Proposed changes to the EEIUC group

[Earth Engine India Users Community]

Hello folks,

To all the new joinees into this Earth Engine India Users Community (EEUIC) group in recent weeks, welcome and thank you for your interest! To the rest of you who have been long time members—some of you have been with us from the start—thank you for contributing in various ways and your continued interest in staying with us! As organizers of this group, we have some updates to share with you all.

Some four years ago when a few of us got together and started this group, large scale geospatial data analysis, particularly like the kind Earth Engine (EE) is built to excel at, was relatively nascent in India. Some online learning resources existed, and there were the occasional EE meetups and workshops. But for enthusiasts working in India or on issues pertaining to here, a platform to gather at, where everyone could learn from, engage and inspire each other, seemed to us to be largely missing. To try to fill that gap, some of us got together and started this online group, and it has grown since then to what it is now, thanks in large part to all of you here. Thanks to this community's efforts, there were online livestreaming sessions (recordings are in our Youtube channel), where practicing professionals shared their EE skills as well as their experience and expertise with applying them in real-world applications. There were also some meetups, when the pandemic allowed, where folks met and learnt together in-person.

Things are different now. Online EE learning resources have grown enormously in size and maturity (eg. a free and open-access textbook covering EE fundamentals and applications, official EE documentation and guides, Stack Exchange for EE, EE developers' forum). Interest in geospatial data and analysis, and its community of enthusiasts in India, has also grown immensely across disciplines, and in academia, non-profit and commercial sectors. In the meantime, activity on this group has plateaued, hopefully because engagement and getting help elsewhere has become less difficult.

In light of this, we are proposing to make the following changes to this online group, with effect from October 1st, 2023 (roughly 3 months from now):

• Close down and archive this group, by:
  
  • Halting all new subscriptions
  • Disabling new posts
  • Retaining all the conversation threads here as a read-only online archive of this group
    
• Retain the community's Youtube channel and all its videos as-is; there will be no new postings

If you have thoughts on alternate directions to take this group, please feel free to write back here and let us all know, and let's consider them together.

Thank you,

Pradeep, Madhu and Craig (organizers)

[Earth Engine India Users Community]

This is a reminder that the following changes are scheduled to come into effect in the evening of Oct 1st, which is a week from today.

• Close down and archive this group, by:
  
  • Halting all new subscriptions
  • Disabling new posts
  • Retaining all the conversation threads here as a read-only online archive of this group
    
• Retain the community's Youtube channel and all its videos as-is; there will be no new postings

Thank you.

Pradeep (one of the organizers)

[Earth Engine India Users Community]

As planned and announced earlier in this thread, this group is now **CLOSED** for new subscriptions and posts. All previous threads remain available for anyone to re/visit.

Once again, we thank you immensely for staying with us thus far and for your participation!

- EEIUC Organizers.