Networking and workshop event for the KomMonitor community

After the great success of the first KomMonitor Community Day last year, Bochum University of Applied Sciences and 52°North once again welcomed users and developers, who were excited to hear about the latest news and use cases surrounding KomMonitor.

This second edition of the Community Day took place at the “Alte Druckerei” in Herne, an impressive location that currently is used as a think tank by the Applied Excellence Department. Approximately 60 participants from various district administrations, municipalities and IT service providers (mainly from North Rhine-Westphalia) accepted the invitation to attend this exciting community-driven event.

Exchange of experience

The morning began with warm greetings from 52°North and the Bochum’s Department of Geodesy, followed by a lively collegial discussion between representatives of two municipalities that have successfully established KomMonitor as a spatial monitoring tool. They exchanged experiences, suggestions and ideas from KomMonitor’s early days and discussed the opportunities and challenges of implementing KomMonitor.

Development insights

The morning session was followed by a review of the developments over the past year, as well as ongoing and planned developments.Highlights of the released software features were improved filter functions, the enhanced interactive reachability tool and new classification methods.The KomMonitor developers also provided an insight into the current developments that are preparing KomMonitor for multi-tenancy. We expect to add this eagerly awaited feature in its full form through a series of interim releases until 2026. As part of this, it will soon be possible to easily apply custom styles to the KomMonitor Web Client. This will allow the front to look and feel in line with individual corporate design guidelines.

KOSIS Working Group

The last item on the morning’s agenda was the presentation of the newly founded KOSIS working group KOmMonitor. The founders introduced themselves, providing a detailed explanation of their goals.The working group’s intention is to support municipality networking regarding the use and further development of KomMonitor. For this purpose, any interested municipality is welcome to join.

Interactive workshops

The afternoon session had a surprise in store. In an interactive workshop format, the participants discussed several topics related to KomMonitor and came up with ideas for future developments and use cases. There were tables on citizen participation, a DUVA interface, accessibility analysis, analysis/evaluation/exploration (of indicators and georesources) and others. As a result, participants proposed many approaches for further developments and the formation of interest groups, which will be taken up for continued discussion on a web platform.

 

In retrospect, the second Community Day was a great success and contributed to increased networking within the KomMonitor user group. We are delighted that the event has already become a fixed date for many users and look forward to the third edition next year with many familiar and new faces.