GRASS Developer Summit Raleigh 2025

The main GRASS GIS community meeting for 2025 will be a 6-day GRASS Developer Summit held at North Carolina State University, Monday, May 19 - Saturday, May 24 in Raleigh, North Carolina, USA.

NCSU venue and organizers

Participants in 2024

Sponsors

• U.S. National Science Foundation, award 2303651 (Planning, preparation, event venue, participant travel)

U.S. National Science Foundation

Promised support:

• Bohannan Huston, Inc.

Why should you become a sponsor? While all major parts of this event are supported by the NSF POSE award mentioned above, we welcome any additional support for ancillary costs associated with the event, as not everything can be covered, for good reasons, by U.S. federal funding.

To sponsor the event, use Open Collective or contact Vaclav Petras <wenzeslaus at gmail com> for additional options.

Purpose

The purpose of this in-person Developer Summit is to identify challenges in the adoption of GRASS GIS as a geoprocessing engine and to foster the growth of the contributor community by connecting new and experienced developers. Attendees will contribute their unique skills to GRASS GIS, evaluate the progress of the project, and participate in long-term planning for GRASS GIS. The goal of the event is to generate actionable feedback for future improvements and to prepare the ground for expanding the geoprocessing capabilities of GRASS GIS.

Agenda

Each day will consist of a block of scheduled sessions (tentative topics below), a block of self-organized sessions (determined by the participants and organizers), two business meals (lunch and dinner), and time for individual contributions to the project.

• Day 1: Identification of priorities for each group of participants (introductions, group discussions and presentations), New contributor on-boarding
• Day 2: Interfacing with QGIS (gathering of user feedback, testing, discussion with developers, development of action items)
• Day 3: Interfacing with R (gathering of user feedback, testing, discussion with developers, development of action items)
• Day 4: Translations to natural languages and internationalization (procedures, glossaries, code adjustments, translating)
• Day 5: Building community for GRASS GIS geoprocessing engine (missing features, documentation, user groups)
• Day 6: NSF POSE project evaluation and community feedback, Plotting project course for next years

While the main communication language at the event will be English, participants are welcome to use other languages as they see fit. Currently, several native speakers in languages other than English confirmed their participation.

Venue

Elevation in the NC sample dataset

NC State University, Raleigh, North Carolina, USA

Raleigh in North Carolina is the home of the famous GRASS North Carolina sample dataset. The developer summit is hosted on the NC State University campus, taking advantage of modern facilities including Talley Student Union, Hunt Library and the Center for Geospatial Analytics.

Participation

Registration is not open yet, but please help us plan better by filling out this interest form:

https://forms.gle/uzQqgayYC7F4kLCZ8

We are already expecting over 20 people!

FAQ

• How these events look like?
  • See GRASS Community Meeting Prague 2024 and GRASS Community Meeting Prague 2023 for last two events which were both great!
• Is the meeting focused on coding?
  • The focus is contributing to the project. The project is build on contributions in the form of code, documentation, translations, promotion and more.
• Is the meeting for developers only?
  • No, anybody can help, with testing, checking out bugs and fixes, documentation and more. The goal is to develop GRASS GIS and make it easier to develop workflows and software on top of GRASS GIS.
• Do I have to be a contributor to come?
  • You don't make contributions prior to the meeting, but the goal is to improve the project, so we ask that you discuss and plan your contributions before coming to the meeting. If you are a committed newcomer, contact us and we will gladly find a way for you to meaningfully contribute.
• Where can I get help and more information about the community meeting?
  • Contact Vaclav (Vashek) Petras <wenzeslaus at gmail com>.

Organizing Committee

• Vaclav Petras, North Carolina State University, Center for Geospatial Analytics
• Anna Petrasova, North Carolina State University, Center for Geospatial Analytics
• Lois Utt, North Carolina State University, Center for Geospatial Analytics
• Doug Newcomb, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service
• Veronica Andreo, CONICET, Argentina