Election 2019 Candidate Manifestos

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. Msilikale Msilanga, Tanzania (OSGeo profile)

About me

I am a Spatial Planner by professional, but i have been working as a consultant since 2011 focusing on Geospatial in Urban Resilience, GEO-ICT and community mapping. Since 2011, I have been working on projects in Tanzania and Mozambique as the way to help my community. As part of this, I have co-led the Ramani Huria community mapping project among others for Africa’s fastest growing city, Dar es Salaam. So far this has impacted over 3.5 million residents of the city providing basemaps and flood evacuation plans, while coordinating a consortium consisting Red Cross, local universities and Tanzanian government ministries and agencies.

My vision

To establish African and other cities in a globe that embrace a local and open approach to risk information that is openly and widely accessible through open data, open tools, open knowledge exchange.

What you have done within the community in the past

• 2017: OSGeo Africa Member
• 2018: Co-Chair FOSS4G
• 2018: Co-Chair Geo4All Africa

What your interests are in terms of the board

To be one among the contributors in order to provide ideas and effective supports that has an impact on the global community.

Any things that you would like to change or introduce

Encourage public goods, technologies platform, digital skills, risk information Services and Research.

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

Being only a board Member is good for me as will give me a chance to give all my Contributions.

2. Marie Anna Baovola, Madagascar (OSGeo profile)

About me

I am database manager at the Geographic and Hydrographic Institute of Madagascar. I lead the Madagascar OSGeo local chapter which still to be confirmed as official.

My vision

To contribute to the promotion of the use of free and open source software in geospatial especially in developing country.

What you have done within the community in the past

Since 2014, I have encouraged my institution and universities to change progressively to open source tools.
October 2017: attending FOSS4G Belgium
August 2018: my first participation in FOSS4G
September 2018: Became a charter member
2019 : Still continue to spread the idea of the OSGeo promotion everywhere I go.

What your interests are in terms of the board

I am willing and understand open source and want to help people to involve into it more such as developers, users, academic and other communities. I would like to explore my potential through this new experience to become a board member.

Any things that you would like to change or introduce

How could OSGeo help local community which contributes to OSGeo mission?

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

I would like to join the Public Geospatial Data Project; but any role can be interesting.

3. Astrid Emde, Germany (OSGeo profile)

About me

I am part of the OSGeo board at the moment and would like to volunteer for another period.

I am from Cologne (Germany) and work in Bonn at WhereGroup as Seniour GIS Consultant.

I work with the OSGeo stack since many years now. Always curious to learn more and open for new technologies. My focus is on web mapping and PostgreSQL/PostGIS.

I love to use OSGeo software and build up projects with this stack and I also love to teach others how to use it. I am involved in Mapbender and have collaborated with some of the OSGeo projects like MapServer, GeoServer, QGIS and PostGIS.

I am part of the OSGeoLive PSC and promote OSGeoLive wherever I can.

4. Helena Mitasova, USA (OSGeo profile)

About me

I am a Professor at the Center for Geospatial Analytics and Department of Marine, Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, North Carolina State University, Raleigh, NC, USA, and lead the Geoforall Lab at NCSU (one of the founding labs).

My vision

Make the world a better place with open source geospatial: promote sustainable, long term use of open source through research and teaching.

What you have done within the community in the past

I have been on GRASS GIS development team since 1991 and I have been involved with OSGeo since its founding in 2006, first serving on committees (conference, education) and then on the board. Since elected to the board I served as vice-president, working with geoforall initiative and managing partnerships through memoranda of understanding. I also work with my students contributing new methods, techniques and tools to GRASS GIS and developing and delivering workshops and courses - see our publications and courses

What your interests are in terms of the board

I would like to make sure that the OSGeo board provides effective support to the projects through resources for code and community sprints and many other activities. I would also like to continue my previous work with geoforall and our MoU partners and provide a voice for academic community to help open source geospatial grow new generation of passionate developers, users and community builders.

Any things that you would like to change or introduce

Encouraging educational institutions not only to use FOSS4G but also increase the contributions at several levels - from educational material to the code. Also, I think that we may need to revisit the OSGeo website management issues to make sure it is always up to date and helps the community.

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

Coordination with geo4all initiative and working with partner organizations.

5. Vicky Vergara, Mexico (OSGeo profile)

About me

I am an experimenting person, perfectionist, a test freak, and lazy. (Maybe you have not noticed the lazy part, but, I spend days, days and more days to figure out if there is a fastest/better way to do a particular task, so that when the task is done, its in seconds, instead of hours).

What you have done within the community in the past

Back in 2013, I was jobless then my only way to contribute, because of the use I was making of OSGeo projects, was to become a translator on pgRouting:

• July 25, 2013 I offered my self as translator of pgrouting
  • Note that I was new to everything: comment about my ignorance
• August 16, 2013: I was invited to contribute code to pgRouting: Invitation
• August 23, 2013: My first code contribution the modifying 75 files Pull request.
• July 2015:
  • Version 2.1.0 released
  • OSGeo-GSoC mentor for pgRouting.
• September 2015: My first FOSS4G participation
• September 2015: Became a Charter member
• June 2017, I accepted to be part of PSC of OSGeoLive: Accepting statement
• 2017 elections: I was nominated to be member of the Board of Directors, did not make it to the Board ;-)
• 2018: I still can do a lot, so I volunteered to be member of the System Administration Committee (SAC)
• 2018: I also volunteered for CRO, because as member of SAC and because I imagined

what the CRO where doing to handle the elections, and I thought I can do a lot to facilitate that Job.

• 2019: I still can do much more, I became member and co-chair of the Code of Conduct Committee.

My vision

The right to be the best one can be

• Who am I?
• What do I do?
• Am I the best of what I can be?
• Do I have a dream?

Those are questions that we can ask to ourselves.

Before I answer those questions, I think in society, everything starts with the family:

• My father gladly goes with me to events (gives me some family time).
• When on vacation on Paris with my mother, a brother and his wife. We met a colleague from OSGeoLive and

we had a great evening. (family time mixed with new family member time)

• One of my sons went to Argentina and volunteered on the reception desk on FOSS4G-Argentina 2017. (allows me family time)
• My other son is letting us use his AZURE code on transifex for OSGeoLive and on pgRouting.
• My husband, well what can I tell, he supported me a full year with my kid to study my masters, he

knows that I will do what I need to do to be the best of what I can be.

• My niece is doing the Spanish translations on OSGeoLive and on pgRouting and made a presentation on

FOSS4G Argentina 2019 about point clouds. (more family time)

I am a lucky person, my family is participating in what I do. I consider that my family is doing all what they can do, so that my right to be the best I can be is fulfilled. And my family is growing with OSGeo.

Now lets answer those questions:

• Who am I? I am Vicky. I was thought to be a fighter and not to give up.
• What do I do? I do whatever I need to do to make this world a better place.
• Am I the best of what I can be? No, as for tomorrow I want to be better than today.
• Do I have a dream? I want to make this world be a better place.

The best of all is that I have my family support.

OSGeo, is as small part of the society, but its an international part of it. And we are part of OSGeo.

We don't have borders and the people are:

• members from everywhere,
• users who live in any country
• volunteers from any part of the world.

I have being one of the fortunate that has met many of them

• on FOSS4G events
• on code sprint events.
• some only thru video conference
• most of them by IRC/chat

I consider them as my heroes.

They give up:

• social time
• work opportunities
• and most important: family time
  • I cheat, some family time I make up when taking a family member to an OSGeo event.

I feel blessed as I have, from some of those heroes of mine, their autograph, I am their FAN #1.

Here are the next questions as a charter member I ask:

• IS OSGeo helping people to be the best of what they can be?
• Is OSGeo encouraging?
• IS OSGeo a safe place?

From my experience the answers to all questions is yes.

There might be limitations, for example of local cultural limitations: A lady I met in India who is a student. Her father, who lives 300km away, forbids her to go out of the campus, not even to the restaurant in 50 mts away, and she complies to her father wishes. (I wonder if ever she will go to an international FOOS4G).

The reason that form my experience the answer is yes, is because when rephrasing the questions:

• Am I helping people to be the best of what they can be?
• Am I encouraging?
• Am I a safe person?

I can answer, without a doubt, YES.

Am I doing enough?

That I don't think so, but I am trying to enforce the right to be the best on can be on our members, volunteers, users, etc.

What your interests are in terms of the board

• In general: promote the use and development of Free and Open Source Software
• In particular: promote the use and development of the OSGeo projects, OSGeo incubation and OSGeo community Free Open Source Software.

Any things that you would like to change or introduce

Given my location and maternal language, the following points have a stronger implied emphasis to Latin America, but its not limited to this area.

Let the kitten be known

• Encourage developers to build open projects using OSGeo projects that can help communities from pot hole control to emergency plans, from planting trees to avoid forest deprivation, from Archaeology to Economics, etc.
• Promote the use of open source as tools, in particular OSGeo projects that give an ample variety of backend and frontend tools for systems development.
• Promote the participation of Latin American students/developers/users to participate from simple tasks as translation up to code contributions on OSGeo Projects
• Promote the participation of Latin American students/developers/users to create new OSGeo Community projects that can be used by local communities.
• I went to the OGP summit in Mexico 2015 https://www.opengovpartnership.org/ and I think there is a lot of possibilities for using OSGeo projects. Do more research, and maybe starting to see how my own country is advancing towards the openness and more details on how OSGeo can be/its being used.
• Support and encourage smaller open source projects to join OSGeo, and make OSGeo more valuable for them
• Reach out to Latin-American local chapters and encourage them to play an active role in OSGeo

Curiosity killed the cat

Normally people tend to see, what's going wrong, on things that are happening. What becomes difficult to observe is what is wrong that things/activities that should be going are not even started yet.

Lets not forget to think about why things are not happening.

• Why "[abc] is NOT [xyz] OSGeo".
• Why do some projects, do not start incubation?
• Why is there no local OSGeo chapter in, for example, Mexico?
• Why do we have mostly sponsors from North America and Europe?
• Why there are so few participation from Latin American countries in OSGeo even if they have conferences every year ... same for Japan actually.
• Why we only hear (and see) those, who raise their voice and shout out loud. But we miss to reach the silent majority?
• What causes the "inactivity"?
• Why ....

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

• As an Economist, I don't want to handle money (It was by accident that I studied economics).
• Get things done! Solving issues and making decision.
• Ask: why? what? how?

7. Till Adams, Germany (OSGeo profile)

About me

(Facts: See OSGeo-profile.) I am a long term member of the OSGeo community and started my first projects with a UMN version "3.something" in the early 2000's, but I am even longer convinced, that the Free&Open Source Software way is the right way to go. In my work life, I had the chance of participate on most of the global FOSS4G conferences up now, and it teached me one thing: There is a special spirit, that distinguishes us from all other GIS or non-GIS conferences in the world.

In 2016 I had the luck to chair the global FOSS4G conference in Bonn. We, the whole local team, put a lot of passion into the preparation and everything we did, was done by us, so no professional conference-agency told us, how to run our conference. I think, that most of the people that joined us here in Bonn felt this special spirit, that was evoked by our motto "building bridges".

Present, I chair of OSGeo's conference committee (in case you vote me on the board, I will step back as CC-chair, of course, although I thought about stepping back after 3 years anyhow and free the seat for new energy ;-)).

Personally I am interested in cooking, food in general, traveling, soccer and of course spending time with nice people. I am married and we have one son (15).

My vision

For me the OSGeo community is a special group of individuals and the way we meet other members or people and the way we interact with each other is certainly not unique, but it is special - I mean positively special :-). There have been two mottos in past FOSS4G conferences, that I appreciated very much and that describe quite well my vision and my way of thinking: "Building Bridges" and "Leave no one behind".

On the one hand, I am convinced, that we as OSGeo have already reached a status, that can make us proud. On the other hand, I see a lot of challenges, which we should face to in the future: Beside some global challenges, I can imagine of equal opportunities, participation, sharing of knowledge, e.g.. One answer could be: Build bridges! "Building bridges" in this context means, strengthening the internal communication in our community, reaching out to (potential) new members, but also establish new or maintenance of existing relationships to other communities and people.

"Leave no one behind" is a wide topic, that not only affects us in OSGeo, but on which we certainly could focus on more, than just having a Travel Grant Programme (which was established by the Conference Committee in recent years and which is a great thing!). In order to strengthen our community towards this topic, I can imagine activities, that help us to share our knowledge, mentoring programms, partnerships among organisaitons or companies, ... (e.g.). This all could help to transfer knowledge among members inside and outside our community.

All together, we have a well established community, that is able to build these bridges and where every single member is willing to help to leave no one behind, so let's go!

What you have done within the community in the past

Beside having had a lot of fun on meetings, conferences, code sprints or whatever, when I list this up, there are quite a few things I did in the past:

• regular visits of FOSS4G events with a countless number of talks (including 2 keynotes, FOSSGIS 2015 & SOTM SEE 2019)
• OSGeo charter member
• co-initiator of local OSGeo chapter FOSSGIS and FOSSGIS conference since 2004
• board member of FOSSGIS from 2014 to 2019
• co-founder and board member of OSGeo's european local chapter
• chair of global FOSS4G conference 2016
• since 2016 chair of OSGeo's conference committee (which I will quit in case of becoming a member of the board)
• member of programm committee and/or organizing committee of numerous FOSSGIS conferences and/or code-sprints
• co-initiator of becoming the actinia project under the umbrella of OSGeo (as community project)
• established 2 companies (terrestris/mundialis) that contribute to and work with OSGeo-software, that today give ~ 30 people an umbrella

But the most important thing is: I met a lot of people all over the world.

What your interests are in terms of the board

Of course I support completely the general ideas, ideals and goals of OSGeo and I could state to promote them here, and of course I will, but:

Looking back, I can say, that this community has given me a lot, not only for my job or for my companies, but also privately. When I only imagine all the people I met in the past 15 years. So it's time to give something back to the community. With my candidacy, I offer to support the board, the community or even simpler - "us" with my experience, my ideas, my network and my passion. Maybe also my work as agile coach may help us to see some things from different perspectives and helps us in general, to strengthen and even improve our methods, processes and behaviour.

There is always the possibility to improve!

Any things that you would like to change or introduce

In our local chapter (FOSSGIS) we managed to get two of the leading Geo-communities under one umbrella: The german speaking OSGeo and OpenStreetMap-community. I'd like to contriibute that OSGeo can establish even more vivid interactions (although, I know there are already quite a few) to neighboured communities such as OSM, OpenData, other Free Software communities or maybe also to the Agile Community - to name just a few as examples... For this I can imagine to use my network for new contacts.

To make this more concrete: In Bonn I participate in a programm called "Geo-Mentoring Prgoramm", which is initiated by the cities administraiton. The idea is to bring newbiews and experienced persons (I claim to be that ;-)) together and to form a tandem with the aim to give the mentee (in this case the student) an orientation about the geoinformation market and to assist with advice and action. Why not work on establishing such means of support across our community (and also beyond Google Summer of Code...) ? Sharing is what we do in order to broaden our movement - to the benefit of all.

Another challenging topic is our rapid changing environment. I could imagine that of course we can do some concrete things towards saving energy and protect our environment. But this could and should be done by any community or organisation. One of the questions to answer could be: "How can we contribute to solutions, that help to guide the consequences of climate change into manageable paths?"

Could we promote data, software or solutions that contribute to transparency, control, education or more general - (de)fin/d/ing an OSGeo position on how we want to position ourselves as a community in the context of global tasks, who push themselves more and more into our daily consciousness? Being a visible part in this whole meachanism has the potential to open even more doors for our community - in sights of projects, connections, awareness, new members ...

Regarding these two topics above - yes, I know, that we as OSGeo live in a do-ocracy and of course, in order to work on the topics mentioned above, one does not necessarily have to be member of the board. However, I can imagine that it is easier to push and move things forward from there, and of course, these motions then have the potential to develop their own dynamics.

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

• Regular incidental works, where I can support
• As my background is more from a business-perspective and in my eyes, business or better companies in our environment are one important part, as they put a lot of (direct or indirect) support into our projects and OSGeo, I can imagine to especially support
  • established companies in networking (i.e. AFAIK at FOSS4G in Bonn, we had the first B2B meeting)
  • help startups with OSGeo-focus to find their way (partners, mentors, advice, ...)

9. Adam Steer, Australia (OSGeo profile)

About me

I have a diverse career/life history, so this could be really long - but I’ll make it short. I’ve been putting data on maps for a long time; and fell naturally to open source software to accomplish that task. Much later, I realised there’s this whole support system behind the stuff I downloaded and used - and now, since I’m not a software engineer and usually would probably make the software worse if I tried, I try to give back by helping that support system to thrive however I can.

My technical world is focussed on airborne remote sensing - lidar and imagery. Outside of technical stuff, I like to adventure and consider deeply how we interact with our planet and each other. And sometimes destroy good songs on a guitar.

My vision

OSGeo blends a pile of theoretical fields, rigorous engineering practice and community; bonded together by the desire to make sense of space around us and create tools which can be freely given for others to do the same in ways which make sense to them. It provides an entrypoint - an easy on-ramp - for anyone to learn about coding; or learn about geospatial stuff; or learn about developing a community. Or all of the above!

This was the special sauce has been so attractive to me, and why I’ve devoted a pile of time to helping grow an open geospatial community in Oceania.

My vision is pretty much ‘keep doing that’, coupled with ‘listen a lot’, and ‘go out of our way to invite people in’.

What you have done within the community in the past

I’ve attended and spoken or facilitated workshops at FOSS4G conferences in 2016,17,18, and 2019. I consider this a huge privilege - so thanks also to this community for your support and trust!

In 2018 I led the sponsorship drive for the inaugural FOSS4G SotM Oceania conference; and also helped create some programmes to specifically fund inclusivity initiatives. In 2019 I had to step back from programme leadership, and invested energy in a community based greenhouse gas mitigation strategy instead.

I’ve contributed small pieces to a couple of projects (PyWPS, I think maybe one line ages ago!) and PDAL (mostly docs). I’m also a member of the marketing committee and have an OGC membership - both of which I feel a bit guilty about because really, I haven’t pushed much along on either front.

What your interests are in terms of the board

I accepted a nomination for this election because there is no representation on the board of OSGeo from the Oceania region. I hope to act as a kind of conduit for the visions of my (broad and diverse) region in terms of guiding OSGeo into a sustainable and equitable future.

I’m also here to learn - from the experience of working with a diverse distributed, and successful group.

Any things that you would like to change or introduce

I think right now I’d need to spend a lot of time learning the ropes before knowing about what to change. We can see which ropes need re-weaving, or if any new ropes need weaving, or which ropes should be un-woven as we go.

One key thing would be to spend time working on greenhouse gas mitigation programmes for conference travel - we’ve seen great enthusiasm for community-led, tangible programmes here in Oceania, I wonder if that exists worldwide. This may really fall to local organising committees in the end, I wonder how OSGeo can offer support?

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

As a first-time board candidate I think learning the ropes will be plenty. Let's see which gaps need filling.