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.
Sponsor us!
We welcome financial contributions to support the meeting and we are looking for sponsors to cover costs such as meals or to help reducing travel and accommodation expenses for GRASS developers who volunteer their time. If you are interested in sponsoring the GRASS Community Meeting, please go to:
Any surplus at the end of the event will be used for future activities of the GRASS GIS project such as the Student Grant program.
This GRASS Community Meeting is a great occasion for you to support the development of GRASS. With your contribution you'll enable more developers to meet. Community meetings are important opportunities for developers to discuss, fix bugs, plan the direction for the project and work on new features. The developers and other contributors or their employers are donating their valuable time, so it would be great if funding can be made available from within the community to cover out-of-pocket expenses. All of the work that takes place at the community meeting will be directly contributed back into the GRASS project to the benefit of everyone who uses it. 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, please contact specific developers or support commercial providers for that.
We are grateful to the following sponsors for their support and commitment!
- U.S. National Science Foundation, award 2303651. (Travel for 5 participants and their time, event venue.)
- In-kind contributions will be acknowledged here.
- Personal time and/or financial contributions will be acknowledged here.
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 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)
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.
Saturday, June 15
- morning: GRASS in Windows
- 2 pm: Project roadmap discussion
Sunday, June 16
- 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
Tuesday, June 18
- 2pm: Website redesign discussion
- UX feedback
- Content
Wednesday, June 19
Thursday, June 20
Day of departure.
Participation
We are planning for an attendance of 15 people at the same time but you are welcome to sign up regardless of capacity: We will find a space for you. 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 | |
| 5 | Vero Andreo | United States | June 13 | June 20 | STAC, 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 | ... | |
| 9 | Markus Neteler | Germany | June 14 | June 20 | Infrastructure, Markdown, mailman vs discourse... | |
| 10 | Luís de Sousa | Portugal | June 14 | June 18 | r.mblend, GeoSPARQL plug-in, DGGS free thinking, ... | Travelling yet to be arranged, dates are tentative. |
| 11 | Edouard Choinière | Canada | June 13 | June 20 | CI, checks, code quality |
If you are arriving or departing on the days of the event, please specify the time, too.
Online
Join our Gitter chatroom
Gitter has a video (and backup will be Zoom).
Participating virtually:
| Number | Participant | Country | Topics | Times, synchronous or fully asynchronous | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Be The First | Your Country | Your Topic | When you will be available (timezone, days, times) |
Venue
NC State European Center in Prague
Malé náměstí 144/1
Praha 1 – 110 00
Prague, Czech Republic
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>.