[GRASS-PSC] Moving sponsoring to Open Collective

[Moritz Lennert]

Hello everyone,

As has been discussed in the past, we have now an active Open Collective 
account which can be used to receive donations. This means that we can 
stop using the PayPal Money Pool linked to my personal PayPal account.

Our fiscal host on Open Collective is OSGeo. Thanks to Michael Smith, 
the OSGeo treasurer, for his support.

Below is a first draft of an email I suggest to send to -announce and 
other mailing lists. As you can see, we highlight a particular company 
donation that we received at the beginning of the summer (but we were 
waiting with the announcement until the Open Collective system was in 
place).

Please let me know if you have any remarks or suggestions concerning 
this email.

Moritz


***********Announcement mail to be sent********************

Subject: GRASS GIS moves to Open Collective for collecting donations and 
thanks its many financial contributors

In order to make money donations easier, the GRASS GIS project has 
decided to use the Open Collective platform with the Open Source 
Geospatial (OSGeo) Foundation as its fiscal host:  
https://opencollective.com/grass. You can donate money via credit card, 
PayPal, or bank transfer (US account - for EU account please contact 
us). This new platform replaces our old PayPal Money Pool.

Although most of the work on GRASS GIS happens on a voluntary basis (or 
donated by organizations and companies in the form of working time of 
their staff), money donations are very important for the development of 
GRASS GIS as they allow us to organize face-to-face coding sessions 
(sprints), finance infrastucture needs (web site, etc) and sometimes pay 
developers to work on important but tedious bug fixes. The new platform 
should allow both individuals and companies or organizations to 
contribute to the GRASS GIS budget.

We would also like to take the opportunity to thank those who have 
already contributed money in the last years. You can see a complete list 
of sponsors on https://grasswiki.osgeo.org/wiki/Sponsors. Whatever the 
amount your help is deeply appreciated !

As an example of a company support we wish to highlight the very 
generous donation recently received from Bohannan Huston, Inc. 
(https://bhinc.com/). We asked Robert S. Dzur, Vice President Spatial 
Data, to explain their motivation behind supporting the project. Here is 
what he has to say:

"Our use of GRASS GIS is primarily related to areas of data inventory, 
visualization, quality assessment and analysis.  As data producers, we 
are regularly confronted with production challenges related to ingesting 
and visualizing high data volumes of imagery, elevation / point cloud 
and feature data.  GRASS GIS gives us the ability to quickly handle 
large datasets at any point in the production stage.  For example, we 
use r.in.lidar and its capacity to read large multi-billion point 
datasets from a text list and create derivative elevation data products 
often to support both quality assurance tasks as well as base maps for 
vector feature data development.  GRASS GIS's multiplatform (Windows, 
Mac, Linux) support and integration with GDAL/OGR is also a plus for us. 
  GRASS GIS gives us direct control, access, and the ability to interact 
with our data at very granular levels.  My colleague, Dennis Sandin also 
reminded me that one of the greatest benefits of GRASS GIS is that its 
environments gives us a plethora of options for manipulating data and 
testing/designing our automation/workflow processes. We also appreciate 
the GRASS GIS legacy and its long history of development dating back to 
its genesis with the US Army Corps of Engineers and the continued 
scientific foundations of its applications.

Over the past few years, we have been making a concerted effort on two 
fronts to 1) support the geospatial open-source community and 2) reduce 
our dependence on commercial software.  Typically, our support had been 
through sponsoring the broader community through code sprint events.  
Last year, however, with code sprints on-hold we decided to contribute 
to the QGIS crowdfunding campaign for point cloud functionality.  At the 
same time, we attempted to make a corresponding reduction in our 
commercial licensing contracts.  This year we have also been trying to 
reach out to some of our key clients and teach team how to use GRASS GIS 
on their own computing infrastructure.  Specifically, we engaged with 
one client to teach them how to use r.in.pdal to develop elevation range 
maps from LiDAR point cloud data as a complementary data element in 
their NDVI analysis to identify vegetation canopy.  Another client was 
interested in merging DEM data of differing source lineage and quality 
and we conducted a basic how to session on GRASS GIS with them and 
shared details about r.patch and r.patch.smooth.  Given those recent 
technical exchange efforts locally with some of our clients, our 
experience with GRASS GIS, and our objective to support a specific 
open-source project, this year we decided to contribute to the GRASS GIS 
project.

If there are companies or organizations like us who are not already 
using GRASS GIS to improve their workflows, they should be."

Convinced you want to support GRASS GIS financially ? Go to 
https://opencollective.com/grass !

The GRASS GIS development team
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