The QGIS User Conference 2026 took place in Laax, Switzerland, on 5 and 6 October, with a workshop day on 7 October. The main venue, LAAX Galaaxy, is at Crap Sogn Gion, 2,222 m above sea level. You take a gondola to get to the talks, and during the breaks most people were outside looking at the mountains.

It was a busy week for us. Martin Dobias, Jan Caha, Stefanos Natsis and I gave five talks between us. We also ran three workshops with our friends at Camptocamp and Septima, and some of our developers stayed on for the contributor meeting afterwards.

Our talks

Non-Earth Coordinate Reference Systems improvements (Jan Caha)

• QGIS 4.2 improves planetary data handling by enabling non-Earth data to be loaded first, scaled accurately, and published via WMS without reverting to WGS 84.

Mergin Maps in 2025/26 (Saber Razmjooei)

• Detailed major platform updates, including high-precision GNSS surveying support, map sketching, and new sharing capabilities.

QGIS 3D and Digital Twins (Martin Dobias)

• Reviewed recent 3D engine upgrades (ESRI scene layers, faster vector rendering) and discussed QGIS's role in digital twins.
• Announced the 2026 QGIS 3D Crowdfunding campaign focused on Gaussian splatting, realistic rendering, and animations.

Point cloud improvements in QGIS 4 (Stefanos Natsis)

• Showcased expanded LiDAR capabilities, including point cloud attribute editing, new classification algorithms, and improved styling options.

State of web map publishing in QGIS (Martin Dobias)

• Discussed the ongoing challenges of publishing web maps from QGIS compared to other enterprise GIS platforms.
• Evaluated the pros and cons of current publishing tools and plugins, including Lizmap, QWC2, G3W-Suite, qgis2web, and Mergin Maps.

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Our workshops

Wednesday was the workshop day, and we ran two half-day workshops on Mergin Maps with our friends and partners from Camptocamp: Getting started with Mergin Maps and  Setting up your own self-hosted data capture infrastructure with Mergin Maps.

Working with Point Cloud Data in QGIS, with Septima was held in a night club and was the busiest workshop (for obvious reasons!)

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The contributor meeting

After the workshops, the 29th QGIS Contributor Meeting took place from 7 to 9 October in a venue next to the conference, and some of our developers stayed for it. Contributor meetings are where developers, documentation writers and others who work on QGIS get together to fix bugs, plan and talk about the project.

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Many topics came up during the contributors’ meeting: AI, security, infrastructure and several lightning talks about cool things built with QGIS.

Running in Laax

On Tuesday I skipped the gondola and ran up to the venue instead: 13.3 km and about 1,340 m of climbing from Laax to Crap Sogn Gion, starting before sunrise. I definitely earned my coffee at the top.

On Wednesday morning, before the workshops, a group of us joined the 6 km trail run organised by the conference, through the forest above Laax.

The runs on a Mergin Maps web map

I also put both runs on a map, using the Laax basemap from our workshop, and published it as a Mergin Maps web map.

Open the interactive map

Both runs on the Laax basemap, with the venues of our talks and workshops

The map shows the two runs, the venues of our talks and workshops, and the photos I took during the week. 

Thank you

Thanks to the organisers, volunteers and sponsors for a great conference in a remarkable place. Thanks also to Julien and Camptocamp, and to Kurt and Septima, for the workshops, and to everyone who came to our talks and workshops with questions and ideas.

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If you would like to know more about anything in this post, get in touch. See you at the next one!