I'm Hans van der Kwast. With more than 20 years of experience with GIS and Remote Sensing in education and projects, I'm now offering consultancy, training and coaching in open source GIS. I'm an active member in the QGIS community, a QGIS certified trainer, and board member of the Dutch QGIS User Group. I've established the GIS OpenCourseWare platform for sharing free course materials on QGIS, Python, Mergin Maps, Google Earth Engine and much more. The PCRaster Tools plugin for QGIS that I've developed has been downloaded more than 90k times. Furthermore, I'm co-author of the book QGIS for Hydrological Applications and I have a YouTube Channel with more than 30k subscribers. As a member of QCooperative, I'm well connected with the best open source GIS developers.
I offer online consultancy on GIS work flows with QGIS, Mergin Maps, Python, PCRaster, WebODM, GDAL and other open source software.
I create online tailor-made training on open source GIS software and Python. For QGIS I provide the official QGIS certificate.
I provide online coaching sessions to beginning and more advanced GIS professionals. Topics for coaching could be on open source business model development, marketing or GIS career development.
Check my YouTube Channel, QwastTube and the GIS OpenCourseWare platform for free videos and step-by-step tutorials. These come without support and without certificates.
We are excited to share that the initial and extended crowdfunding goal for the new QGIS hydrology tools has been successfully achieved. Thanks to the generosity and commitment of the QGIS community, we not only reached the initial €6000 target, but also surpassed the extended €7000 goal. This support enables the development of powerful, native...
For years, QGIS users have relied on external toolsets from processing providers such as SAGA, GRASS, WhiteboxTools and PCRaster for hydrological analysis. These tools are powerful, but they also introduce challenges: installation issues, inconsistencies across operating systems and versions, and workflows that break when dependencies change....
This morning, the PCRaster Tools plugin for QGIS officially passed 100,000 downloads. For a project that began as a modest prototype, this milestone marks a major achievement! It shows how deeply practitioners value robust, transparent, and reproducible workflows, and how PCRaster Tools has become a trusted foundation for those workflows.
Nine years ago, we held the very first FOSS4GNL in Groningen. This year, we returned, and it felt like coming home. Thanks to the generous support of the Jantina Tammes School of Digital Society, Technology and AI at the University of Groningen, we enjoyed two inspiring days in their beautiful venues.