Election 2020 Candidate Manifestos

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A space for the candidates for election to the Board to share some information about themselves, their aspirations for OSGeo, what they would like to change, improve or introduce and what role they would like to play on the board.

1. Angelos Tzotsos, Greece (OSGeo profile)

About me

My name is Angelos Tzotsos. I am a remote sensing scientist/researcher and have been a FOSS developer for more than half of my life. I wrote my first program at the age of 11 and installed my first GNU/Linux distribution in 1997. I started working with Free and Open Source Software as an undergraduate student in engineering. I was very excited with the quality of the code and got determined to contribute back and help the community. I am very proud to be a member of the OSGeo community and honored to be nominated again for a position at the Board of Directors.

My vision

In my early days in academia, my vision was to inspire young people to join our community (or any other FOSS community) and discover the technical and ethical revolution of Free and Open Source Software, the way I did. In the last few years, while being also active on the business side, I have realized the need for a sustainable future for our FOSS4G projects and the need to keep promoting open source solutions to governments, organizations, universities, research institutions, private companies, users and decision-makers. I also see the need to continue reaching out to other communities and organizations.

What you have done within the community in the past

  • OSGeo President since 2020
  • OSGeo Board member 2016-2020. Participated in all board meetings.
  • OSGeo Vice-President 2017-2019.
  • OSGeo charter member since 2011.
  • Chair of the OSGeoLive PSC and core developer.
  • OSGeo Project Officer for pycsw and OSGeoLive.
  • Core developer and contributor of many projects like pycsw, GeoNode, pygeoapi, ZOO-Project, OTB (more contribution details can be found on my wiki page https://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/Angelos_Tzotsos).
  • Maintainer of UbuntuGIS.
  • Maintainer of openSUSE Geo.

What your interests are in terms of the board

My first priority is keeping a healthy and viable OSGeo community. During the COVID-19 crisis the community remains strong (as seen by the level of participation in our online events) but we need to reach out and bring more new people in our community. My plan is to help organize more online events, while waiting to see each other again face to face in 2021. I also want to help keep a strong connection between OSGeo and OGC, since I feel this cooperation benefits both organizations. During my term as a board member, I have helped our projects being active in OGC especially in the certification program. I plan to keep working towards this direction. For my previous board term, one goal was to increase support for SAC and marketing committees (in terms of funding) so that OSGeo is more attractive for new projects to join. I feel we need to keep making our infrastructure stronger and provide more services to our member projects. A critical priority of the board is to ensure that our graduated and incubated projects are sustainable. The board has introduced funding support for our projects in the last years, and my goal is to keep this happening. We also need to focus on keeping the projects healthy: as a board member I focused on monitoring our projects' status and asking their officers and PSCs to report to the board regularly. I also wish to be one of the voices in the board that remind all of us of our Free Software roots (Free is part of FOSS4G, even if not reflected in the OSGeo name), avoiding proprietary systems as much as possible.

Any things that you would like to change or introduce

I would like to work towards expanding our community with more code/community sprints and regional/online FOSS4Gs around the world. Let's be more inclusive for projects and new members.

What role you would wish to fulfill on the board (if any)

I would be happy to serve the OSGeo Board in any role I am assigned.

2. Michael Smith, US (OSGeo profile)

About me

For those of you that don't know me, I'm Michael Smith, a physical scientist at the US Army Corps of Engineers. I've been involved with the MapServer community since 2001 and OSGeo since its inception. For the last 6 years, I've been honored to be a OSGeo Board member and the OSGeo treasurer. It’s been quite a learning experience and I greatly thank Daniel Morissette, the previous OSGeo treasurer for so much support in handling the transition.

My vision

In my time on the board and as treasurer, my focus has been on encouraging governments (in general) and the US in particular, especially the Department of Defense which, personally I know makes extensive use of OSGeo projects, to more actively participate is OSGeo and the projects beyond just use and occasional commits.

What you have done within the community in the past

What your interests are in terms of the board

If reelected, I plan to continue as OSGeo Treasurer. Its been a bit of a learning experience handling the funds from OSGeo, learning how to do the non profit tax filings for the US Government (where OSGeo is incorporated) and handling distributions of funds to Code Sprints and Events. Its also been a lot of fun to work directly with groups and individuals all over the world with OSGeo. Its been a very rewarding experience.

Any things that you would like to change or introduce

What role you would wish to fulfill on the board (if any)

If reelected, I plan to continue as OSGeo Treasurer.

It’s really wonderful to see a great group of new candidates to the board. Its wonderful to see the diversity and multiple regions of the world represented in the candidates. Thank you for the nomination, OSGeo Community!


3.Michele Tobias, United States (OSGeo profile)

About me

Creativity weaves its way through everything I do. Originally from near Los Angeles, I currently live in Davis, California, USA, where I work at University of California Davis' DataLab. I love my job working in spatial data science because of the variety of things I get to do - research projects, advising on research workflows, and teaching workshops. All of these require creativity and problem solving.

Trained as a biogeographer and ecologist, I am constantly learning new skills and applying them across disciplines. Recently I’ve worked on history, medicine, agriculture, and water policy projects. And I get to work with a variety of open source tools - QGIS, PostGIS, R, Python, Inkscape… I started using QGIS in 2008 while working on my PhD and branched out from there as I needed other tools.

My vision

When I’m helping a researcher decide on a workflow I frequently tell them: use what works. I’m an advocate for using the right tool for the job and not committing to using just one tool. But people need to know what tools are available and what each tool is meant to do. I want to help people make these connections between what’s possible and what works for their needs.

What you have done within the community in the past

  • OSGeo California Chapter Member, organizer of meetups, tabling at events (since 2009)
  • QGIS US Users Group (since 2019)
  • QGIS North America 2020 online conference Organizing Committee
  • FOSS4G (International & North America) Workshops & Presentations (Denver, Portland, San Francisco, Boston, Dar Es Salaam, San Diego...)
  • Maintain a library of open licensed open source geospatial workshops on my GitHub account (since 2017)
  • Lead developer of the Literature Mapper QGIS plugin, a tool for georeferencing Zotero citations (since 2015)

Related: Organizer of #maptimeDavis, University of California GIS Week online conference Organizing Committee, #GISChat weekly Twitter chat

What your interests are in terms of the board

I can be a bridge not only to academia but also to local and state government on the US west coast and have experience with leadership in US-based non-profits.

Any things that you would like to change or introduce

I would like to explore options to help people learn about what's going on inside OSGeo. There are so many important initiatives and programs going on, but it can be hard to know about them and know how to get involved.

I would also like to help connect learners and non-coders to the broader OSGeo community.

What role you would wish to fulfill on the board (if any)

I am ready to take on any role I am needed to fill.

4. Tom Kralidis, Canada (OSGeo profile)

About me

I've been involved in FOSS4G efforts since the 1990s. Starting as a user with no open source or development experience, I was drawn to the principles and inclusiveness of FOSS and the rest (as they say) is history. I develop, use and advocate for FOSS4G/OSGeo tools both in a volunteer capacity as well as my role at the Meteorological Service of Canada as a Senior Geospatial Architect.

Best of luck to all candidates! It is an honour and a privilege to be nominated again for the Board. Thank you!

My vision

For Geospatial Open Source to always be a strong viable option for implementation by anyone, anywhere, anytime. FOSS4G is neither too big or too small for any requirement, project or activity.

This is realized by a balanced, interoperable, sustainable and healthy OSGeo.

What you have done within the community in the past

  • OSGeo member since inception
  • Board member 2018-2020. Contributions include:
    • Update of policies and procedures (budget, bylaws)
    • Helping onboard numerous new community projects
    • Creation of Board member onboarding checklist
    • Charter member onboarding
    • sponsorship communications
    • OSGeo Annual Budget and Money guidance for projects, committees, initiatives and events
    • OGC coordination
    • ISO TC211 liaison setup

What your interests are in terms of the board

During my first Board term (2018-2020) I was lucky to work with a strong Board team and was exposed to many facets of OSGeo. I also realized the significant part that standards play in numerous OSGeo projects. As a firm believer of do-ocracy and collaboration, if re-elected I will continue to advocate on lowering the barrier to geospatial tools for anyone across numerous organizations and jurisdictions. This includes strengthening our position on standards requirements and implementation (OGC, ISO).

Any things that you would like to change or introduce

If re-elected I would like to continue on the OSGeo/OGC MOU review which will result in valuable OSGeo participation and benefits for the next generation of standards.

Since 2018, the OGC has embarked on significant efforts on modernizing their API suite of standards via OGC API. The OGC API movement is proving to lower the barrier to implementation more than ever before. This, combined with OSGeo's TC211 liaison membership in 2020, provides our community a huge opportunity to lead and direct the future of international standards, either by providing requirements/feedback, writing software as well as providing reference implementations. OSGeo's standards efforts need to undergo a similar review and renewal activity so we can participate more efficiently, have our voice heard and have FOSS4G projects be a key contributor and option to users.

This will not happen by accident. Continuous imporovement on our Certification serivces, OSGeo participation in OGC events, CITE compliance, and OGC threads at OSGeo sprints will all contribute to adding value for FOSS4G as the best option for standards based implementations.


What role you would wish to fulfill on the board (if any)

To continue as a trusted voice as part of a strong leadership team and community to help steer OSGeo in achieving its goals for the long term.


5. Zoltan Siki, Hungary (OSGeo profile)

About me

My name is Zoltan Siki, a land surveyor who is deeply involved in open source and geoinformatics. I am a senior lecturer at the Budapest University of Technology and Economics, old enough to use open source more than 30 years. I started with Unix workstation (Sun and HP), first I came across MapServer 3.5 in 2002 from the OSGeo projects. Nowadays I use intensively open source not only in the geospatial domain, among others Ubuntu, LibreOffice, GIMP, QGIS, Mapserver, PostgreSQL/PostGIS, GRASS. I am a programmer also, I use mostly Python. I have a couple of open source projects on which I work together with my students. I joined actively to the OSGeo community in Praha 2010 at the Geoinformatics Conference. I am a charter member since 2014.

My vision

OSGeo has a great community, projects, developers and advocates. The mission of the board in my opinion to maintain the flame. I would like to foster, maintain and widen this community.

What you have done within the community in the past

  • Committee member of OSGeo Europe Conferences (several times, general or academic track)
  • Academic track committee member of FOSS4G 2019 Bucharest and FOSS4G 2021 Buenos Aires
  • Author of several Hungarian tutorials for QGIS, GDAL, GRASS, PostGIS
  • OSGeo advocate in Hungary, conference chair of Hungarian FOSS4G local events
  • small contributions to OSGeo projects (translations, documentations and coding)

What your interests are in terms of the board

I would like to help the community as much as I can.

Any things that you would like to change or introduce

I would like to make closer connection to the academic area and the Geo4All Labs network and involve more students in the community.

I would also like more success stories on the OSGeo home page about the complex usage of several OSGeo project together from industry, governments and local governments.

What role you would wish to fulfill on the board (if any)

I am ready to take on any role I am needed to fill.

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