Student Grants

GRASS GIS offers a limited number of student grants for projects related to GRASS GIS. These can include actual coding, bug fixing, or documentation and the creation of educational resources.

Eligibility

To apply for a grant, a student must:

• be eighteen (18) years of age or older upon application;
• be enrolled into a post-secondary academic program, as of the beginning of the grant;
• for the duration of the grant, be eligible to work in the country in which they reside;
• and not be a GRASS GIS Project Steering Committee (PSC) member.

In addition, the student has to:

• demonstrate ability to contribute to GRASS GIS through a GitHub pull request (PR);
• have the agreement of an active member of the GRASS GIS community to mentor the student's work.

Additional criteria

• Students that are already active in the community have a better chance of obtaining a grant.
• There is no limit on how many times a student can apply or receive the grant.
• There are no special rules for former GSoC students. They are eligible to this grant as well, as long as they still fulfill the above criteria.

Nature of the grant

• In 2023, GRASS GIS will offer a total of 4000 USD for grants.
• The maximum per grant is 1000 USD. Grant requests can be for lower amounts.
• One person can be awarded one grant at a time, but can apply more than once at different times.
• The time to complete the work should be maximum 2 months, but much shorter projects are clearly possible. It will mostly depend on the student's availability.

How to apply

Students should submit their proposals through the GRASS GIS wiki and send an email to grass-grants@osgeo.org to notify of their application (i.e., link to the wiki page with the proposal). See here for a previous round. The email should contain:

• proof of eligibility (age, student status, link to accepted GRASS GIS PR, mail by active community member confirming mentorship)

The wiki page should contain:

• applicant's name
• a description of the proposed work
• a calendar of activities and deliverables
• a budget proposal

For the current call, applications will be accepted until October 30, 2023.

Approval process

Project proposals are evaluated by the GRASS GIS Project Steering Committee within two weeks after the deadline and a notification will be sent to successful applicants.

Grant payment

Grants are paid in two amounts (unless stated otherwise for the specific grant):

• 50% at the beginning of the work phase
• 50% after reception and approval of the final report by the PSC

Final report

The final report should be also written in the GRASS GIS wiki under the proposal up to two weeks after the final date planned originally. When finished, the student sends an email to grass-psc mailing list to announce the end of the work and share the link to the final report. The final report should include:

• A description of the state of affairs before the work
• A description of the work done

Topics

The GRASS GIS community provides a list of topics highly relevant to the community. Applicants may come up with their own topics. Relevance of the topic to the project will be evaluated individually. Topics contributing to the core GRASS project are usually more relevant than others.

List of open topics:

• Improve documentation and tests for a set of tools
  • includes revising text, add missing/update examples with pictures, notebook how to generate the pictures, add tests (pytest)
  • requirements: Python
  • $100-200 per tool
  • list of suggested tools: r.sim.water, r.reclass, r.resample, r.resamp.filter, r.mask, r.mode, v.surf.idw, v.surf.rst, r.fillnulls, r.surf.*, …

• r.rescale - reimplement as a wrapper to r.recode (see https://github.com/OSGeo/grass/issues/1986), add tests, examples and documentation
  • requirements: Python
  • $500

• Parallelize a tool with OpenMP
  • possible candidates: r.horizon, r.mapcalc, r.proj, v.surf.idw
  • requirements: C, OpenMP experience
  • $1000 (one tool)

• Implement History manager in GRASS GUI
  • display history of executed commands and re-execute them
  • requirements: Python
  • $1000

• Improve d.vect.chart
  • fix legend (see https://github.com/OSGeo/grass/issues/3100), update documentation, add tests
  • requirements: basic C and Python
  • $500

• Add JSON output to different tools
  • r.report, r.mapsets, r.what, r.univar, r.info, v.info, r3.info
  • requirements: C
  • $500 for 1