[GRASS-PSC] Moving sponsoring to Open Collective

[Michael Barton]

Congrats for the change over and thanks much for all that you did to make this happen. Great email.

Michael

Michael Barton
School of Human Evolution &Social Change
School of Complex Adaptive System Science
Center for Social Dynamics & Complexity
Arizona State University

...Sent from my iPad

> On Sep 3, 2021, at 6:02 AM, Moritz Lennert <mlennert at club.worldonline.be> wrote:
> 
> 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://urldefense.com/v3/__https://opencollective.com/grass__;!!IKRxdwAv5BmarQ!NqQHkHoBCHwvdlGdw1dc45XON-KoTAdeBAUCnNAYoNz9r1kqVDv8gFH6doLN4zXhgVI$ . 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://urldefense.com/v3/__https://grasswiki.osgeo.org/wiki/Sponsors__;!!IKRxdwAv5BmarQ!NqQHkHoBCHwvdlGdw1dc45XON-KoTAdeBAUCnNAYoNz9r1kqVDv8gFH6doLN_z60ISQ$ . 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://urldefense.com/v3/__https://bhinc.com/__;!!IKRxdwAv5BmarQ!NqQHkHoBCHwvdlGdw1dc45XON-KoTAdeBAUCnNAYoNz9r1kqVDv8gFH6doLN4dxyMHo$ ). 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://urldefense.com/v3/__https://opencollective.com/grass__;!!IKRxdwAv5BmarQ!NqQHkHoBCHwvdlGdw1dc45XON-KoTAdeBAUCnNAYoNz9r1kqVDv8gFH6doLN4zXhgVI$  !
> 
> The GRASS GIS development team
> ~
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