[Incubator] Initiating the process for R-Spatial to become an OSGeo community project

Fri May 28 16:59:32 PDT 2021

First up it is great to see such a strong R community, I have even seen
presentations on the *sf* in my local university down "geogeeks" meetup
(back when we could you know meet up).

I was checking in to see if you had made any progress towards an osgeo
project page, and I did not see anything yet...

Checking your github repositories such as https://github.com/r-spatial/sf

1 Be geospatial
- README.md clearly spatial topic :)

2. Have a free license or open source license
- sf LICENSE <-- does not actually list an open source license (so you
would trick github license detection)
- mapview was clearly GPL
- Searching the codebase shows
https://github.com/r-spatial/sf/blob/master/DESCRIPTION#L50 indicating some
combination of MIT and GPL (what is your thought here?)

3. Welcome participation and new contributors.
- Well I have personally experienced your enthusiastic community, ... but
this is a bit more focused on having a policy for things like pull requests.
- Massive number of closed pull requests from a wide range of contributors
- For sf I did not find a CONTRIBUTING.md file (shown to folks making a
pull request) but the README has heading about contributing which is great

So this looks okay, but I have questions:

Q: What is the project license for sf? Can you clearly indicate it in a
LICENSE.md file? Or would that mess up your build?
Q: What is your osgeo id? So you can be setup with website access to make a
project page

--
Jody Garnett

On Mon, 22 Feb 2021 at 06:21, Robin Lovelace <rob00x at gmail.com> wrote:

> We would like to apply, as the 'R-Spatial' community, to become an OSGeo
> affiliated organisation.
>
> We are a diverse group with a shared interest in developing free and open
> tools for the reproducible analysis of geographic data. R is a popular and
> rapidly growing language for statistical computing and 'data science'. It
> is already part of the OSGeo ecosystem: the OSGeo Live distribution ships
> with R <https://github.com/OSGeo/OSGeoLive/blob/master/bin/install_R.sh>
> and R integrates with established OSGeo projects such as GRASS GIS
> <https://grasswiki.osgeo.org/wiki/R_statistics>, SAGA
> <https://cran.r-project.org/package=RSAGA> and QGIS
> <https://docs.qgis.org/3.16/en/docs/>. R tutorials (which would benefit
> from being updated) are listed on the tutorials listed on OSGeo's old
> website <http://old.www.osgeo.org/educational_content>. We would like to
> update existing content and create new OSGeo-affiliated tutorials for using
> R-Spatial software. Many R-Spatial projects have support from the R
> Consortium <https://www.r-consortium.org/>, opening the possibility of
> stronger links between R and OSGeo at an organisational level.
>
> After a discussion on our GitHub Organisation at github.com/r-spatial, it
> is clear that closer links could be mutually beneficial. Collaboration is
> at the heart of open source software and the R community has a long
> history. The history of R-GRASS GIS bridges, for example, covers more than 20
> years <https://doi.org/10.1016/S0098-3004(00)00057-1> and goes in both
> directions. R interfaces enable a wide range of people to access
> OSGeo-supported software from a reproducible command-line interface.
>
> Continued development and innovation in R-OSGeo links are illustrated the
> qgisprocess <https://github.com/paleolimbot/qgisprocess> package, which
> motivated positive changes in the QGIS source code (see
> github.com/paleolimbot/qgisprocess/issues/21). The R-Spatial community
> relies on the OSGeo projects GDAL, PROJ and GEOS for data access and
> geographic operations. Core R-Spatial packages sf, raster and terra use
> bindings to the libraries for much of the heavy lifting and many thousands
> of people using R for spatial research (often without knowing) run OSGeo
> support code every day. We would like to support the ongoing work of these
> vital components of the wider community that is represented by the
> OSGeo-affiliated conference series FOSS4G. We also anticipate benefits from
> being part of the wider OSGeo community and would like to be more active
> members of the wider movement advocating free and open source software for
> geospatial.
>
> 'R-Spatial' can be loosely defined as the ecosystem of code, projects and
> people using R for working with and adding value to spatial data. A
> manifestation of the wider R-Spatial community is the friendly, vibrant and
> diverse range of voices using the #rspatial
> <https://twitter.com/search?q=%23rspatial> tag on Twitter. For the
> purposes of OSGeo supported *software* projects however, we define
> R-Spatial as the packages found at https://github.com/r-spatial/ (which
> includes sf, stars, mapview, gstat, spdep and many other popular packages
> for working with spatial data) and https://github.com/rspatial/ (which
> includes packages raster and terra). A (possibly incomplete) list with R
> packages that directly link to OSGEO libraries is found here
> <https://github.com/r-spatial/discuss/wiki/R-packages-that-use-the-OSGEO-stack-in-System-Requirements:>.
> Thousands of R packages depend on these packages one way or another.
>
> We would like to initiate the process needed for R-Spatial to eventually
> become an OSGeo community project, by achieving the first two of the three
> steps as outlined on the Incubation Committee web page
> <https://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/Incubation_Committee#Step_1:_Add_OSGeo_Website_Project_Page>
> :
>
>    - We would like to create an OSGeo web page with information about key
>    packages in the 'R-spatial stack', including how they relate to OSGeo
>    projects
>    - We would like to become an OSGeo Community Project
>    <https://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/Incubation_Committee#Step_2:_Join_Community_Projects_Program>
>
> All the best,
>
> R-Spatial developers and contributors, including: Robin Lovelace, Roger
> Bivand, Edzer Pebesma, Tim Appelhans, Robert Hijmans, Jakub Nowosad, Nick
> Bearman, Emmanuel Blondel, Andy Teucher, Marynia Kolak, Timothée Giraud,
> Ahmadou Dicko, Andrea Gilardi, Lorena Abad, Martijn Tennekes
> _______________________________________________
> Incubator mailing list
> Incubator at lists.osgeo.org
> https://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/incubator
>
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