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QGIS Grants

·4 mins

QGIS Grants are awarded annually. Prospective projects are uploaded as QEPs in March and then voted on by the QGIS Project. #

The QGIS.ORG grant programme is a way to accelerate and streamline development of the QGIS.ORG project by supporting committed developers and contributors from the community for their work through a grant system. It is a way to distribute funds amongst our team members in a fair and transparent way.   Applicants may submit more than one proposal and the proposal may be on any topic that you think is relevant and beneficial to the greater QGIS community within the guidelines laid out below.
Check out the current submitted Grants https://github.com/qgis/QGIS-Enhancement-Proposals/issues
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Why have a grant programme? #

There are four main reasons for the grant programme. 

  1. The main intent of the grant programme is to amplify the contributions of grantees by allowing them to spend more time on QGIS over and above what they would be able to do on a purely volunteer basis. At a broader level we would also like to avert the potentially negative reaction to funded development work in QGIS: “Why should I donate my time to work on QGIS when others are paid to do it?” And rather create an aspirational environment: “If I make a large contribution to QGIS I could also be eligible for a grant like other dedicated contributors have received.”
  2. To simplify the decision making process for how to spend the funds received in the QGIS project via our Sponsorship and Donations programmes. Not having a cohesive plan for how to disburse QGIS funds results in funding being done in a very ad hoc manner - which in turn results in a skew of funding towards development related activities and away from other critical project activities such as improvement of user documentation, API documentation, sysadmin tasks and so on.
  3. To get things done that volunteers don’t naturally gravitate towards doing, such as housekeeping, maintenance and so on.
  4. To be more transparent in the decision making process when spending QGIS.ORG funds to advance the QGIS project.

Admissible project topics #

Proposals may be on any topic that you think is relevant and beneficial to the greater QGIS community. However, the grant programme does not accept proposals for the development of new features. Therefore, proposals should focus on improving the QGIS project infrastructure and polishing existing features.
Some examples of the kinds of topics you could propose are:

  • Updating and improving documentation
  • Improving API documentation
  • Curating the pull request queue
  • Bug fixing
  • Rewriting and improving a part of the code base
  • Security improvements to the QGIS codebase
  • Updating and improving QGIS.org web infrastructure
  • Helping new QGIS devs to get started with improved developer documentation and utilities
  • etc.

Guidelines #

  1. The proposal must be submitted as a ‘QEP’ (QGIS Enhancement Proposal) issue in the repo: https://github.com/qgis/QGIS-Enhancement-Proposals (tagged as Grant-YEAR). Following this approach will allow people to ask questions and provide public feedback on individual proposals.
  2. Proposals must clearly define the expected final result, so that we can properly assess if the goal of the proposal has been reached.
  3. The project budgets should account for PR reviewing expenses to ensure timely handling of the project-related PRs and avoid delays caused by relying on reviewer volunteer time. 
  4. In the week after the QEP discussion period, the proposal authors are expected to write a short summary of the discussion that is suitable for use as a basis on which voting members make their decisions.

Budget and deadline for applications #

The total amount for the enitre grant programme was EUR 30,000 in 2024. The QGIS Project likes to support as many activities as possible so if amounts are too large, they may be rejected. The target for all sucessful grant project delivery is version QGIS 3.46. The closing date for applications is usually mid-March. 

Important dates #

This is an example of the complete programme schedule for 2024:

  • 2024-02-15: Call for proposals (4 weeks)
  • 2024-03-14: QEP discussion period (2 weeks)
  • 2024-03-28: Writing discussion summaries (1 week)
  • 2024-04-04: Voting starts (2 weeks)
  • 2024-04-18: Publication of results — 6 months of project work —
  • 2024-10-18: Deadline for follow-up reports
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