[GRASS-dev] Statement Vaclav Petras

GRASS GIS GRASS GIS developer
1

Dear GRASS community,

Thank you for a nomination for a second term at PSC. I’ve been at PSC since 2016 and a core developer since 2012. I’m working in academia mostly on developing or helping people to develop code for research. I think I have touched a lot of files in the GRASS GIS code base, but according to the command below [1], it is only 16.5%. I presented GRASS GIS at various conferences and taught it to graduate students and at workshops. My favorite presentation I did is perhaps 33 Years Of GRASS GIS As An Innovation Platform [2, 3].

As a PSC member, I will vote for sponsoring crucial or special project needs on top of sprints and promotion what we did so far. Additionally, I would like to see more support and promotion within the project for people and organizations which provide some kind of GRASS GIS support or services as part of their business. For example, I think that a developer seeking crowdfunding should not only be supported by the project, but there should be an established and ongoing process of doing that. Therefore, I will support proposals which make promotion, sponsoring, customer-contractor matching, and contributing and thanking by money more common and present in our community.

Best,
Vaclav

[1] python -c “print(100 * $(git log --pretty=‘%H’ --author=‘wenzeslaus’ | while read commit_hash; do git show --oneline --name-only $commit_hash | tail -n+2; done | sort | uniq | xargs ls -d 2>/dev/null | wc -l) / $(git ls-tree -r master --name-only | wc -l))”
[2] https://ncsu-geoforall-lab.github.io/grass-as-a-platform/ncgis2017.html
[3] https://youtu.be/Vv5NnPg6MOY

2

Dear GRASS community,

I am honored to be nominated - thank you.

As most of you probably know I am faculty at the Center for Geospatial Analytics at North Carolina State University.
I have participated in GRASS GIS development since 1991, working at USA CERL in 90s and I have been on GRASS PSC
since it was established. I have collaborated with Markus on the GRASSbook and co-authored many papers and two
additional books with GRASS-related topics. I have promoted GRASS in academic communities and at conferences through
presentations of our research developing innovative tools and applications.

I am currently on the board of directors for OSGeo and as GRASS PSC member I try to make sure that the views and needs
from GRASS project are well represented. I am rather quiet on the lists as I try to minimize sending emails, writing only when I feel
that it is absolutely necessary. But I closely follow GRASS development and follow up with any issues that arise with Anna and Vasek.
I developed and teach courses where we use GRASS and my current and former graduate students use GRASS in their research.
I was fortunate to have Anna and Vasek as my grad students bringing GRASS development into our lab at NCSU.

As a PSC member I see my role as guarding the continuity while supporting new ideas -I am excited about the new developments
which may change how people use GRASS and make it more accessible. I am committed to working with GRASS community to further develop open access educational material for courses and workshops.
I would also strive to keep the admin and procedures as simple as possible to focus the resources (time and effort)
on development, documentation and education, while dividing the work as suggested by Markus - perhaps bringing
in some experience from currently well functioning OSGeo board.

Helena

3

Hello GRASS community,

a big thanks to everybody who nominated me as a candidate for the next PSC term !

Over twenty years ago (1998) I discovered GRASS (4.2.1) to wrangle with weather radar data for a PhD project in South Africa. The PhD project led to one of first GRASS-centered LiveLinux CDs, to make scientific results, software, and data open, accessible and reusable [1]. In 2000 I joined the newly founded german GRASS Anwender Verein (now FOSSGIS), serving as Deputy Chair 2008 – 2009.

I have used GRASS professionally for the development of Tsunami early warning systems, satellite based remote sensing workflows, and cluster-based high performance computing. Currently I am responsible for the scientific infrastructure of the German Institute for Economic Research (DIW Berlin), where GRASS is used on a daily basis to process data from longitudinal surveys. DIW Berlin was also proud to host GRASS codesprint 2019.

GRASS has enabled me to explore new GIS use cases and to develop add-ons for GRASS 5.x/6.x, inluding expert system integration, 3d printing, and GRASS software citation, the latter with the support of Vaclav Petras.

Since 2007 I’ve been supporting OSGeo as an elected Charter member, becoming co-Chair of the Open Geoscience Committee (together with Maxi Cannata) in 2016, when the GRASS community also elected me to serve in the previous GRASS PSC term.

I advocate GRASS and OSGeo in the Earth and Space Informatics (ESSI) chapters of both the European Geoscience Union (EGU) and the American Geophysical Union (AGU), by organising annual Townhall events and have helped to negotiate a Memorandum of Understanding between OSGeo and AGU in 2017.

When working at the German National Library’s of Science and Technology (TIB), I established the still continuing collection of OSGeo releated scientific videos and conference recordings in the TIB online collection for scientific video, beginning with the GRASS 1987 promotional video, narrated by William Shatner (-> Star Trek Original Series) [2][3]. Since then, every year over 100 hours of OSGeo-related video from FOSS4G conferences are now being preserved by TIB for education and research. This includes the beautiful renderings of the evolution of the GRASS codebase by Markus Neteler [4].

If I should be elected for the new PSC, I will push for these topics:

  • Education and reach out to early career scientists to get new generations of users and developers on board, especially in developing nations.

  • Professional recognition for GRASS related work by scientific citation and reference, both for new code but also maintenance of the codebase and generation of data.

  • Fostering exchange with organisations advancing the state-of-art of good scientific practice, like the FAIR prinicples (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable) and Open Science. The GRASS community is a role model for this. They can learn from us and we can learn from them.

  • Long term software curation and discovery: Now that the GRASS repo is git-based, we can tie into global repository infrastructures (Zenodo, re3data) for long term archiving and code preservation.

  • Improving the discoverability and fostering reuse of the growing GRASS-/OSGeo-related video “library”.

  • A „historical“-section in the GRASS web presence to provide information about GRASS-related real-world memorabilia and artifacts of the last 37 years, including the GRASS manual signed by William Shatner, historic tape reels, T-Shirt designs from the 1980s, etc.

Best,
Peter

[1] https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.1164724
[2] https://doi.org/10.5446/12963
[3] https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.1420936
[4] https://doi.org/10.5446/14652

peter.loewe@gmx.de