OSGeo Advocate

= Introduction =

OSGeo Advocates are authoritative OSGeo personalities who have volunteered to talk on behalf of the OSGeo foundation. Advocates should be able to speak well, even better if they are entertaining.

There are hundreds, if not thousands of conferences around the world which have an interest in seeing presentations from authoritative speakers, with deep insights into topics related to Open Source Geospatial Software. Luckily, OSGeo is fortunate to draw extensive membership from around the world, and has access to such authoritative figures within most countries.

= OSGeo Advocates = This section lists current OSGeo Advocates:

United States
= Lapsed OSGeo Advocates = This section lists prior listed Advocates who have not recently updated their profiles. These prior Advocates might have refocused their interests in other areas.

= Understanding OSGeo roles =

Below is an explanation of roles which Advocates might have been involved in as part of OSGeo:

[[File:OSGeo_board.png]] [[File:OSGeo_exboard.png]] OSGeo Board Members

 * We only have 8 active board members in the world, which have been peer selected based upon their outstanding leadership in the greater OSGeo community.

[[File:OSGeo_charter.png]] OSGeo Charter Members

 * Charter membership is obtained through a strongly contested selection process. Members tend to be developers and leaders in one or more OSGeo projects, and/or OSGeo business leaders, and have a deep understanding in many of the OSGeo projects and principles of Open Source.

[[File:OSGeo_chair.png]] [[File:OSGeo_psc.png]] Voted position in an OSGeo community

 * These people hold a position of responsibility within one of the OSGeo sub-communities. This may be a chair of an OSGeo committee or Regional Chapter, or as a member of a project's Project Steering Committee (PSC).

[[File:OSGeo_coder.png]] [[File:OSGeo_committee.png]] Developers and Committee Members

 * This is where the real work gets done developing and coordinating development of OSGeo Software.

[[File:OSGeo_user.png]] OSGeo Community Members

 * These people are actively involved in one or more OSGeo communities, acting as practitioners, users, promoters or supporters of OSGeo software. These people tend to have a practical understanding about how OSGeo software works.

= Process for becoming an OSGeo Advocate =

Anyone fitting one of the OSGeo Advocate categories, may put themselves forward as an OSGeo Advocate. To do so, you will need to:
 * Create an OSGeo wiki account, to edit this wiki (See "login" link in top right of this page).
 * Create a new wiki page http://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/User:YourOSGeoWikiUserName, and populate as per User:Template.
 * You can then add your profile on this wiki page, under your Country, using the following:

= Annual Refresh of Advocate list =
 * The list of OSGeo Advocates will be refreshed annually, after the annual voting of OSGeo Charter Members. This will be achieved by removing Lapsed Advocates, then moving all Current Advocates into the Lapsed Advocate section. All Advocates will be invited to update their profile, and move their profile back into the current Advocates section.

= Other Resources = Links to other organizations running a similar process.
 * http://www.ogcnetwork.net/node/1585