news: report of the GRASS GIS Community Meeting in Prague (#378)

* news: report of the GRASS GIS Community Meeting in Prague


Co-authored-by: Vaclav Petras <wenzeslaus@gmail.com>
Co-authored-by: @petrasovaa 
Co-authored-by: @veroandreo

content/news/2023_08_13_GRASS_Community_meeting_Prague_june_2023_report.md

@@ -0,0 +1,71 @@
+---
+title: "Report of the GRASS GIS Community Meeting in Prague"
+date: 2023-08-13T13:12:41+02:00
+layout: "news"
+author: GRASS Development Team
+---
+
+#### **Community Meeting** to celebrate the GRASS GIS 40th birthday!! 
+
+The GRASS GIS Community Meeting was held in the Czech Republic from June
+2 to 6 at the Faculty of Civil Engineering of the Czech Technical
+University in Prague. The meeting was a milestone event to celebrate the
+40th birthday of GRASS GIS and brought together users, supporters,
+contributors, power users and developers to celebrate, collaborate and
+chart the future of GRASS GIS.
+
+Thanks to the generous funding from OSGeo, FOSSGIS e.V., OSGeo.JP, and
+individual financial contributors, we were able to welcome 17 in-person
+participants from 9 countries on 3 continents and 4 remote participants.
+
+<a href="/images/news/grass_community2023_prague_fotowall.jpg">
+  <img src="/images/news/grass_community2023_prague_fotowall.jpg"
+   alt="Prague 2023 Community Meeting"
+   title="Prague 2023 Community Meeting"
+   width="65%" style="float:right;padding-left:25px;padding-top:15px">
+</a>
+
+The meeting was not only a celebration of 40 years of GRASS GIS, a free
+geographic information system (GIS) software for managing, analysing and
+visualising geospatial data, it was also a testament to the
+collaborative spirit that has driven GRASS GIS for four decades.
+Participants worked together on various aspects of GRASS GIS, including
+source code, documentation, translations and the website. Participants
+contributed new tools, enhancements to existing ones, and a large number
+of bug fixes. The improvements to documentation, including onboarding
+materials, and a draft of the 8.3.0 release was another important
+outcome.
+
+There was a strong focus on improving the sustainability of the GRASS
+GIS ecosystem. Several participants made progress on the CMake
+transition needed for improving Windows builds. Various technical
+discussions were held on improving the GRASS GIS interfaces to QGIS,
+GDAL, and R. These discussions were attended by special guests from QGIS
+(Nyall Dawson) and R (Roger Bivand) communities, leading to valuable
+insights and future collaboration plans on strengthening these GRASS
+integrations.
+
+Participants submitted detailed reports outlining their contributions,
+collaborations and ongoing work. The event was meticulously planned,
+with efforts made in fundraising, budgeting, venue selection, promotion
+and virtual meeting organisation. Besides aforementioned financial
+contributions, personnel time and other costs were covered by Department
+of Geomatics Faculty of Civil Engineering Czech Technical University in
+Prague (Czech Republic), Center for Geospatial Analytics at North
+Carolina State University (USA), mundialis GmbH & Co. KG, (Germany),
+CONICET (Argentina), INBO Research Institute for Nature and Forest
+(Belgium), SunGIS (Latvia), and OpenPlains Inc. (USA). Special thanks
+goes to Martin Landa, the local host, for planning local events and
+keeping the participants well fed and productive.
+
+For more details on the meeting, sponsorship, and individual reports,
+please visit the [GRASS Community Sprint Prague 2023 wiki page](https://grasswiki.osgeo.org/wiki/Talk:GRASS_Community_Meeting_Prague_2023),
+and follow us on social media ([X](https://twitter.com/GRASSGIS),
+[mastodon](https://mastodon.social/@grassgis@fosstodon.org)),
+join the chat channel in [Gitter](https://app.gitter.im/#/room/#grassgis_community:gitter.im)
+or the [mailing lists](https://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/grass-user) to
+stay updated on future news and events. If you would like to see more
+developments like this in the future, please consider contributing via
+[Open Collective](https://opencollective.com/grass/contribute).
+
+*Markus Neteler, Anna Petrasova, Vaclav Petras, Veronica Andreo, August 2023*