User:RoelH

Contact

 * e-mail: roel AT huybrechts DOT re
 * twitter: @rhuybrec

Bio
At work, I'm a GIS consultant for Realdolmen. At the moment I'm working for the Flemish government, department DOV, where we manage and publish all data related to the soil and the subsoil of Flanders. This ranges from soilmaps, geological formations, boreholes to groundwater data. We do so almost exclusively using OSGeo tools: PostGIS, Geoserver, Geonetwork and QGis to name a few.

In my spare time I like playing around with other open-source tools (I'm a long time Debian user). I recently started playing around with Mapnik again, to produce some interesting maps of OpenStreetMap data joined together with Open Data from the government and historical maps of my hometown. Hope to share them with you soon.

This year I had the fantastic opportunity to attend my first global FOSS4G conference (after attening our first Belgian FOSS4G last year) and speak about the tablet app I made using QGis [1]. It was a great experience and I loved meeting the community behind the projects I use on a daily basis. With this membership I'd like to become a (more active) part of this community, spreading the OSGeo spirit in Belgium.

Other conferences I attended include FOSDEM (I was once active in the Ubuntu-be/-nl teams) and more recently I helped out at State of the Map 2016 as a volunteer. I also try to attend the Missing Maps Mapathons [2] of HOT (Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team), organised regularly at IPIS (Antwerp), MSF (Brussels) or elsewhere.

Besided all this geekyness I love hiking in the mountains (which we do not have in Belgium, unfortunately), riding my bike (on flat terrain, which we do have, yay!), gardening and playing boardgames. Also: I recently bought a canoe, which will be fun!

[1] Slides and video at: http://roel.huybrechts.re/ [2] https://fosdem.org/ [3] http://2016.stateofthemap.org/ [4] http://www.missingmaps.org/