Feeling chatty? Join our Gitter chatroom if you have any question or want to chat about the software!

Roadmap

The GRASS GIS project roadmap, established in September 2024, provides a clear outline of our key priorities and strategic objectives for the next 3 years. While we welcome all kinds of contributions, the following efforts are most likely to get broad support from the project maintainers.

Software releases

The GRASS GIS mission is to bring advanced geospatial technologies to the world. To that end, we plan to release one minor version per year and micro versions as needed:

  • 8.5.0: 1st quarter of 2025
  • 8.6.0: 1st quarter of 2026

Software distribution

In order to make GRASS GIS run as smoothly as possible on all platforms, we plan to:

  • Release and maintain a GRASS conda package.
  • Transition to CMake to streamline compilation.

Integration into data science pipelines

GRASS GIS has robust and unique models and tools for geoprocessing and analysis that can be used together with other software packages (eg., R and Python) in data science pipelines. While the conda package described above serves this area of focus, we also aim to:

  • Create tutorials on different topics, applications and use cases demonstrating how GRASS GIS can be combined with other software packages in notebooks or scripts.
  • Improve Python and R APIs to streamline integrations.

Facilitate researchers' contributions

We want to streamline researchers' unique contributions to keep bringing advanced geospatial technologies to the world. Our goals in this focus area are:

  • Develop and enhance existing onboarding guidelines to streamline contributions of scientific models and tools.
  • Encourage acknowledgement and citation of GRASS tools used in research.

Code quality and security

We are committed to provide robust, secure and high quality software by introducing tools to detect vulnerabilities, code quality and formatting issues. To maintain high standards, we will:

  • Fix security and quality issues reported by the different tools.
  • Maintain and enhance CI workflows that help contributors comply with the standards.

Documentation

We are committed to offer complete and up to date documentation for newcomers, users and contributors. Our goals are to:

  • Enhance tools' manuals by adding examples and figures where missing.
  • Convert html documentation to markdown to lower the barrier for contributions.
  • Provide tutorials on a wide variety of topics, both introductory and advanced.

Community growth

Growing the GRASS GIS community is essential for fostering innovation, collaboration, and the long-term sustainability of the project. To grow and diversify our community, we aim to:

  • Foster community involvement by organizing yearly community meetings and promoting smaller local events.
  • Participate in mentoring programs (Google Summer of Code, GRASS student grants) to grow the base of users, contributors and promote inclusion.

Sustainability

A diverse group of contributors have invested their time and financial support to ensure the ongoing development of GRASS GIS. To ensure GRASS' long-term success, we aim to:

  • Improve and document the project's governance, procedures, infrastructure and established practices.
  • Attract new funding through grants, sponsors and donations.

Communication

GRASS GIS is used in several different ways by different users and in different contexts. To showcase GRASS versatility and innovation, we aim to:

  • Highlight GRASS capabilities and new developments on our website, social media channels, and conferences.
  • Migrate the mailing lists to modern discussion forums.