and you can download that sample project and deploy it on your account to see how that works so it's a really useful platform in that regard yeah that's indeed the case here um related to documentation there's this question from ZT engineering I'll just put it here on the screen like why is using another database like post GIS so difficult with merging is there plan to make it more integrate and Saber answered that that there is already a feature to the plugin which makes a configuration file and and you can use it so that was quite useful information so always check the documentation there's also a lot of tutorials around and yeah if you have any questions maybe peter that's also something which is interesting to mention if people have questions or wishes how do you communicate with your users about these things yes we have a community slack channel so we can go merging maps.com slash community slash join and we have almost 100 users there and everyone from the team so if you ask there's something we try to answer or someone from community usually answers so that's probably the best best way how to communicate with the community for the db sync for for post GIS question uh there is also a youtube video I made a few months ago about tutorial about this synchronization so you can check that one also and if people have particular wishes or features do you have some facility for that yes we have a website wishlist dot merging maps.com and you can put there your feature or you can browse the existing request from community and vote up so we usually pick the most voted items from the list and try to implement those or if sometimes we got funds from various companies or public sector to implement some some features and those of course will be implemented as funded but we try to pick also the community requests that are on top of that list or wishlist okay that's very useful and have a look at that list if you need something and you already find it important just edit or upvote it there I have a question for Leine several questions the first one is do you have any experience with using external gpses in your courses yes I do have we mostly with my external gpses for the forest ecology external gpses yes it's easy to handle and and we get good accuracy we actually use with a centimeter accuracy I don't normally use it in classes because then we need more gpses and we don't have that much gpses so yeah but it's very easy to use by the way the one thing I was when you were mentioning images when we're capturing images or pictures please remember that you can actually set it to a lower resolution so you don't if you are on a poorer internet you can you don't have to up and download and synchronize huge pictures you can set it in the project please look that up in the information also yeah that was in fact my second question because if we work with heterogeneous groups they have different quality of phones different memory if we work remote some people have a good bundle of internet other people can't afford it so yeah who would like to respond to to what you can do in in those cases I guess there are several solutions yeah one of them is it is to only take images when needed we don't take images of everything just when when you can't explain it in in what you're collecting about data so just keep it keep it low with a minimum of images and then set the resolution to a minimum too and that's done in the project settings yeah there are also a few new settings there maybe peter you can explain a bit about selective sync and those yes the selective thing is very very important then it means that your colleagues or other students doesn't need to download your photos so you have only your photos in your phone also you can set it up in project settings so you upload all the photos but you don't download other photos so that's useful and there are also various other options for example there is a media sync script that is also some very advanced advanced functionality where you can move your pictures from margin maps cloud to some other storage let's see s3 bucket or something so you don't again you don't download the photos of others and you don't even have them on the cloud storage you have to somewhere else but yes this photo quality selective sync and this media sync tool to synchronize photos are probably the three easiest way how to limit the photo size or download upload bandwidth that's very useful information because we often deal with unexpected internet connections or qualities of the phones in the classroom maybe Kurt from your your trainings I use I think in your case you started with for the users with just the app on the phone so they don't need to have much GIS knowledge how how's your experience with text having as user friendliness were they quick in understanding how it worked or did it need a lot of guidance from your side oh no they it was it kind of depended on their expertise in those cases with smartphones in general some of the older people helping out with the king tide project weren't very used to even working with a with a mobile phone so they there was kind of a one team leader in each group that would kind of handle the phone it was more comfortable with it but in general and now knowledge of smartphones is pretty ubiquitous these days and the high school students picked it up before I was done talking so nice oh yeah Peter go ahead I think that's other way around nowadays like people are younger people have sometimes problems with knowing like what is the folder and how the data is stored on a disk rather than on smartphone so usually it's easy to to show them or they can pick up very easily the the phone part but it's harder to set up the project in qgs and work with a computer with some data structure and uh as Lynn Lynn mentioned in the presentation that's setting up some qgs expressions are sitting up forms it's uh that's probably the difficult part but it's only required for data administrators or people or people that preparing the project on qgs site so yeah I think that's an online course I think we spend the majority of the time learning how to set up the project in qgs that's that's the most time consuming piece yeah and I think from all our experiences if we we have to teach people that the good practice which is also applicable in general to um store data for for qgs and where where to put your projects on which drive or which folder that that is really essential it's one of my biggest annoyances when I teach that these good practice guidelines are not often followed and then people learn it in the hard way I think from Lena's presentation we could also see that have people putting it on the desktop and all kinds of issues because there are spaces or it's stored in some magic location uh what really doesn't help is of course that with newer versions especially on windows um more and more is hidden for users or decided for users where files go and how it deals with file extensions so Lena what's a bit of your your own practice on teaching good practice that's 101 we start day one actually we start before because they before they start my class they get a work list and say create a folder on the c and make it a gis in not in capital letters and they they learn it the hard way because we we show the students all the what happens when it's not when they don't do it and it's especially when we going to make a little bit more advanced stuff that they they they can see we need to follow your guidelines yeah yeah I also feel that uh probably the best way to learn it is the hard way um I have a video on my youtube channel if you're interested in good practice it addresses uh good practice with file types and storing exactly the things that we are mentioning here also in the documentation of merging maps are really some good guidelines if you want to set it up for merging maps um related to geopackages and what you do if you want to update things so I think it's very important if you're teaching this maybe for the first time that you also really check that so you build up your projects uh in a good way from scratch um there's a question here from the the audience from uh from karen put it here on the screen are there any future plans to include uh point cloud scanning in addition to images maybe peter can answer this one uh we we sometimes get such requests um it's definitely not on a immediate plan of actions right now the right now we are we changed the make a small facelift of the graphical approach to this whole stack so we are trying to finalize the uh the the new logo and new colors to web and mobile application that and then we are trying to focus on publishing of the simple web maps so when you got your merging maps project on cloud you can click a button and make you the public map for so that's that's a thing that's hopefully will be coming in next few months and these point clouds it's not on top of the list at the moment also especially especially again connected with some more expensive hardware either like some recent iPhones or some external devices so um yeah i i'm not aware of of uh makes like that is coming very soon okay um i want to ask if the the other panelists have questions for each other that we didn't discuss yet maybe you have questions for peter occurred or for me or and or curt so luckily that's the fun part being in the open source community that it's actually easy to access in real life and email on phone and and it's easy to get in contact and ask questions yeah the community is really the nice thing about open source curt anything i wish there was but um yeah i've just spoken to everyone here fairly recently so i don't really have any questions but um i don't know unless there's another interesting uh use case anyone has of of using mergin that was um a little more maybe creative or unforeseen or is there any surprising ways people have used mergin yeah most of curious about that uh that ice breaker one was a was a funny one that i came up with but i guess some people use it also for strange things peter um maybe that's a question for you uh some statistics maybe how many educators trainers are using this according to your knowledge and have you seen any very creative things that you have never seen or expected it to be used for uh yeah i checked statistics today and we have over 300 teachers uh registered in education plans and for students it's not that easy to to count but it will be it will be over thousands so so it's kind of popular for courses i know that there are also some high schools that teach um capturing of data i don't know if i call it gis uh and many universities um there are also plenty of bachelor or master thesis i know about the merging maps or something connected with the field surveying so it's quite popular um and for for some strange projects um i i don't know uh really um i'm not that close to uh to helping people and support so i would need to ask our support team probably i just thought of one this summer in kosovo at the fosfor g conference peter georeferenced the site map in judas and made it a merging maps project so people could download the map to the the site where our conference is being held and find their next talk the immersion maps on their phone that's a very cool use of it i love that one at the restaurant because it was far away and how people get lost the way to lunch so peter how many uh users you have uh in total uh i think we have i haven't checked recently but it will be way over 70 000 uh users registered i think wow some number i remember i'm sure it will it will increase when you get the online map so people don't have to happen to have kugis uh and for for schools and high schools it will be much easier for them if you have a web map so you will sound like a really nice feature yeah we are what are you planning for that we already have the the internal web maps for uh so when you want to see some web maps when you are logged in but for public maps that's like one yeah it's probably the the next item after changing of these colors on the applications so we have the technical stuff in place and ready uh like qg servers and uh and all that so we will we'll just need to implement some kind of front end browser for that and so but but i think the the hard part is is already prototyped and deployed uh so yeah it's uh really really exciting to see that because everything that it's very important for people to share their maps is uh public or clients and or yeah yeah that would be really great i'm also looking forward to that feature we're almost at the end but i know that Kurt like me is also a writer we write books for locate press well we write it for you in fact all people are watching and we have written together qds for hydrological applications which doesn't cover merging maps but uh Kurt can you tell a bit about how you uh what materials you have also available in books or what's coming up for merging maps absolutely i have a couple slides if you could put my slide back up so this is a book that i finished um the second edition of last august it's discovered qjus 3x the second edition so this is a a book i wrote to help instructors teach gis using qjus and open source software and so it's a large book available to locate press and one of the um new exercises in here is sorry there we go um here's my shameless plug and there's a new exercise in here that is uh in the data management and acquisition section on field data collection with merging maps so this is a an exercise that um professors can use this book to teach merging maps um if they need a a a lab exercise that's ready to go it walks through how to do a tree survey and shows um students everything they need to know to set up a basic project in qjus and um use the plug in and and the app to collect some data so um this is a nice new resource this is the first book that i know of that has um an exercise on using qjus with merging maps in it um but i'm also now working on another book with um alexandra buko-versova who's the technical writer for ludic consulting and merging maps so we're teaming up on this book called field data collection with qjus and merging maps it's currently in production uh we hope this is out early in 2024 and this bulleted list here is the list of chapters in the book sorry the draft so it's going to go through setting up a project in qjus configuring your survey layers and some best practices along the way uh going out and collecting data post-processing the data some um advanced workflows and then um how to make a map as a result and then finally a chapter on concepts around both merging maps and gnss so um some of the gps constellation concepts it's useful to know so um look for this early in 2024 through a locate press that's a great news kurt i'm really looking forward to to get that book myself and to learn more about these these things so thanks for for showing us what's coming up and while you're waiting for the new book uh try discover qjus 3.x second edition which as mentioned by kurt already has uh exercises for merging maps that you can use in the classroom so i don't see any more questions in the chats that sabre didn't answer yet or are relevant for the for the plenary so um i would like to thank uh the the people who are watching uh live on youtube for your participation your questions and um hopefully this gave a lot of insights of using merging maps in the in the classroom of course in the classroom because you go outside with your people to to use merging maps i would also like to thank uh the panel here for joining me on my youtube channel really happy to to have you here and discuss merging maps with you so thanks kurt thanks lane and thanks peter and looking forward to to see you in the future again in some live event or or meet you at the phosphor g so bye bye everyone