QGIS Session Report: FOSS4G Hiroshima 2026

Introduction

FOSS4G Hiroshima 2026 is an international conference that brings together people from around the world who work with open source geospatial software (FOSS4G). It was held in Hiroshima Prefecture in September 2026. It was the first time the FOSS4G Global conference was held in Japan.

An overview of the whole event and the atmosphere at the venue are covered in a separate article, so read it as well.

This article reports on the QGIS-related presentations I (Kunou) heard on site, grouped by theme.

Plenty of QGIS-related sessions

At FOSS4G Hiroshima 2026, more than 20 talks had “QGIS” or “QField” in the title alone, and even more mentioned QGIS in their abstracts. As befits one of the world's largest FOSS4G events, the three days covered QGIS from every angle: development, community, practical use, and education.

Below are the main QGIS-related talks, with links. Below are the main QGIS-related talks I could confirm, with links.

Day 1 (September 1)

• QGIS Hub: The Community Resource Ecosystem You Might Not Know About (Ismail Sunni)
• QGIS 4 is coming and my plugins will break (Numa Gremling)
• Bridging the Language Gap: How the QGIS Brazil Community Drives Open Source Adoption in the Global South (Narcélio de Sá)
• Scaling Geospatial Communities: 16 Years of QGIS Brazil and the Path to LATAM 2024 (Narcélio de Sá)
• Training without Barriers: Lessons for Building Geospatial Capacity (Seabilwe Pontso Leah Tilodi)
• Making drainage engineers' life easy: A culvert designers plug-in for QGIS (Blake, Nimalika Fernando)
• QGIS + VS Code = DevTools (Maxim Dubinin)
• Amazon Location Service Plugin for QGIS: Basemaps, Geocoding, and Routing (Yasunori Kirimoto)
• QGIS Web Client (QWC) - project status and new developments (Marco Hugentobler)
• Mapping the World, Empowering People with QField (Marco Bernasocchi)
• Seamlessly Compare Maps on QGIS with the QMapCompare Plugin (Raymond Lay)
• The #1 plugin for QGIS (Maxim Dubinin)

Day 2 (September 2)

• Developing a QGIS Plugin for Urban Structure Evaluation (Satoshi Kitashima)
• A Japanese Company's Journey in Building the QGIS Community (Toshiya Kunou)
• Implementation and evaluation of geography education using QGIS for Japanese high school students (Hiroyuki Yamauchi and others)
• QGIS in Your Language (Keita Uemori)
• QGIS "Ask me Anything" session (Marco Bernasocchi)
• Current status and challenges of FOSS4G's Japanese localization (Yoichi Kayama)

Day 3 (September 3)

• Participatory Renewable Energy Zoning Using QGIS and Open Data: A Case Study in Urahoro, Hokkaido (Shota Furuya)
• One Project, All Views: QGIS Map Themes (Tomaž Šturm)
• Kumoy: Turn your QGIS Maps into Cloud-Native (Raymond Lay)
• Quality Control Leveraging the Characteristics of Proprietary and Open-Source GIS (misako ueno)
• Current GIS Applications in Hokkaido Agriculture and Hokuren's FOSS4G Initiatives with QGIS (Yuhi Yamamoto)
• From Zero to Mapping Mojo: Teaching QGIS Through Hands-On Workshops (Tomaž Šturm)
• Connecting the dots around QGIS (Marco Bernasocchi)

Next, here are the QGIS-related sessions I attended, organized by theme.

The QGIS community and the state of localization

One of QGIS's strengths is that communities around the world have built environments where people can use it in their own languages. This time, there were many presentations about those communities and localization.

Bridging the Language Gap: How the QGIS Brazil Community Drives Open Source Adoption in the Global South

This presentation was by Narcélio de Sá, who leads the QGIS community in Brazil.

In Brazil, only 5% of the population speaks English, and only 1% speaks it fluently. If people cannot read a software's menus, they cannot use it at all, so the language barrier is a fundamental obstacle to the adoption of tools.

The QGIS Brazil community is one of the oldest QGIS communities in the world, and it started with translation. When students at a university repeatedly asked for QGIS in Portuguese, translation began. Through that work a small group formed, and it eventually grew into a large community. Today Brazil is one of the countries where QGIS is used most actively in the world, and QGIS has become established there as a standard tool, not just a cheap alternative GIS software.

The message that the Brazilian QGIS community's story conveys, “Translating software means creating a community,” was especially memorable.

Scaling Geospatial Communities: 16 Years of QGIS Brazil and the Path to LATAM 2024

This was another presentation by Narcélio de Sá, covering the 16-year history of the QGIS Brazil community.

The activity began in 2005 with translation work at a university, and in 2010 the community was officially launched as “QGIS Brasil” with the opening of an official portal site. Because Brazil is so large that it is hard for members to meet in person, the community has made online exchange the core of its operations, using Facebook, YouTube, Google Groups, Telegram, and WhatsApp. Today the Facebook group has more than 35,000 members and the Google group has 5,000, and the community site has had more than 300,000 visits, so active online exchange continues.

In 2014, the community ran its first QGIS usage survey and a user conference. In 2024, it hosted the “QGIS LATAM Meeting” in Brazil, an event that drew participants from across Latin America, from Mexico to Chile.

The advice for people starting a new community, to “start with documentation and localization” and “build around an online network,” offered plenty of food for thought for the Japanese community as well.

Current status and challenges of FOSS4G's Japanese localization

This presentation was by Yoichi Kayama, who has long supported FOSS4G localization in Japan.

The talk started with the history of localization in Japan. On the current situation, of the FOSS4G projects listed on OSGeo.org, only a few, such as QGIS, GRASS, and PostGIS, have Japanese localization, and they depend on a small number of contributors. Kayama has also worked on the Japanese localization of QGIS Desktop since 2008.

As recent developments, the talk covered the official QGIS website, which moved its framework to Hugo and introduced multilingual support in 2026. Because the Japanese translation rate passed 35%, Japanese can now be selected as the site's display language. The talk closed by raising a challenge: QGIS has many translation contributors, but the work has become an individual effort, and a place to review and discuss translations is needed.

QGIS in Your Language

This presentation was by Keita Uemori of MIERUNE. It introduced the work behind this site, QGIS LAB, to a global audience.

Japan already had rich resources, including a Japanese UI, official documentation, books, and blogs. But they were spread across multiple versions and many sites, making it hard for beginners to tell “which page matches my version” and “what should I learn first.” QGIS LAB does not aim to replace existing resources. Instead, it aims to play three roles: organizing, localizing, and keeping content up to date.

The presentation also shared the behind-the-scenes details of running the site in concrete terms: guides that follow a “one article, one task” approach and combine Japanese UI screenshots with Japanese open data, learning packages that group articles by theme in learning order, and quality maintenance through testing and double-checking. At the end, it put a question to each language community: “Can a new user in your language find a clear path from opening QGIS to doing practical work with local data?”

A Japanese Company's Journey in Building the QGIS Community

I also gave a presentation, on the journey of MIERUNE, a Japanese company that has helped grow the QGIS community.

Since its founding in 2016, MIERUNE has been an official sponsor of QGIS. Through four activities (training, support, QGIS LAB, and the development of OSS plugins and Kumoy), it has been involved with QGIS through both community and business. As lessons from the past ten years, I talked about three points: the road from first using QGIS to having it take root in an organization is long, and a company's role is to support each step; free knowledge sharing builds trust, which becomes business and returns as investment in the community, creating a “sustainable cycle”; and the importance of localization.

Getting questions and expressions of agreement from QGIS community members from abroad was a great reward.

The cutting edge of the QGIS ecosystem

A major highlight this time was the evolution of the ecosystem around QGIS itself, which supports everything from field data collection to the cloud, plugins, and web publishing.

Mapping the World, Empowering People with QField

This presentation was by Marco Bernasocchi of OPENGIS.ch.

QField began in 2011, when Marco, then a university student, worked on Android support for QGIS through Google Summer of Code. It has since grown into a mobile GIS with 500,000 monthly active users and more than 1.5 million downloads on Android alone.

QField 4.3 had just been released right before FOSS4G, and recent releases have kept adding features such as a 3D mode and project templates. The use cases were varied too: a move of government work to open source in Finland, an invasive mammal eradication project in New Zealand, cultural heritage protection by the German Archaeological Institute, and nationwide wastewater management in Costa Rica. The talk showed QField at work in the field all over the world.

QGIS LAB also publishes articles on QField, including how to use it.

QGIS Hub: The Community Resource Ecosystem You Might Not Know About

This presentation was by Ismail Sunni.

QGIS users each create their own styles, scripts, and models, but these are scattered across places such as Git repositories, so “people looking for them” and “people who have them” could not find each other. QGIS Hub is a web portal where the community can share styles, 3D models, models, project templates, and more.

With the QGIS Hub Plugin, you can also search and preview resources directly inside QGIS without opening a browser, and add them to a project with one click. In the demo, adding a style with a unique color palette showed it appearing right in the Style Manager.

Kumoy: Turn your QGIS Maps into Cloud-Native

This presentation was by Raymond Lay of MIERUNE. It introduced Kumoy, the cloud GIS service MIERUNE released in April 2026.

Kumoy is a web service that connects QGIS projects to the cloud. It needs no code or servers: you can publish a map made in QGIS as an interactive web map in a few clicks, and the layer styles are kept as they are.

The other pillar of Kumoy is cloud data sharing. By gathering GIS data in the cloud, a team can open the same QGIS project from any device and edit it together in real time while styles and data stay in sync. It also supports access control through roles such as viewer, editor, and administrator.

At the end of the presentation, a map of the run logs from “FOSS4Run,” the morning running event held during the conference, was shown, published with Kumoy. It excited the audience.

QGIS in practice in the field

How is QGIS used in real work, and what challenges does it face? There were also plenty of presentations from workplaces in Japan.

Quality Control Leveraging the Characteristics of Proprietary and Open-Source GIS

This presentation was by Misako Ueno of SOCO Corporation.

The talk started from a project experience: the data producer did quality control in QGIS and the client did it in ArcGIS, and the two produced different topology validation results for the same data. In a validation experiment with data that had a 0.5 mm gap between the endpoints of lines, the results split: QGIS judged them “not connected,” and ArcGIS judged them “connected.” The cause was a difference in design philosophy. QGIS compares coordinate values strictly, while ArcGIS has a certain tolerance by default and treats two points within that range as the same coordinate.

The presenter stated that “neither design is a flaw” and that “quality depends not only on the data but also on the tools used for validation.” As measures to prevent recurrence, the presenter proposed stating the tolerance numerically in the specifications, unifying the validation method and tool settings between the ordering and contracting parties, and recording the tools, versions, and tolerance in the deliverables.

Participatory Renewable Energy Zoning Using QGIS and Open Data: A Case Study in Urahoro, Hokkaido

This presentation was by Shota Furuya. It introduced a case of renewable energy zoning in Urahoro, Hokkaido.

Urahoro, which has declared itself a zero-carbon city, worked on zoning to define conservation areas, adjustment areas, and promotion areas in order to avoid future disputes over development. The work proceeded through repeated seminars and workshops for residents, and QGIS was used to make the maps that served as the basis for those discussions.

Starting with almost no GIS experience, the presenter learned the skills by asking AI questions and reading QGIS LAB articles, and then integrated many layers, centered on National Land Numerical Information open data, to complete the analysis. I felt it was a good example of community-led zoning that combines dialogue with residents and open tools and data. (As the operator of QGIS LAB, I was delighted to hear that it had been useful, which made this a very happy presentation to hear.)

Education and workforce development

Sessions that focused not only on “using” QGIS but also on “teaching” it were memorable too.

Training without Barriers: Lessons for Building Geospatial Capacity

This presentation was by Seabilwe Pontso Leah Tilodi, who leads the training division at Kartoza.

The talk started by raising a problem: many GIS trainers are “accidental trainers” who became teachers without formally learning how to teach, and being able to explain a tool is a different skill from being able to teach. If you teach tool operation first, learners can repeat the click steps but cannot apply them as a skill. So the point that you need to build a foundation from basic concepts such as coordinate reference systems, raster, and vector, and teach the tool last, was memorable.

As practical measures, the talk shared, along with many stories of failure, how to survey learners' prior knowledge with a pre-course questionnaire and adjust materials; how, when training in a field outside your own expertise, to ask three questions (“What decision do you want to make?”, “What does your current workflow look like?”, and “What does done look like?”); and how to approach different kinds of learners (beginners, analysts, executives, and people forced to attend). The remark that “almost every training that went badly stumbled on confirming the scope in advance” hit home for me, as someone involved in QGIS training.

Implementation and evaluation of geography education using QGIS for Japanese high school students

This was a research presentation by Hiroyuki Yamauchi and colleagues at Ritsumeikan University, evaluating the effects of GIS education for junior high and high school students.

The background is that the use of GIS and maps is emphasized in “Comprehensive Geography,” a subject required in high schools since fiscal year 2022. From 2018 to 2025, the team held a total of eight educational events for junior high and high school students, with 210 participants in all, and analyzed the effects of the QGIS exercise through assignments and questionnaires. In the exercise, using the Kyotogawa alluvial fan in Yamanashi Prefecture, a well-known classic example for learning the relationship between landform and land use, each student works through importing and coloring a digital elevation model (DEM), creating slope, hillshade, and contour lines, and overlaying land use data, all while operating QGIS themselves.

The correct answer rate for the assignment on understanding GIS data concepts and operating procedures was high at 86.2%, which suggests that the large majority of students understood the concept of spatial data regardless of grade. On the other hand, the correct answer rate for the assignment of reading geographic features from multiple layers was only 47.3%, and a clear difference by grade appeared: more than 75% of second- and third-year high school students answered correctly, while younger students scored around 30 to 40%. The study showed that geography education with QGIS is fully feasible for junior high and high school students, and identified future challenges: strengthening map reading education and adapting instruction to individual differences in PC skills and learning pace.

Bonus: QGIS Japan Community Activities Discussion Meeting

On September 4, the day after the conference, the QGIS Japan Community Activities Discussion Meeting was held. It is a forum for discussing the future of the QGIS community in Japan, including translation, information sharing, and event organizing.

The discussion covered the problem that Japanese can no longer be selected on the official QGIS website if the translation rate falls below 35%, the need for reviewers separate from translators, organizing and sharing translation guidelines, and launching a QGIS Japan community.

An idea of holding an event to coincide with the release of QGIS 4.4, scheduled for the end of October 2026, also came up. It was a positive step toward carrying the energy of FOSS4G into community activities in Japan.

The details of the discussion results are published on GitHub, where anyone can view them.

Conclusion

At FOSS4G Hiroshima 2026, developers, community organizers, practitioners, researchers, and others gathered under one roof, and I could feel firsthand the state of the world around QGIS and FOSS4G. From the story of the community that began with translation in Brazil, to the evolution of the ecosystem including QField, practice in workplaces in Japan, and the spread into education, the event made me realize that, whatever our positions, the wish to “make QGIS easier to use and bring it to more people” is shared around the world.

The QGIS community in Japan has also started moving toward a new structure. If you are interested in FOSS4G, including QGIS, consider joining a community or an event!