GRASS Community Meeting Prague 2024

The GRASS GIS Community Meeting for contributors and developers will be happening from June 14 to June 19, 2024 in Prague, Czechia.

Sponsors

• U.S. National Science Foundation, award 2303651 (Planning, preparation, travel for 5 participants and their time, event venue).

U.S. National Science Foundation

• OSGeo: 5500 USD (approved budget contribution, motion).

Open Source Geospatial Foundation

• FOSSGIS e.V.: 3500 EUR (approved budget contribution, request).

FOSSGIS e.V.

• Community Meeting 2024 goal contributors at Open Collective
  • Paul, Melanie B., Veronica Andreo, Doyle, and two anonymous sponsors
• In-kind contributions:
  • mundialis GmbH & Co. KG - personnel time (personnel time)
  • Research Institute for Nature and Forest (INBO | Brussels, Belgium) - personnel time + travel and hotel costs of INBO staff member
• Personal time and/or financial contributions:
  • Edouard Choinière, Ivan Minčík, Chung-Yuan Liang, Helmut Kudrnovsky, Luís de Sousa, Floris Vanderhaeghe, Martin Landa, Markus Neteler, Ondřej Pešek, Vaclav Petras, Anna Petrasova, Corey White, Caitlin Haedrich, Veronica Andreo, Linda Kladivová, Alen Mangafić, Loïc Bartoletti, Paulo van Breugel
  • In addition to the above contributions, many participants made special efforts to keep costs down.

Purpose

The GRASS GIS Community Meeting is a great occasion for folks to support the development by actively contributing to the project in different ways. These include source code updates, documentation (manuals, wiki, tutorials), translations, website improvements or likewise. The community meeting is also a get-together where supporters, contributors, power users and developers make decisions and tackle larger problems related to the project, discuss and collaboratively resolve bugs, plan the direction for the project and work on new features. We welcome people committed to improving the GRASS GIS project and the interfaces to QGIS, GDAL, PostGIS, R, OGC Services and others.

In this meeting, building on momentum from the 40th birthday meeting, we will continue the revisions of the maintenance processes and infrastructure - a process which highly benefits from the current maintainers being in one place (and time zone). Topics which require highly synchronous collaboration will be included such as Markdown documentation and CMake build transitions. Other contributors are expected to enhance existing tools and their documentation. A press release gives an overview of last year's event.

We do require participants to work on GRASS GIS or connections to other projects. However, we leave them the freedom to work on what they think is the best contribution to the project given their skills and time available.

For the detailed agenda and individual's plans, see below.

Agenda

These are some of the identified project priorities:

• Develop the project roadmap to better communicate project vision and priorities.
• Discuss the GRASS GIS integration with QGIS with its maintainers to identify next steps.
• Test the CMake and conda packaging implementations.
• Finalize the initial HTML to Markdown documentation conversion.
• GSoC students will showcase their projects and seek feedback. We also search for fostering their engagement with community members participating in the meeting and others that want to join online.
• Test and review onboarding documentation for developers, maintainers and other contributors.
• Develop use cases and tutorials on the use and integration of STAC related modules into data processing workflows.
• Get feedback on ongoing GRASS website UX improvements and add missing content.
• Address issues discussed last year about GRASS-R integration: https://github.com/rsbivand/rgrass/discussions/78
• Discuss mailing list (mailman) vs discourse (forum)
• Simplify working with GRASS 8.4+ in Python wiki page, then improve here on GS
• Create release artifacts by GitHub CI (for inspiration, see libgeotiff and GEOS)
• Meals: Lunch and dinner provided unless noted otherwise.

Thursday, June 13

Day of arrival. Contact organizers if you are interested in individualized program or helping with organization.

Friday, June 14

• Welcome.
• Refine shared goals.
• 5 pm: PSC meeting (See local times):
  • Elections' date, contributors that will vote, who steps down (minutes)

Saturday, June 15

• morning: GRASS in Windows
• 2 pm: Project roadmap discussion
• Individual evening plans (dinner not provided)

Sunday, June 16

• 11am or 4pm: Group photo
• 2 pm: Documentation discussion
  • html - md conversion status
  • Programming manuals
  • Guidelines: contribution, submission, translation, etc.
  • Tutorials: feedback on topics, where to include them, etc.

Monday, June 17

• Morning: Status of GRASS-QGIS integration (meeting minutes)
• Afternoon:
  • Session, projects and mapsets, Python API, subcommands in CLI (Vashek leads)
  • Website redesign discussion

Tuesday, June 18

• 9:15am-9:45am: Nix, Ivan Mincik, Geospatial Nixpkgs maintainer
• 10am: GeoSPARQL in GRASS
  • SPARQLing Unicorn modularisation
  • on-line with Timo Homburg
• 2pm: GSoC students presentations

Thursday, June 20

Day of departure.

Participation

Please add your name here or contact Vaclav Petras <wenzeslaus at gmail com>:

In person

Number	Participant	Country	Arrival	Departure	Topics	Notes
1	Vaclav Petras	United States	June 13	June 20	review PR, reduce PR queue, Python API topics (also for QGIS and R), funding
2	Anna Petrasova	United States	June 13	June 20	grass.jupyter, R and QGIS integration
3	Corey White	United States	June 13	June 20	STAC, JSON outputs, connections with other tools (OpenPlains)
4	Caitlin Haedrich	United States	June 13	June 20	grass.jupyter, GRASS on Windows
5	Vero Andreo	United States	June 13	June 20	tutorials, website, documentation, contributing guidelines
6	Floris Vanderhaeghe	Belgium	June 13	June 18 (morning)	Interfacing GRASS from R (parts of the todo-list)
7	Martin Landa	Czech Republic	June 14	June 19	GUI, Modeler, Markdown, ...
8	Helmut Kudrnovsky	Austria	June 14	June 16	...	Arrival on Friday evening.
9	Markus Neteler	Germany	June 13	June 19	Infrastructure, Markdown, mailman vs discourse...
10	Luís de Sousa	Portugal	June 14	June 20	r.mblend, issue 2187, GeoSPARQL plug-in, DGGS free thinking, ...	Arrival on Friday evening.
11	Edouard Choinière	Canada	June 13	June 20	CI, checks, code quality
12	Ondřej Pešek	Czech Republic	June 13	June 20	Modeler, refactoring, i.atcorr, ...	Not joining on June 15
13	Alen Mangafić	Slovenia	June 13	June 20	LiDAR tutorial, hyperspectral discussion
14	Ivan Minčík	Slovakia	June 17	June 19	packaging
15	Linda Karlovska	Czech Republic	June 15	June 15	GUI, refactoring	Maybe joining also on June 16
16	Chung-Yuan Liang	Taiwan	June 13	June 20	Tools parallelization

If you are arriving or departing on the days of the event, please specify the time, too.

Online

Join our Gitter chatroom: grassgis/sprint

Gitter has a video (and backup will be Zoom).

Participating virtually:

Number	Participant	Country	Topics	Times, synchronous or fully asynchronous	Notes
1	Loïc Bartoletti	France	QGIS Integration, CMake, C	Part of 15th and 17th
2	Paulo van Breugel	Netherlands	Documentation, tutorials	Part of the 16th	Will join discussion at 2pm

Venue

NC State European Center in Prague
Malé náměstí 144/1
Praha 1 – 110 00
Prague, Czech Republic

Map

Prague, the capital of Czechia (Czech Republic) has an international airport. It's location in the middle of central Europe makes it easily reachable by train, bus or car. The city itself has great public transportation.

Accommodation and Costs

Participation is free of charge. However, participants should plan for the following costs:

• Travel
• Lodging
• Food and drink (some may be covered)

Please note: The currency in Czech Republic is Czech crown (CZK, koruna, Kč). 100 Czech crowns are about 4 Euros (see current rates).

Individual Preparation

• Bring your own computer
• Bring power connector adapter if needed (Czech Republic: 230V, 50Hz, Type C Europlugs are common and also Type E)
• Install git and the compiler tools, and come with a working GRASS development environment if possible. See here for details.

FAQ

• How was it last time?
  • Splendid! See GRASS Community Meeting Prague 2023!
• Is the meeting just a coding event?
  • It is mainly a coding and documentation event. It is a working session for people who are already participants in the GRASS project and/or are committed to improving the GRASS project. Committed newcomers are welcome!
• Is the GRASS Community Meeting for developers only?
  • No, anybody can help, with testing, checking out bugs and fixes, documentation and more.
• Where can I get help and more information about the community meeting?
  • Contact Vaclav Petras <wenzeslaus at gmail com>.