Join STAC Sprint #8

The Cloud-Native Geospatial Foundation, in partnership with the SpatioTemporal Asset Catalog Project Steering Committee (STAC PSC), is excited to announce the first in-person STAC sprint since 2019. The 8th STAC sprint will take place at Element 84’s offices in Philadelphia, PA from September 26th to 28th. The sprint has two goals:

1. To make improvements to the STAC specifications
2. To improve the educational ecosystem around STAC

Building on the previous successes of STAC Sprints, the event will bring together a community of interested collaborators to push the entire STAC ecosystem forward.

Technical Improvements

On the technical side, the goal is to get the STAC Specification ready for 1.1.0, which entails addressing all the issues in the 1.1.0 Milestone. The STAC PSC has been holding monthly STAC Working Sessions to work through all the open Issues in the stac-spec GitHub repository. The team categorizes the issues into specific date milestones and thematic tags to better organize and prioritize tasks. By the time of the STAC Sprint, the team will have discussed all of the open issues in the repository and will have a set list of issues to address for the Sprint (Milestone 1.1 and “new extension” tagged issues). Additionally, multiple updates with stac-spec and stac-api-spec extensions will be addressed during this Sprint.

Educational Materials

In order to help more people benefit from STAC, we need to develop educational materials to introduce people to STAC and how to use it. We are currently collecting information on community needs to identify which educational materials we should develop at the sprint. Additionally, the STAC PSC has prioritized the translation of STAC materials into additional languages other than English. Depending on the language skills of sprint attendees, translating documents may also be a sprint activity.

Event Structure

Throughout the 3-day event, the STAC sprint will feature a similar structure each day:

• Morning Plenary: All participants, both in-person and potential virtual attendees.
  • Lightning Talks: Sponsors will be offered presentation slots to present, spread across the three days.
  • Division of Labor: determine work to be done and divide participants up into working groups.
• Breakout Groups: Disperse throughout the building to work on designated tasks.
  • Lunch and snacks are provided during the day.
• End-of-day update: All participants, both in-person and potential virtual attendees, to reconvene and update on progress made during the breakout sessions.
• Optional Social Event: An evening social gathering.

How to register

If you are interested in participating, we invite you to fill out the application form here. We are also exploring an option for virtual participation. If interested in virtual attendance, please make sure to indicate it on the form.

If you are interested in attending in person but don’t have travel funding we may have some small travel grants available.

Interested in sponsoring the sprint?

We are seeking sponsors who want to help make the sprint a success. To learn more about sponsorship opportunities, please see our sponsorship prospectus. We are grateful to Element 84 hosting the sprint.