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 30k times. Furthermore, I'm co-author of the book QGIS for Hydrological Applications and I have a YouTube Channel with more than 20k 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 trainings 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 and the GIS OpenCourseWare platform for free videos and step-by-step tutorials. These come without support and without certificates.
This year I've participated again in the #30DayMapChallenge, an initiative from Topi Tjukanov. Each day of November 2023, I created a map using open data and open source software and posted in on X.
I'm happy to share with you the recording of my latest webinar on Mergin Maps, a fantastic app that lets you collect and edit geospatial data on your mobile device and sync it with QGIS. The webinar was live streamed on my YouTube channel on 25 October 2025.
On 13 and 14 September OSGeo.NL is organising the FOSS4GNL 2023 conference in Middelburg. On 13 September there are workshops and I'll give one on point cloud processing with QGIS and PDAL wrench. My workshop materials are freely available in English and Dutch at GIS OpenCourseWare!
From 26 June to 2 July 2023, I've attended the FOSS4G 2023 Conference in Prizren, Kosovo. It was a great event and the ideal place to touch base with the global open source geo community.