Board Member Nominations 2022

#	Nominee Name	Country	Statement	Nominated by
1	Ariel Anthieni	Argentina	Ariel is an entrepreneur and active communicator of the potential of geospatial technologies as enablers of sustainable development, especially in emerging economies. Since 2007, starting in the city of Santa Fe (in the interior of Argentina) he participated in the SDI of the province. From this moment on, he was part of the foundation of Geoinquiet@s Argentina, where different activities were carried out to fortify the open source in the country and in the region. Ariel has been very active organizing and streamlining the geospatial community in Argentina. He was the chair of FOSS4G Argentina 2016 and has participated in the organization of the following editions: 2017, 2019. He also was part of the organization of SOTM Argentina 2017 and SOTM LATAM 2018. In 2018 he was part of the foundation of the Geolibres Association (https://geolibres.org.ar/ ), which supports the geospatial communities of Argentina (Geolibres Argentina, Openstreetmap Argentina, QGIS Argentina, Geochicas). He started as the treasurer and is currently President of the Association. Ariel was one of the main organizers of the FOSS4G International Buenos Aires 2021 and coordinator of the LOC, the first in Latin America that marked a milestone in the global integration of OsGeo in other regions of the world. He has actively participated with talks at FOSS4G 2018 Bucharest and FOSS4G 2022 Firenze about new technologies with the aim of bringing Open Source technologies closer to Spanish-speakers.He is the manager of the local OSM and QGIS Chapters in Argentina and regional communicator in open source events and applications in cadastre, urban management, Smart City and Digital Twins technology. As part of his work, he is also a very active advocate for FOSS technologies in the geospatial world. From 2012 to 2018, he was the coordinator of the metadata group of the SDI of Argentina (IDERA). Ariel is currently a speaker in lectures and workshops about open source tools and technologies in the annual conferences of the nation SDI. In 2021 he founded and became CEO of Kan Territory & IT, one of the companies in the region that implements Open Source technologies in the ECLAC, with integration projects of the geographic statistical framework in 8 Latin American countries or also the migration of the cadastre of Mexico City to open source technologies such as qGIS, postGIS, and postgres. They also participated in the implementation of the SDI in Chile and UNOPENGIS. Ariel would be an important addition to the Board, bringing the bridge closer, even closer, between the Latin American communities and the rest of the world. He advocates to have documentation in Spanish and generating spaces for technologies that allow insertion in Latin America. He wants to change the paradigm that the only thing that exists is the option of proprietary software for some solutions, towards the insertion of open source as an option offered by communities and companies, as already happens in the rest of the world.	María Arias de Reyna
2	Tom Kralidis	Canada	Tom has been an OSGeo charter member since 2007 and has served on the Board since 2018. He has contributed to numerous OSGeo software packages, such as MapServer, GeoNode, QGIS, PyWPS and OWSLib, and he is the creator of pycsw and pygeoapi. He is also on several Project Steering Committees (PSCs). Tom is a longtime contributor to the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC), where he has been involved in the development of several specifications. More recently you may have heard him talk about the new OGC API, or even used his latest contribution to our ecosystem: the pygeoapi project, a Python implementation of the OGC API suite of standards which is also an OGC Reference Implementation. Tom is also active in the UN World Meteorological Organization and chairs the WMO Expert Team on Metadata in support of next generation weather/climate/water data sharing efforts. Tom currently works at the Meteorological Service of Canada where he and his team leverage the power of OSGeo software and OGC standards for mission critical applications.	Francesco Bartoli
3	Michael Smith	USA	Michael has been an OSGeo member since 2012 and a board member since 2014, he served as treasurer and he is really active and responsive in his role. I had to work with him to organise FOSS4G 2022 and he helped us a lot and he was always fast and precise. He is involved in several OSGeo projects, especially as a member of the Project Steering Committee of MapServer and PDAL projects.	Luca Delucchi