Jeroen Ticheler

Jeroen Ticheler studied Tropical Forestry at the Wageningen University with specialization in GIS and Remote Sensing. Upon graduation in 1997 he worked on Participatory Soil Fertility Management in Africa at the Royal Institute for the Tropics of The Netherlands (also: Tropenmuseum) until he joined the Food and Agriculture Organization of the UN FAO in 1999. He served on the Board of Directors of OSGeo in 2007-2009.

In 2008 he founded GeoCat, a company delivering services around open source geospatial software witha focus on geospatial metadata catalogues and Spatial Data Infrastructures. GeoCat is a member of the Dutch Cooperative Group OpenGeoGroep

He started the GeoNetwork opensource project in 2000 as the foundation for the spatial data management in FAO: FAO GeoNetwork.

He has been promoting the use of international standards and Free and Open Source Software for geographic data and information ever since he started working on GeoNetwork opensource.

Since 2008 he organized a yearly Code Sprint in Italy, also known as the Bolsena Code Sprint. Developers of different OSGeo projects and other FOSS4G projects gather here to collaborate, initiate new projects and share ideas and experiences.

Other initiatives:
 * The OpenSDI to start discussions on development of a FOSS based SDI software stack.
 * The United Nations Spatial Data Infrastructure UNSDI process (see also UNGIWG UNSDI). It started with a small workshop named the UNSDI Workshop, although it was better known as the first GeoNetwork workshop in FAO in 2005.

He participated in writing the UNSDI Reference Architecture document that can be downloaded from the UNGIWG website.

He's a fan, supporter and was a member of the Open Source Geospatial Foundation board that has been created to support and build the highest-quality open source geospatial software.

Jeroen Ticheler on Wikipedia