We have embarked on an exciting international journey by launching Gispo Sweden. Starting in April 2023 Gispo offers training and support for open source geospatial tools in Swedish. Our business operations in Sweden are based in Stockholm and run by Mari Punakivi.

A great start for our Swedish operations was Kartdagarna in Helsingborg. Kartdagarna (‘Map days’) is a popular event for the Swedish GIS and mapping community. Last year Gispo was there to check the atmosphere (and dance skills). This year Gispo Finland and Gispo Sweden participated jointly as exhibitors. The QGIS-hoodies wearing team Gispo attracted a lot of attention, and hourly raffles of QGIS t-shirts were a hit.

Along with all the fun Kartdagarna gave insight to the Swedish market. Our team learned that there are enthusiastic QGIS users in Sweden, but there is a lack of organisation offering training in QGIS.

In terms of open data, Sweden is still far behind Finland. Sanna Jokela gave a presentation about the experiences of opening data in Finland in 2012. The exiting news in the event was the announcement that during the following two years Lantmäteriet (Land survey Sweden) is going to be opening up data.

Want to know what Gispo Sweden is up to? You can follow @gisposverige on Twitter. Take a look at our website in Swedish as well.