FOSS4G 2025 | Openness and Collaboration as Strategic Choices – case National Land Survey of Finland

Presented by Jani Kylmäaho on 21 November 2025 11:30, at FOSS4G 2025 Auckland. Track: Community, Collaboration & Impact
Full presentation details - https://talks.osgeo.org/foss4g-2025/t... GJSSXJ

This talk is about why National Land Survey of Finland made a strategic decision to use open solutions and collaborate actively with other agencies and OS communities. The talk will outline our experiences on open solutions and collaboration, as well as plans to strengthen the collaborative efforts going forward.

The National Land Survey of Finland has been an active user, and increasingly a developer, of FOSS4G solutions related to our core tasks for nearly two decades now. We also made a strategic decision in 2020 to leverage open source solutions for our major business critical IT systems.

Following the strategic decision, the National Land Survey of Finland started building a new topographic data production system on open source components in autumn 2020. Core components of the system include QGIS, PostgreSQL/PostGIS and QField for field work.

During spring 2025, the system was taken into full production use. Now it is time to put even more focus on the collaborative aspects: how we collaborate with other authorities, the QGIS user community and with IT companies to ensure continuity of the solution.

This talk will describe
On what grounds we made the strategic decision of using open source
What are our most recent experiences with the open solution and collaboration
How we are organizing collaboration in Finland with other stakeholders
How we are looking at engaging in further collaboration with open source communities to ensure continuity of the solution
Most importantly, what benefits every public sector organization can gain by using and investing in open solutions.

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