GRASS Congress

[Daniel Dupré]

Dear Grass community,

Rainer Trusch's idea of having such a gathering sounds wonderful and comes in an
excellent moment. Very good timming Rainer, indeed :)))

I could help us and other guys working in developping countries to grasp the real
dimension and potential of Grass as a GIS alternative tool down here.

An international open source alternative to the comercial GIS junck "tide" here in
Brazil - after many years of closed market - is very important. More on if it has a
strong and organized international community behind it.

We've being using mostly ARC/info, MGE and Envi in NT environment, with all the
altready known commercial and "black box" constraints to our research and
development aims.

Last year we started exploring Linux and Grass as open source alternatives more
adequate for our research, development and teaching purposes with very promissing
perspectives for a Grass community expansion.

One of the main cornerstones for widening Grass use is to have a Spanish /
Portuguese Grass international version, as Red Hat and ARC/info are doing. In spite
I'm away for so many years from home, my mother language - French - would be very
nice too ;)))

Instituto Ecos may be interested on doing the job (people translating Red Hat to
Portuguese and Spanish are also based down here in Curitiba) as an NGO (development
and incentive of GIS and remote sensing use is one of our institutional aims). And
international funding for this may not be difficult to find in the context of well
designed project.

We actually have research and development projects funded by international
cooperation institutions in Brazil, Peru, Uruguay, Argentina and worked in Bolivia,
Colombia and Angola. In this context, we would also like to cooperate on
developping a strong Grass community here in South America, but need some starting
assistance form you all (ideas, strategy, experiences, etc.). The possibility of
gathering in a Congress may give us this opportunity.

Comments are very much welcome.

Dr. Daniel Dupré
Instituto Ecos
ecos at netbank.com.br
R. Mons. Ivo Zanlorenzi 847/4
Curitiba-PR
Brazil
80.740-590
Tel.  +55 (41) 339 1461
Fax. +55 (41) 339 3080



Rainer Trusch wrote:

> Hi Everybody,
>
> Coming straight to the point, it's time to organize a GRASS Congress and thats
> what I'm planning to do in Mainz / Germany (Mainz fits quite good in geographic
> terms, because it´s situated directly on 50°N).
>
> What do you think about the idea? I changed a few words about it with one
> of our Professors and he sounded quite positive about it. All the organisation
> over here shouldn't be a problem, but you are needed for filling it with
> contents. It should be for Users and Programmers equal, but everything is open
> about what and how.
>
> I talked about it with Markus and he was very interested in it. Please send
> your opinion about it.
>
> Best wishes,
>
> Rainer