ouRGeo is a community effort. It is free, it has no company behind it, and it gets better in exactly one way — people use it and say what they find. Here is how to help, from five minutes to ongoing support.
Every serious GIS you have used was shaped by the people who filed its bug reports. ouRGeo is no different — it is just earlier.
ouRGeo is developed in the open under the GNU Affero General Public License v3, with no company, no subscription and no investors setting the roadmap. That has an obvious upside: nobody can take it away from you, put your workflow behind a tier, or decide your platform is no longer worth supporting — and because the AGPL is a copyleft licence, that stays true of anyone else’s version as well.
It also has an obvious consequence. There is no QA department, no support desk, and no analytics dashboard quietly reporting what is broken. ouRGeo collects no telemetry at all — that is a deliberate privacy decision, and it means the project genuinely does not know a feature is failing until somebody says so.
Everything below is a real job that needs doing. None of it requires permission, an invitation, or any particular expertise — most of it just requires that you were using the software and paid attention.
The most useful thing you can do, by a wide margin.
Download ouRGeo, point it at your own data, and try to do real work with it. Not a demo dataset — the awkward shapefile with the broken geometry, the raster that is too big, the CRS nobody outside your jurisdiction has heard of. That is where software actually breaks, and that is exactly the data no solo developer has on hand to test against.
When something goes wrong — a crash, a tool that errors, a map that renders incorrectly, a result you believe is simply wrong — post it on the community forum. Reading the forum is open to everyone; posting takes a free account.
You do not need to diagnose anything. You just need to make it reproducible. The most helpful reports include:
# A report template worth copying What I did: Toolbox → Buffer, 500 m, on a shapefile of parcels Expected: Buffered polygons Got: Error, pasted below System: Windows 11 · ouRGeo 1.15.6 · R 4.4.1 Data: ~12,000 polygons, EPSG:2264, some with curves # Console output parcels_buffered <- sf::st_buffer(parcels, units::set_units(500, m)) Error in ... : <the message R printed>
The roadmap is not fixed. It responds to what people ask for.
If ouRGeo is missing something that stops you using it for real work, say so on the forum. Feature requests are not filed and forgotten — with no product manager and no commercial roadmap, what users actually ask for is the clearest available signal about what to build next.
Requests to make an existing feature less awkward are just as welcome as requests for new ones. Rough edges in something you use every day are easy to stop noticing — and impossible to fix if nobody mentions them.
You do not have to be an expert. You only have to be one step further along than whoever is asking.
The community forum is where ouRGeo's shared knowledge accumulates. Every answered question is a question the next person does not have to ask, and a solo developer answering everything personally does not scale.
Time is the real constraint. Funding buys time.
ouRGeo is free and will stay free. There is no paid tier planned, no feature held back for subscribers, and nothing on this site is behind a paywall. But building it is unpaid work done alongside everything else, and that is the genuine limit on how fast it improves.
If ouRGeo saves you time — or saved you a licence fee — a contribution directly converts into development hours.
One-off or recurring, whatever suits — ko-fi.com/ourgeo
All of these are genuinely useful, and several address gaps that are hard to fill any other way.
If you teach GIS or spatial analysis, ouRGeo may be worth a look for a specific reason: students see the R behind every operation they perform. Point-and-click work produces a readable script, which makes the gap between "using a GIS" and "writing spatial code" much smaller than it usually is. Feedback from classroom use is particularly valuable — students find confusing interfaces faster than anyone.
Using ouRGeo in published research? Say so on the forum. Knowing which analyses depend on the tool directly affects which parts get the most careful attention.
ouRGeo is published in full, under a licence designed to keep it that way.
The complete source lives at github.com/CCurtis1988/ouRGeo, released under the GNU Affero General Public License v3 — the same licence the RStudio IDE uses.
That last clause is the point of choosing copyleft. It means no one can take ouRGeo, close it up, and sell it back to the community it came from. The freedoms you get are the freedoms everyone downstream gets, permanently.
This site claims ouRGeo sends no telemetry and phones no servers home. Published source is what turns that from a promise into something you can check yourself — see the privacy policy for the specifics of what the app does and does not do.
If you only do one thing, do the first one.