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) http://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.''


 * - valign="top"
 * Milan Antonovic
 * Switzerland
 * From: Massimiliano Cannata

''Milan is a passionate and excellent FOSS developers, that during the last 6 years (from Cape Town FOSS4G) he's actively participating in International, Continental and Regional Free and Open Source for Geomatics communities.

During these years he worked with a large number of OSGeo software with an excellent spirit of innovation in application development and service creation. He's currently a core contributor of istSOS, he largely contributed to the development of GeoShield (a precursor for OWS security access and privilege management system).

Enthusiasm and competence make of him a perfect FOSS4G advocate.''


 * - valign="top"
 *  Jeremy Morley
 * UK
 * From: Suchith Anand

''It is my great pleasure to nominate Jeremy Morley for OSGeo Charter membership. I have known and worked with Jeremy for many years now and his help and support was key for expanding OSGeo in the UK. He is the cochair of OSGIS conference series and has been the co-chair of the very successful FOSS4G 2013 at Nottingham.

Jeremy is Theme Leader for Geospatial Science at the Nottingham Geospatial Institute. He has worked in the academic GIS sector since the mid-90s. Jeremy has promoted and researched Open GIS standards (through the OGC TC since 2000), data (UK Location Programme User Group) and software (hosted the “EOGEO” workshops, predecessors to FOSS4G, in 2000 & 2004). He has also been actively giving training programs (good example is the very successful GIS Open Source Summer School in Girona), workshops, talks etc. He is also leading new  module on our MSc GIScience called  "Geospatial Information Services" at  fully using OSGeoLive. This is a good example for other universities to follow in the future for their Master, undergraduate programs etc.

I am surprised that Jeremy is not already a charter member and i am sure not only the UK Chapter colleagues but also our Edu community will be happy to see him as a charter member.''


 * - valign="top"
 * Takayuki Nuimura
 * Japan
 * From: Venkatesh Raghavan

''It is my pleasure to nominate Takayuki NUIMURA [1] for OSGeo Charter membership. Active in the Japanese and international community, Nuimura-san has been actively lately on promoting OSGeo at various forums, conducting training and workshops and helping with the OSGeo-Live and QGIS translation projects. He helps organize the FOSS4G conferences in Japan.

His enthusiasm and passion for all-things-FOSS4G is second to none.''


 * 1) http://researchmap.jp/nuimura/?lang=english


 * - valign="top"
 * Florin Iosub
 * Romania
 * From: Venkatesh Raghavan

''It is my pleasure to nominate Florin IOSUB[1] for OSGeo Charter membership. Active in the Romanian and international community, Florin has been actively lately on promoting OSGeo at various forums, conducting training and workshops and helping with the several FOSS4G related projects. He helps organize the FOSS4G conferences and code sprints in Europe.

His enthusiasm and passion for all-things-FOSS4G is second to none.''


 * 1) https://www.linkedin.com/in/floriniosub


 * - valign="top"
 * Oliver Tonhofer
 * Germany
 * From: Cameron Shorter

''I'd like to nominate Oliver Tonnhofer to be an OSGeo Charter Member. I can vouch for Oliver's contribution to the OSGeo-Live project where he is the maintainer of MapProxy on OSGeo-Live. He is also the core-developer of MapProxy and Imposm, and has spoken at FOSS4G, FOSSGIS and FOSS4GE conferences.''


 * 1) http://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/OSGeo_Advocate#Oliver_Tonnhofer


 * - valign="top"
 * BJ Jang
 * South Korea
 * From: Shin, Sanghee

''It’s my great pleasure to nominate BJ Jang[1] for the OSGeo charter membership.

He’s been very active in OSGeo Korean Chapter for many years. He is in charge of all open source GIS education and trainings through OSGeo Korean Chapter. With his efforts OSGeo Korean Chapter has carried out many open source GIS trainings successfully.[3] He is also an enthusiastic translator. He’s gotten involved in many translations and had led the most of those translations including PostGIS[4], GeoSever[5], QGIS[6].

BJ is also a prominent GIS SW developer who loves to share his knowledge & experiences with others. He has carried out many challenging GIS projects using open sources.[7] He is now developing GeoStatistics QGIS Plug-in[8] and contributes much to Tadpole project, an open source DB management tool.[9]

I believe that his enthusiasm, experiences and leadership will definitely give new energy to OSGeo community.''


 * 1) http://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/User:BJJang
 * 2) http://www.osgeo.kr/152
 * 3) http://is.gd/BQqKPZ
 * 4) http://www.osgeo.kr/141
 * 5) http://www.osgeo.kr/149
 * 6) http://www.osgeo.kr/171
 * 7) http://www.slideshare.net/jangbi882
 * 8) http://opentutorials.org/module/982/
 * 9) https://github.com/hangum/TadpoleForDBTools


 * - valign="top"
 * Hugo Santos
 * Portugal
 * From: Jorge Sanz

''It's my pleasure to nominate Hugo Santos[1] from Portugal for the OSGeo Charter Membership. Hugo is one of the key members of the OSGeo Portugal community and one of the organizers of the small but wonderful GeocampPT unconference[2]. On his everyday job he is the manager for GIS and forest resources for the Rio Maior municipality. I met him at Campo Maior, at GeoCamp 2012, and since then it's always a joy to find him at Geocamp (PT an ES) and see his passion for FOSS4G and OSGeo.''


 * 1) http://pt.linkedin.com/in/hdsantos
 * 2) http://geocampers.com/


 * - valign="top"
 * Jorge Arévalo
 * Spain
 * From: Jorge Sanz

''It's my pleasure to nominate for the OSGeo Charter Membership Jorge Arévalo[1]. Jorge is a long time developer of FOSS4G software, mainly developing on the PostGIS Raster GDAL driver[2]. He is reviewer of many FOSS4G books and has been actively working on Geoinquietos Madrid[3], a local microchapter, as well as participating in some conferences and trainings. This year he is mentor of one of the GSoC projects. Finally Jorge is one of the main contributors of a nice set of free workshops on FOSS4G topics called GeoTalleres[4].''


 * 1) https://www.linkedin.com/in/jorgearevalo80
 * 2) http://trac.osgeo.org/gdal/wiki/frmts_wtkraster.html
 * 3) http://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/Geo_inquietos_Madrid
 * 4) https://geotalleres.readthedocs.org/


 * - valign="top"
 * Kate Chapman
 * United States
 * From: Schuyler Erle

''I'd like to nominate Kate Chapman[1] for charter membership in OSGeo. Kate has been an active advocate of Open Source GIS software for many years, and a regular presenter at FOSS4G. For the last several years, Kate has served as Executive Director of the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team, where she works tirelessly to promote the development of Open Source software and data as part of a comprehensive response to problems of international crisis response and economic development. Kate continues to be a vocal proponent of OSGeo and its ideals, and would be an ideal addition to our organization.''


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


 * - valign="top"
 * Zoltan Siki
 * Hungary
 * From: Jeff McKenna

''Zoltan[1] has been a longtime advocate for OSGeo by being very active in the Hungarian community. He has contributed translations and tutorials for many OSGeo projects, and has given several hands-on workshops.

I have had the pleasure to meet Zoltan at several FOSS4G events, and I was surprised to hear that he is not a Charter member yet. I believe he deserves to be thanked for his hard work supporting OSGeo and FOSS4G.''


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


 * - valign="top"
 * Jukka Rahkonen
 * Finnland
 * From: Even Rouault

''Jukka is one of the few people who belong to several PSCs of our OSGeo projects, namely Geoserver since 2012 and GDAL since 2013 (and among the very few to make the bridge between the Java and C/C++ tribes !)

As far as GDAL is concerned, Jukka is one of our most active power users since many years. You've probably noticed him many times answering to questions from other users on the mailing list, testing bleeding edge trunk or doing precise bug reports. It was a pleasure for me to finally meet him in person at Nottingham last year.

Jukka is also involved into other OSGeo (or related) communities such as MapServer, TinyOWS or Spatialite, which gives him a quite broad vision in the geospatial field.

Jukka also maintains Finnish translations for OpenJUMP and Kosmo GIS and has given a workshop on GeoPackage in the Finnish OSGeo seminar this year.''


 * - valign="top"
 * David Fawcett
 * United States
 * From: David Bitner

''David Fawcett has been an integral part of the Twin Cities Local Chapter of OSGeo / Twin Cities Mapserver Users Group for over a decade. David has been a vocal proponent of Open Source, Open Data, and Civic Participation in GIS over the years. Notable contributions have included founding of the Spatial Hotdish "GIS mashup competition" and acting as Program Chair of the 2013 FOSS4G North America Conference. David has also been very active in the Minnesota GIS/LIS consortium including helping to bring forward the ideals of Open GIS to the broader GIS community with workshops, presentations, and general advocacy. David has a strong knack for bridging the traditional GIS world with the developer centric Open Source world.''


 * - valign="top"
 * Moisés Arcos
 * Spain
 * From: María Arias de Reyna

''He is a very active member of the Spanish local chapter in Sevilla (GeoInquietos). Right now he is promoting a mapping party in Sevilla with the local SDI and he is actively working opening data. A recent example of his work opening data is OpenCycleSeville[3].''


 * 1) http://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/User:Moiarcsan
 * 2) https://github.com/moiarcsan
 * 3) https://github.com/GeoinquietosSevilla/opencycleseville


 * - valign="top"
 * Simon Mercier
 * Canada
 * From: ''Daniel Morissette

''Simon has been quite active in the Quebec Local Chapter since it was created in 2008. He is still today one of the most active members of the steering committee of the local chapter and in this role he has been involved in the organization of multiple editions of the "Rendez-vous OSGeo-Quebec" event and also contributed to the organization of the GeoHack Challenge 2013 in Montreal and is currently working with a team on the organization of a new edition for 2014.

His contributions also include speaking at conferences about OSGeo projects/products and open data, as well as training new users on QGIS, MapServer, OpenLayers, PostGIS, OSM and related technologies. Finally, Simon has been promoting the use of OSGeo software in his work at Ministère de la Sécurité Publique, Spatialytics, MGeospatial and now at Mapgears since 2012.

Even if he is not very visible at the international level, he is a very active promoter of OSGeo at the local level and has all the attributes expected of a charter member.

More info about Simon:''


 * 1) Blog: http://simonmercier.net/blog/
 * 2) Twitter: https://twitter.com/SimonMercier

From: Vincent Picavet

''I would like to nominate Simon Mercier to be part of OSGeo charter Members. Simon works at Mapgears in Quebec, and is a long time OpenSource GIS supporter.

He contributes to various opensource projects, mainly around Mapserver. He created the Scribe language for Mapserver, on top of which is based ScribeUI, an interface for easier Mapfile writing.

He regularly writes on Opensource GIS topics on internet, in its own name or representing Mapgears.''