New Member Nominations 2014

The Charter Member nomination (part of the Election 2014) will be open from 2014-07-19 to 2014-08-01. The list of nominees for the 2014 Charter Member Election is maintained by the Chief Returning Officer (cro at osgeo.org). This page is write protected and can only be edited by SysOps.

To submit a charter member nomination:
 * Please confirm with the nominated person first!
 * Please email cro@osgeo.org with their name, country, contact email and paragraph describing why you are recommending this person as a Charter Member
 * Please also feel free to cc: the nomination to the OSGeo discussion list - discuss@lists.osgeo.org - so the community can be nudged along and have a sense of what is going on.
 * Also, you might want to reference your OSGeo Advocate profile.

The list of nominees will be maintained by the CRO here:

{| class="wikitable sortable" border="1" cellpadding="5" !_______Name_______ !______Country______ !Notes
 * - valign="top"
 * Santosh Gaikwad
 * India
 * From: Ravi Kumar

''Santosh is with Open Source GIS for more than a decade and he has conducted training sessions in the same. His LinkedIn profile is copy pasted below. WEB-GIS trainings are the most well attended events that he conducts. He is a very active member of OSGeo India.''


 * http://in.linkedin.com/in/gaikwadss


 * - valign="top"
 * Thijs van Menen
 * Netherlands
 * From: Bart van den Eijnden

''When I first started to work on a large open source geospatial project in The Netherlands in 2002/2003, Thijs was part of the government agency (Rijkswaterstaat) that did the tender for a geospatial infrastructure based on open standards. Our open source proposal got chosen, and we worked many many years on setting up the SDI and maintaining it. The project was called GeoServices, and as with many things, the project was unfortunately a bit ahead of its time.

Thijs is one of the few people at government agencies that truly understands what open source is. He is very passionate about open source software development, and a few years after the inception of the project he led a team of consultants hired by the Ministry to work on the maintenance of the software as well as on applications built on top of it.

He has also been a frequent attendant of FOSS4G, with attendance in Victoria, Cape Town and Denver. Some of the Denver people might remember Thijs by his frequent use of the phrase “Tik hem aan ouwe”. He was also involved in the inception of the Dutch language chapter.

Through this nomination I’d also like to thank Thijs for everything he did for open source geospatial in The Netherlands. His enthusiasm really helped things move forward.''


 * - valign="top"
 * Stephan Meißl
 * Austria
 * From: Helmut Kudrnovsky

''Stephan(1) is a committer to MapServer(2) and also a member of the MapServer PSC(3). As well known in the OSGeo community, he has organized the wonderfull OSGeo Code Sprint 2014 (4)(5) in Vienna which was great step forward in community building between all the nice OSGeo projects.

So I am convinced that Stephan will be very valuable OSGeo Charter Member.''


 * 1) http://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/User:Schpidi
 * 2) https://github.com/mapserver/mapserver/blob/master/COMMITERS
 * 3) http://mapserver.org/development/rfc/ms-rfc-23.html
 * 4) http://vienna2014.sprint.osgeo.org/
 * 5) http://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/Vienna_Code_Sprint_2014
 * 6) http://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/User:Hellik


 * - valign="top"
 * Jeffrey Johnson
 * United States
 * From: Bart van den Eijnden

''Jeff is truly passionate about open source geospatial and he brings a lot of skills to the table (deep technical skills, project management, business skills). He is one of the driving forces behind the GeoNode project(1), an open source geospatial content management system based on technologies such as pyCSW and GeoServer. In his professional career he was a Brigade Captain at Code For America and he worked for OpenGeo / Boundless up until recently. Jeff is also very involved in the OSM community.''


 * 1) http://geonode.org


 * - valign="top"
 * Régis Haubourg
 * France
 * From: Vincent Picavet

''I would like to nominate Régis Haubourg as OSGeo charter member. Régis has been a long supporter of OpenSource, and was among the first in French Public administration not only to support and use FOSS4G, but to actively promote and fund it.

Régis is very active in promoting QGIS and other FOSS4G tools, and maintains a constant and close relationship between users and developers. He funds a lots of QGIS feature development and bugfixing.'''


 * 1) http://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/User:Rhaubourg


 * - valign="top"
 * Johan Van de Wauw
 * Belgium
 * From: Jeff McKenna

''It is my pleasure to nominate Johan Van de Wauw for OSGeo Charter membership.

Active in the Belgium community, Johan has been working hard lately on helping with the OSGeo-Live project. He is also active in the SAGA GIS community. He also helps organize the FOSDEM conference in Europe.

I had the pleasure of meeting Johan in Bremen recently, and I really like his raw enthusiasm and passion for all-things-FOSS4G.''


 * - valign="top"
 * Bruce Bannerman
 * Australia
 * From: Cameron Shorter

''Bruce has been very hard working toward the OSGeo cause and often provides valuable insights to OSGeo discussions from a government purchasing perspective. He currently works as the key a GeoSpatial Architect at the Australian Bureau of Meteorology, where he plays a key role in the World Meteorological Organisation and Open Geospatial Consortium where he is a member of several expert teams.

Bruce was incredibly hard working on the FOSS4G 2009 organising committee, and was key in fostering OSGeo/OGC relationships by coordination and sourcing substantial sponsorship. He has done a lot of local OSGeo evangelism, manning OSGeo booths at conferences, writing papers for Government committees on behalf of OSGeo and helping found and run the Australian/New Zealand local chapter of OSGeo. He is also the rasdaman mentor, helping guide the rasdaman project through incubation.''


 * - valign="top"
 * Alexandre Neto
 * Portugal
 * From: Giovanni Manghi

''Alexandre is a very active member of the Portuguese and International Osgeo community. He is very active on several Osgeo mailing lists and on gis.stackexchange.com were he usually helps a lot of people solving their issues (1). He is one of the main contributors of the QGIS translation to Portuguese. He publishes a blog in Portuguese with posts about practical issues (2) and he is quite known for its maps (3). He is a QGIS plugin author (4) and recently was part of the group that funded the Portuguese QGIS user group (5).''


 * 1) http://gis.stackexchange.com/users/6191/alexandre-neto?tab=answers
 * 2) http://sigsemgrilhetas.wordpress.com/
 * 3) https://www.flickr.com/photos/95677407@N05/
 * 4) http://plugins.qgis.org/plugins/author/Alexandre%20Neto/
 * 5) http://qgis.pt/


 * - valign="top"
 * Thomas Gratier
 * France
 * From: Even Rouault

''Thomas is a member of the OSGeo-FR association and has been involved into the organization committees of the FROG 2013 event and the successful 3-day FOSS4G-FR 2014 that took place in last may. He contributes to several of our projects, mainly focused on translation :


 * parts of the OSGeo-Live DVD, which he presented as well as OSGeo4W during a session at FOSS4G-FR
 * contribution to the i18n translation mechanism of MapServer
 * French translation of TinyOWS documentation
 * French translation of ZOO Project

Thomas is involved into other user forums such as GéoRezo, and has redacted tutorials and press reviews for GeoTribu.''


 * - valign="top"
 * Ivan Minčik
 * Slovakia
 * From: Jáchym Čepický

''Ivan(1) is very active at Slovakia, working with, promoting and providing support to the OSGeo stack. Among his publicly available work, GISLab (2) is to be mentioned. He is also active in the packaging community.

I had possibility to talk to Ivan several times and I think, he would be valuable charter member of OSGeo.''


 * 1) http://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/User:Imincik
 * 2) https://github.com/imincik/gis-lab


 * - valign="top"
 * José García
 * Spain
 * From: María Arias de Reyna

''Although he is not very active on general mailing lists of OSGeo, he is a very active and prominent developer of geoNetwork. He is also commonly seen participating on FOSS4G events and codesprints.''


 * 1) http://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/User:Josegar


 * - valign="top"
 * Alexander Bruy
 * Ukraine
 * From: Alex Mandel

''He is a well known contributor in the QGIS and OSGeo-Live realms, a leader in of OSGeo interests in Ukraine, a GSOC mentor, and a lead translator for many OSGeo projects into Russian and Ukrainian.

Though I've never met him in person we run into each other all the time on IRC and mailing lists competing to help people use FOSS4G.''


 * 1) http://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/User:Alexbruy


 * - valign="top"
 * Mohammed Rashad
 * India
 * From: Margherita Di Leo

''Rashad[1,2] is from Kerala, India. He is currently at the end of his internship at CNES [3], Toulouse and completing his master degree at IIIT Hyderabad [4].

He started working on GRASS GIS for his engineering project, a web application deployed using Cartoweb PHP framework and GRASS GIS. When he started his master at IIIT Hyderabad, he began working on a collaborative mapping platform called VRGeo [5] (Village Resource Geo data repository), LSIViewer and WebGRASS. He participated in GSoC 2012 and 2013 for OSSIM projects under OSGeo.

Currently he is working in OTB and OSSIM python bindings. Moreover, he packages GRASS GIS and OSSIM for Ubuntu PPA [6]. He's always helpful with users through the various ML and GIS Stack Exchange[7].''


 * 1) http://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/User:Rashad
 * 2) http://rashadkm.wordpress.com/
 * 3) www.cnes.fr/
 * 4) http://lsi.iiit.ac.in/
 * 5) http://vrgeo.in/
 * 6) https://github.com/rashadkm/
 * 7) http://gis.stackexchange.com/users/10212/rashad
 * 8) http://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/User:Madi


 * - valign="top"
 * Sittichai Choosumrong
 * Thailand
 * From: Jeff McKenna

''It is my pleasure to nominate Sittichai Choosumrong (known as Bomp) for an OSGeo Charter Member. I have known Bomp for many years now, and have worked with him in Japan while he was doing his graduate schooling under Venka-sensei. Bomp regularly gives workshops and talks on various OSGeo projects, and his youthful enthusiasm rubs off on students. He is now a researcher at Naresuan University in his beloved home country of Thailand, where I am sure he will continue to promote OSGeo. He has worked very hard to promote OSGeo and I want to thank him for this.''