[gdal-dev] GDAL Maintainers Meeting Minutes

[Howard Butler]

Howard Butler, Dan Baston, Alessandro Pasotti, Chris Toney, Seth Girvin, Even Rouault, and Javier Jimenez Shaw held the monthly GDAL Maintainers Meeting on 03/26/2026. The following items were discussed and reported upon:

# Project News

## AI/LLM
* New AI/LLM policy is now active. See https://gdal.org/en/stable/community/ai_tool_policy.html#ai-tool-policy for details
* Howard gave a short interview with NumFOCUS about the GDAL Sponsorship Program that includes a bit about AI and the impact on open source https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gFzNCoQaBfo 

## Releases
* Maintenance release GDAL 3.12.3 was released https://github.com/OSGeo/gdal/releases/tag/v3.12.3 See https://github.com/OSGeo/gdal/blob/v3.12.3/NEWS.md for bug list and details
* GDAL 3.13 feature freeze is planned for early to mid-April and aiming for a May final release

## Conferences
* Even and Seth will be giving the GDAL Workshop at FOSS4GE in Timisoara, Romania on July 3rd, 2026. See https://2026.europe.foss4g.org/schedule/workshops/ for details and get your ticket at https://pretix.geo-spatial.org/foss4ge2026/timisoara2026/
* Howard submitted "Building the GDAL Sponsorship Program" as a talk for FOSS4G Hiroshima https://talks.osgeo.org/foss4g-2026/talk/review/FNSYDBBCF7LUPB77JHSGPUMUQV3NSNWB Vote early and vote often 😀 https://talks.osgeo.org/foss4g-2026/p/voting/signup/

# Maintenance activities update

## Alessandro

* PR review activity
* OGR Schema development

## Seth 

* Collating examples throughout the documentation into the GDAL Cookbook https://gdal.org/en/latest/user/cookbook.html
* Adding more specific cookbook examples including coordinate system examples and utilizing a WCS server

## Dan

* Quiet on GDAL and working hard on GEOS curve support
* Exposed `convexhull` and `concavehull` https://gdal.org/en/latest/programs/gdal_vector_convex_hull.html https://gdal.org/en/latest/programs/gdal_vector_concave_hull.html to expose GEOS functionality for GDAL 3.13

## Even

* 87+ PRs and tickets
* GDAL 3.12.3 release 
* Shapelib 1.6.3 https://github.com/OSGeo/shapelib/releases/tag/v1.6.3 fixes gcc15 build failure
* Numerous maintenance and security-related items in libtiff https://gitlab.com/libtiff/libtiff/-/commits/master?ref_type=HEADS 
* ~2 EPSG updates to PROJ :)
* Re-enabled TIGER and UKNTF drivers at sponsor request
* Review and merge J2K driver – JP2Grok https://github.com/OSGeo/gdal/pull/14204 

## Chris

* Working RConsortium grant proposal to include support for CI activities
* Fixed viewshed bug with points exactly on surface https://github.com/OSGeo/gdal/pull/14237 

# Next Meeting

The next GDAL Maintainers Meeting is 04/23/2026 at 13:00 UTC. Project contributors should contact Howard Butler for an invite.

# Online Version

https://gist.github.com/hobu/40deb091e5e07ccd57bf085f8ff4a038

# Financial Support

* Support GDAL with a new t-shirt! Visit https://gdal.org/tshirt/ to purchase. Change your country preference on the bottom of the page. Profits from swag sales go directly to the GDAL Sponsorship Program via NumFOCUS! 
* Make an individual or corporate donation online https://numfocus.org/donate-to-gdal 
* Organize a contribution to the GDAL Sponsorship Program https://gdal.org/en/latest/sponsors/index.html#sponsorship-program 

(sorry for missing last month's notes)