GRASS Community Meeting Prague 2023

The GRASS GIS team is organizing the GRASS GIS Community Meeting with contributors, power users and developers from June 2 to June 6, 2023 to celebrate GRASS GIS 40th birthday (by contributing to GRASS GIS of course).

Prague 2013
Bonn 2018

Purpose

GRASS GIS Community Meeting is a great occasion for folks to support the development by actively contributing to the source code, documentation (manuals, wiki, tutorials), translations, website 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 desiring to celebrate with us the 40th GRASS GIS birthday!!

In this meeting, we will work on GRASS GIS and integrations with related OSGeo projects. We will revise connection to QGIS to make it easier to maintain, and we will work on migration of the build to CMake to improve Windows builds including PDAL support. Furthermore, we will start moving documentation to Markdown to make it easier to contribute to and we will add images and examples for tools and workflows which still miss them. Finally, we will automate and document maintenance processes to reduce the burden on maintainers and thus improve the project sustainability.

Note that while we have our general plan, we can't accept any earmarked donations, i.e., we can't make any promises for a specific work to be done. 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 at that time given their skills and time available.

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

Timing

When: June 2-6, 2023

Of course you are invited to join or leave the meeting whenever you want.

Venue

Department of Geomatics
Faculty of Civil Engineering
Czech Technical University in Prague, Czech Republic
Thákurova 7/2077, Prague
Room B868
Map

Prague has an international airport and is also reachable by train, bus or car.

Accommodation and Costs

Participants should plan for the following costs:

The participation is free of charge
Travel to Prague, variable depending on where you come from, reimbursements depending on the financial contributions provided by the community
Accommodation and meals (with the donated sponsorship money we will try to cover some expenses of the participants)

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

Please let us know your time of arrival and departure, so we can book accommodations and organize the logistics.

Financial support: (partial) travel grants can be payed upon request thanks to our sponsors!

Agenda - What we plan to do

Note: The program is generally open for your ideas. Please write an email to the GRASS developer list to discuss your contribution.

During the meeting we will work on GRASS GIS on these tasks (please add more!):

We will update and revise the GRASS GIS Integration with QGIS to simplify maintenance.
Furthermore, we will migrate the compilation technology to CMake to significantly improve the Windows builds including PDAL support and become binary compatible with OSGeo4W.
The extensive GRASS documentation will be converted from HTML to Markdown to facilitate future collaboration.
Pictures, examples and workflows will be added to the documentation where they are still missing.
Software maintenance processes are automated and documented to reduce the burden on maintainers and thus improve the sustainability of the project.

This means that there are tasks from both the programming and documentation areas to appeal to a wide range of interested parties.

Further details about the action items you find here and below. Topics cover non-technical, semi-technical, and technical issues.

Timeline

(agenda is under development, but also flexible)

Thursday, 1 June

Arrival

Friday, 2 June

9:00 meeting starts in the room B-868
Lunch: 12:45 NTK
Review the plan for the next days
API for use in Python and in other projects (e.g., QGIS)
Parallelizations

Saturday, 3 June

Reducing cost of distribution on Windows
Convert GRASS GIS documentation from HTML to Markdown and implement new documentation system (mkdocs?)
Group photo 1
Outdoor social evening

Sunday, 4 June

Compilation CMake (Windows, Linux)
Connections in general, rgrass, qgisprocess
GRASS GIS addons overview generator for entire GitHub (and more?) based on tag "grass-gis-addons"
Group photo 2

Monday, 5 June

Connections in general, QGIS, rgrass, qgisprocess
Parallelizations
grass.jupyter

Tuesday, 6 June

Connections in general, QGIS
Parallelizations
grass.jupyter

Wednesday, 7 June

Departure

Social events

Friday, 2 June

Dinner at 7pm: U veverku pub (map)

Saturday, 3 June

Dinner at 6pm: Únětický pivovar (map)

3:50pm train from Podbaba (15min walk) to Roztoky
walk 1:30min
Bus (355) back from Unetice to Dejvicka: 21:57 or 23:18

Sunday, 4 June

Dinner at 7pm: Restaurace Vltava (map)

Monday, 5 June

Dinner at 7pm: My Paprika (map)

Participation

We are planning for an attendance of 20 people (i.e., coding places) but of course you are welcome to join us and bring new ideas with you: we'll make more places available. Please add your name here or contact Martin Landa <landa.martin at gmail.com>:

In person

Number	Participant	Country	Arrival	Departure	Topics
1	Martin Landa	Czech Republic	June 1	June 7	Python: create_location (#1987), Graphical Modeler improvements and single window layout integration
2	Micha Silver	Israel	June 2	June 6	Addon to derive soil moisture from Sentinel 2
3	Helmut Kudrnovsky	Austria	June 2 (18:37) by train	June 4 (18:24) by train	support CMake transition
4	Markus Neteler	Germany	June 2 (17:17)	June 6 (12:43)	translations, manual pages, ..., see my list in "Discussion" page
5	Ondřej Pešek	Czech Republic	June 2 (17:17)	June 6 (12:43)	Python 3.12-connected issues, gmodeler
6	Helena Mitasova	United States	June 2	June 6
7	Vaclav Petras	United States	June 1	June 7	init and other Python API topics, support CMake transition, revise connection with QGIS and other tools, funding
8	Anna Petrasova	United States	June 1	June 7	parallelization documentation, grass.jupyter, R and QGIS integration
9	Corey White	United States	June 2 (10:55)	June 7	Connections with other tools, OpenPlains, JSON outputs
10	Maris Nartiss	Latvia	June 2 (14:30)	June 6 (12:00)	Improvements of imagery modules (push i.svm.*; i.signatures; ?)
11	Aaron Saw Min Sern	Singapore	June 1	June 7	Support CMake transition, r.mapcalc parallelization
12	Luís de Sousa	The Netherlands	June 1 (20:00)	June 5 (20:45)	Update r.mblend add-on; test CMake transition.
13	Caitlin Haedrich	United States	June 1	June 7	grass.jupyter
14	Linda Kladivová	Czech Republic	June 2	June 6	Single-Window layout issues and improvements
15	Carmen Tawalika	Germany	June 2 (17:17)	June 6 (12:43)	Happy to assist with general topics like documentation + automation, in doubt something related to actinia
16	Floris Vanderhaeghe	Belgium	June 3 (train 19:17)	June 6 (train 8:25)	Helping in interfacing GRASS from R (rgrass & qgisprocess packages)

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

Via chat or hangout

Join our Gitter chatroom

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

Participating virtually:

Number	Participant	Country	Topics	Times, synchronous or fully asynchronous
1	Brendan Harmon	United States	Update integration with QGIS	Available 8:00 AM CST (UTC-6) onwards
2	Veronica Andreo	Argentina	Mission and vision, interfaces with QGIS and R, sponsoring, ... see discussion tab	available from 8:00 AM ART (UTC-3) onward
3	Daniel T	Mexico		some availability through the days :/
4	Loïc Bartoletti	France	QGIS Integration, support CMake transition

Timing of hangout meetings

Vero: available from 8:00 AM ART (UTC-3) onward

Collaborative document scratching

TBD

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.

Broadcast & Video

During the event :) Find the latest information on the Gitter Channel.

Photos

Day 1

Hard at work on the first day
Lively discussion
Dinner at a nearby pub

Day 2

Group photo
A full table on day 2
GRASS GIS development brings smiles
Pizza fuels work!
Afternoon working and collaborating
View at Alšova vyhlídka on the way to Únětický pivovar (brewery)
Beer at Únětický pivovar, a 300-year-old brewery, after a day of hard work

Day 3

Working on new features, bug fixes, documentation and more..
An even fuller table on day 3
Collaboration and discussion
Panoramic photo of a cheers to GRASS's 40th Birthday at Vitala restaurant

FAQ

How was it last time?
- Very nice, see GRASS_GIS at OSGeo Virtual Community Sprint 2020!
Is the GRASS Community 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.
- On demand we can do some presentations of current working GRASS implementation and new upcoming features to spread the idea of Open Source GIS software.
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 Martin Landa <landa.martin at gmail.com>

Report and press release

TBD: After the event :-)

We'll esp. craft a report for our sponsors.

GRASS Community Meeting Prague 2023

Contents

Purpose

Sponsors

Thanks to our sponsors

Timing

Venue

Accommodation and Costs