California/Outreach Speakers

= Introduction = The California Chapter of the OSGeo has members that are willing to serve as speakers as part of the chapter's ongoing outreach effort. You will find information on each volunteer speaker and a list of topics they are willing to present at local events below.

= Speakers and Topics =

Landon Blake
Topics:
 * The OSGeo: An Introduction
 * Open Source Software Development - Frequently Asked Questions
 * A Beginner's Workshop On Vector GIS With OpenJUMP
 * Applying Traditional GIS Principles to Open Street Map with Open Source Software
 * An Introduction To GIS For Land Surveyors and Civil Engineers
 * Managing Cadastral (Real Property) Assets With GIS

Bio: Landon Blake works as a licensed land surveyor for a small civil engineering and land surveying company in California's Central Valley. He has been interested in GIS since his first exposure to it during the Land Surveying Program at Flathead Valley Community College. He was able to learn the basic concepts of GIS as part of the classes shared between the Land Surveying and Forestry programs at Flathead Valley Community College. His interest in GIS was renewed when he discovered JUMP, anopen source GIS program written in Java by a Canadian company called Vivid Solutions. He decided to teach himself Java so he could improve and customize the program. He later became one of the administrators for OpenJUMP, a fork of the original JUMP that with a more "open" and cooperative development process, and has been working with OpenJUMP ever since. Landon's participation in the OSGeo includes contributing articles to the OSGeo Jorunal, assisting the OSGeo Education Committee, and work with the deegree Project and GeoTools, which are both GeoTools projects.

Alex Mandel
Topics
 * Open Source Licensing and Business Models
 * Open Source Geospatial Foundation
 * QGIS, GRASS, OpenLayers, Spatialite
 * Getting Started with GIS Scripting in OpenSource (Python)
 * Writing python plugins for QGIS
 * Wiki's, Content Management Systems and Geospatial
 * OpenStreetMap: concepts, contributing and consuming data.

Bio Alex Mandel is a Phd Student in Geography with a BS in Wildlife Biology. He's worked for and with non-profits, state and federal agencies on desktop, web and handheld GIS. He's also familiar with making the move from Windows to Linux and interoperability between proprietary and open source. Current research involves simplifying open source gis tools for neo-geographers.