New Member Nominations 2010

Name	Country	Notes
Steve Woodbridge	USA	Steve has long been a strong advocate and user of the open geospatial world of products. It would be hard to find someone who is more helpful and willing to help on any topic than Steve. From his early help on Mapserver until now, Steve has been a very active member and contributor in the geospatial community.
Jesse Eichar		Jesse Eichar has been a long-time developer on the uDig open source desktop GIS, and has contributed important work to the GeoTools library. He is a constant presence on the uDig community list, helping new users and developers. He has participated in the FOSS4G conference over the years, giving talks and teaching workshops. He knows the open source geospatial world, and is a part of the larger community.
Alex Mandel	USA	Alex is an excessively active contributor to the numerous facets of OSGeo. You have likely seen him on one of the many OSGeo IRC channel he haunts, regularly offering advice to newbies, contributing to conversations and volunteering to take on tasks. I've seen him contribute significantly over the last couple of years to the core development of the OSGeo-Live project and the marketing committee. He also helps out of the System Administration Committee, acts as a representative at numerous trade fairs, helped found the Californian OSGeo chapter, helped develop numerous Geography academic courses which use a variety of FOSS applications and he has contributed directly to QGIS. Alex brings a valuable "user perspective" with him, as he has a degree in Wildlife Biology and field experience with State and Federal agencies.
Hirofumi Hayashi	Japan	He is one of the most active member of OSGeo-Japan Local Chapter and is deeply involved in promoting OSGeo in Japan and elsewhere. He is a great team player and also contributed significantly to Internationalization of OSGeo software, localization of documentation, enhancement to OSGeo4W package and organization of FOSS4G events in Japan. He is the Vice-Representative of OSGeo Japan Local Chapter and PSC member in the ZOO project. He bears all the positive attributes desired of a OSGeo Charter Member Mr. Hayashi is one of the most active member of OSGeo-Japan Local Chapter and is deeply involved in promoting OSGeo in Japan and elsewhere. He is a great team player and also contributed significantly to Internationalization of OSGeo software, localization of documentation, enhancement to OSGeo4W package and organization of FOSS4G events in Japan. He is the Vice-Representative of OSGeo Japan Local Chapter and PSC member in the ZOO project. He bears all the positive attributes desired of a OSGeo Charter Member.
Gavin Fleming	South Africa	Gavin is the chief organizer of FOSS4G 2008. I attended the FOSS4G2008 conference, which Gavin was instrumental in organising. He and his team attracted delegates from some 50 countries, and subsequently produced a hugely successful conference. This is a tribute to Gavin's exceptional hard work and dedication to the task at hand. In so doing, he managed to put South Africa firmly onto the FOSS4G map. I particularly appreciated his kind manner, for regardless of the pressures on him, he always treated people with dignity and respect.
Suchith Anand	UK	Suchith is the chief organizer of OSGIS UK 2009 and 2010, as an OSGeo charter member. Suchith has done a major service to the interests of our foundation by organizing OSGIS UK conferences and by setting up an open source geospatial lab at University of Nottingham and negotiating a MoU with OSGeo, I think he definitely should be a charter member.
Dr. Xianfeng Song	China	Dr. Xianfeng Song, Associate Professor, Graduate University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, for his contributions to the FOSS4G2010 as a academic chair and also his great activities in OSGeo China and Japan chapters to involve international collaborations.
Milena Nowotarska	Poland	Milena_Nowotarska is very active member of Poland OSGeo Chapter. She is the key person in localization of Quantum GIS, GRASS, gvSIG and author of first polish QGIS manual. Milena has been involved in translations of GUI, manuals, brochures and promotional materials. Co-founder of polish forum and wiki for mentioned projects and GRASS-wiki manager. Trainer and teacher of FOSS4G at university and during several workshops. Milena plays important role in popularization of FOSS in local governmental agencies in Poland. Co-organizer of upcoming QGIS Hackfest in Wroclaw 2010.
Bruce Bannerman	Australia	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 international programs such as the Global Earth Observation System of Systems http://www.earthobservations.org/ . 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 for the Climate Change Integration Plugfest. 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.
Nicolas Bozon	France	Nicolas Bozon is specialized in design and GUIs for FOSS4G based applications, he has contributed to various FOSS4G projects and used OSGeo tools for scientific research projects. He actively promoted OSGeo during many trainings and workshops in France and participates actively in national and international conferences (OSGeo fr + jp + th, ...), giving talks and teaching workshops. Nicolas co-founded the ZOO Project (http://zoo-project.org/), is ZOO PSC member and important contributor.
Jo Cook	UK	Jo Cook is the patient leader of the UK OSGeo community. For years she has stuck with it, waiting for the world around her to catch up. Now she is providing a guiding hand to the flourishing OSGeo:UK chapter as its members put on conferences, masterclasses, training. Jo's notable FOSS4G presentations include "Portable GIS - GIS on a USB stick" in 2007 and "Open source archaeology - two years later" in 2010. One reason i am nominating Jo is that i think she'd make a good board member for the OSGeo foundation. I was surprised to learn that Jo's not already an OSGeo charter member.
Daniel Ames	USA	Dan is instrumental in the .NET side of the open source geo ecosystem, heading up both the MapWindow (http://www.mapwindow.org/) and the DotSpatial (http://dotspatial.codeplex.com/) projects.
Karsten Vennemann	USA	Karsten is an active and well-known OSGeo champion in the Seattle area, running his own OS-based consulting shop and regularly promoting the OSGeo agenda by running training classes and workshops on free and open source GIS tools.
Simon Mercier	Canada	Simon is indeed an active member of the geospatial free and open source community in the Quebec Province. As an employee of the Quebec Ministry of Public Security (MSP), he has contributed to the implementation of several innovative and effective geospatial systems based on free and open source technologies, such as G.O.LOC (http://geomsp.msp.gouv.qc.ca/portail_geo/goloc.htm) and SAG 911 (http://www.quebecgeographique.gouv.qc.ca/approfondir/bibliotheque/geoinfo/geoinfo-mars-2010.asp). He is to my mind one the person responsible for the successful transition initiated by the MSP for the use in its every day missions of geospatial free and open source technologies. Based on these successful initiatives, the geomatics department of the MSP acts now as a pioneer among the different public organisations in the adoption of open source technologies in the Quebec Province. In 2009, Simon has also been elected as a board member of the steering committee of the OSGeo Quebec local chapter. He has been one of the co-organisers of the 1st rendez-vous OSGeo-Quebec (http://rendez-vous-osgeo-qc.org/2010/) which have gathered about 100 attendees from different organisations and offered the Quebec community to meet and discuss with different members of the OSGeo international (see http://rendez-vous-osgeo-qc.org/2010/conferenciers/). Recently, Simon has joined Spatialytics (http://www.spatialytics.com), a new startup in Quebec city which at developing a commercial open source Geospatial BI (Business Intelligence) Suite.
Pedro-Juan Ferrer	Spain	Pedro-Juan has been an active member of OSGeo-ES since the LC started. He has presented the OSGeo Foundation in several events doing a hard job on advocacy on free software blogging, at mailing lists, etc. He's doing a lot of work in other fronts like translations, documenting, advocacy, support at mailing lists and so on. Finally he is part of the Board of Directors of the Local Chapter and also the Liason Officer.
Miguel García Coya (Micho)	Spain	Micho has been an active member of OSGeo-ES for more than two years and nowadays he is part of the Board of Directors of the Local Chapter. He is a FOSS4G expert and apart from working on GIS projects is also doing a hard job at OSGeo-es advocacy tasks. Now he's living at North Spain (Galicia) and he is promoting a microchapter with a recently succesful first meeting.
Anne Ghisla	Italy	Anne is an active member of OSGeo and a FOSS evangelist. In 2008 she first participated in Google Summer of Code as a student She contributed the Home-range analyses in QGIS using R through Python and in 2009 she developed v.krige, a GUI for Kriging analysis for GRASS GIS. This summer (2010) she was a mentor in the Google Summer of Code program and helped the administration team by presenting GSoC at FOSS4G in Barcelona. Anne has also shown interest in helping out as an administrator for GSoC in 2011. She is also spearheading the still relatively fresh OSGeo Women Chapter, and is a member in the Web Committee. Anne also participates on the OSGeo IRC channels and mailing lists. She is very eager to be more involved with OSGeo!
Astrid Emde	Germany	Astrid is an active member of OSGeo and contributes to Open Source software projects for many years. She has been active in organizing the FOSSGIS conference in Germany ever since it's inception and promotes OSGeo in the German language community. She spreads word and disseminates Open Source technology and know-how through her work as training instructor in the companies CCGIS and the WhereGroup. She is an active PSC member of the OSGeo Project Mapbender, contributed to the OSGeo Live project and MapServer, gives talks at events in Germany and abroad and contributes to publications on Open Source geospatial. She helps to organize OSGeo appearances at professional trade fairs like Intergeo and scientific conferences like AGIT. Astrid will be a valuable addition to the OSGeo Charter Members and help to tie local chapter activities in with the global mission and vision of OSGeo.
Maria Brovelli	Italy	Maria has been very active in promoting OSGeo for Education and Research and has made great contributions in enhancing OSGeo tools, developing educational contents and course using OSGeo tools and helping inthe organization of FOSS4G conferences. She bears all the positive attributes desired of a OSGeo Charter Member. Maria is a professor of geomatics at Politecnico di Milano, Campus in Como, Italy and one of the most active members in the OSGeo educational committee. She has provided invaluable leadership in organizing academic tracks and tutorials at FOSS4G conferences and her work with students is highly regarded in the GFOSS community. She has incorporated GFOSS in her teaching for many years and advised numerous student projects that produced sophisticated modules for GRASS GIS. She is an Associate Editor of the journal Applied Geomatics, and co-chair of the ISPRS working group IV/5 on Distributed and Web-Based Geoinformation Services and Applications providing important OSGeo connection to the WebGIS professional community. Maria was also the chair of the recent WebMGS2010 event in Como Italy (1st International Workshop on Pervasive Web Mapping, Geoprocessing and Services), containing many presentations on the use of OSGeo projects and OGC standards Maria Antonia Brovelli has been an active promoter of Open Source long before OSGeo's inception in 2006. She works in the academic domain and has organized and co-organized many conferences and events, her latest contribution being the 1st International Workshop on Pervasive Web Mapping, Geoprocessing and Service WebMGS 2010. She uses and promotes Open Source geospatial tools for hydrological and noise modelling and contributed papers on using Open Source tools for archaeological web maping and mobile uses. Maria is an active member of the Italian academic Open Source community and helped to establish OSGeo and Open Source GIS software as an integral component in research and science curricula. Maria will not only bring international academic reputation, quick thinking and culture to the OSGeo Charter Membership but also add a touch of Italian liveliness.
Jason Fournier	Canada	Jason has been an active member of the newsletter and journal activities within OSGeo and is a participant in many open source communities including MapServer and MapGuide. He is a strong proponent of open source software in general and participates in other geospatial and non-geospatial projects outside of OSGeo.
Yves Moisan	Canada	Yves has been involved in the FOSS4G community ever since he came across a project that linked Zope to MapServer (ZMapServer) around 2003. He attended most FOSS4G conferences since then and more recently he has been involved in the Geoprisma and MapFish (as a PSC member) projects. He actively participates in the OSGeo-Qc chapter since its inception and he organized the first two OpenStreetMap mapping parties in Sherbrooke. He is also very interested in the role of public bodies and educational institutions as both adopters and -- more importantly -- producers of FOSS in general, and FOSS4G in particular.
Vincent Picavet	France	Vincent has been involved in OSGeo francophone local chapter since its creation. He is currently the chapter's treasurer. GIS expert, he contributes to PostGIS and spread the word on OpenSource GIS in various conferences. He founded Oslandia in 2009 with Olivier Courtin, to provide services around OpenSource GIS, especially PostGIS and OGC webservices.
Eric Lemoine	Switzerland	Eric met the FOSS4G world when he joined Camptocamp in 2007. He is involved in, and committed to, the OpenLayers, GeoExt, and MapFish projects, both as a core developer and PSC member. Eric likes web maps built with JavaScript and Python, and being present on the community lists to help others and participate in technical discussions.
Dimitris Kotzinos	Greece	Dimitris is currently an Assistant Professor at the Department of Geoinformatics and Surveying at the Technical Educational Institution of Serres in Greece. Dimitris has been a researcher and a teacher at the university level for more than 8 yeras. Dimitris has an extensive record of activities in the Greek open source community and especially the geospatial domain including: founding and running the OSGeo Greek Chapter at the end of 2007; elected and serving on the board of HellasGI, the Greek GIS scientific organization (2008 to 2010); elected and serving on the board of the Greek Open Source Association (2010 to 2012); organizing various events for the community over the past few years like the "Interoperability Day" in April 2009 (a joint HellasGI, OGC and OSGeo-Greek event), the Greek Open Source Conference in 2009, a Greek one day conference on open source in education in 2007 and of course the last couple Greek GIS conferences, where he is organizes open source geospatial events and sessions. As part of his OSGeo involvement, Dimitris has been involved in the publishing process of the OSGeo Journal as section editor and reviewer and as author of each year's Greek chapter's annual report. Dimitris actively integrates open source in his everyday teaching and work by using it in the courses taught at his university and has been involved with local open source groups. He will be a valuable member of the OSGeo Charter Membership helping to bridge cultural differences and invigorate the educational pillar of OSGeo.
Adam Iwaniak	Poland	Adam is one of the initial members and leaders who established and run OSGeo Chapter in Poland. In my opinion, Adam has been very active promoting FOSS4G and OSGeo Foundation on the Polish ground. As chair of organization committee, Adam helped to organize two editions of FOSS4G dedicated conferences in Poland: WOGIS 2009 and WOGIS 2010 Adam is affiliated with the Institute of Geodesy and Geoinformatics of Wroclaw University of Environmental and Life Sciences. Adam's contact details.
Olivier Courtin	France	Olivier Courtin is involved in PostGIS developer team, mainly in charge of export functions and upcoming 3D support. Olivier is also the leading developper of TinyOWS, the high performance WFS-T solution. He founded Oslandia in 2009 with Vincent Picavet, to provide services around OpenSource GIS, especially PostGIS and OGC Web Services.
Santosh Gaikwad	India	Mr Santosh Gaikwad, an open source GIS officer at SACON, has been extremely active in harnessing, developing user interfaces for Desk top to web based open source tools for more than five years. He has excelled in promoting the widespraed use of Postgre SQL and Post GIS along with Open jump, QGIS and other tools. His innovative use of these tools for Conservation of biodiversity has been a path breaking initiative for a number of users. ( see www.keralawetlands.in) His knowledge and expertise was put to a good use in World Conseravtion Monitoring Centre, Cambridge and elsewhere. He has been also involved in many capacity buiding activiites of Osgeo India chapter.
Praveen Kumar Sinha	India	Praveen Kumar Sinha, is a senior Geologist of The Geological Survey of India (G.S.I). He is one of the forces behind the capacity building initiative, of OSGeo India. He methodically created training course materials for the Geologists of G.S.I, using FOSS4G tools, including GRASS, OpenJUMP and PostGIS. This training material initiated training more than a hundred, Geologist of G.S.I, through Open Source GIS.
Andreas Hocevar	Austria	Andreas has been an active developer and an integral member of the MapBuilder, OpenLayers, and GeoExt communities. In addition to making consistent valuable contributions to those projects, he maintains an active presence on a number of project mailing lists, providing helpful advice to novice and advanced users alike. Andreas lives in Austria and represents OSGeo projects at conferences in Europe and around the world.
Gabriel Roldán	Argentina	Gabriel is a founding Project Steering Committee member for GeoServer and an active GeoTools committer. Gabriel developed and maintains the ArcSDE module for GeoServer, providing a pathway for proprietary software users to become users of OSGeo software. He also started and maintains an active presence on the GeoServer Spanish language users mailing list, working hard to ensure that participation is open to a wider community of users.
Uttam Kumar	India	Uttam Kumar is one of main developer of Graphical User Interface (GUI) for GRASS, which is known as GRDSS (Geographic Resources Decision Support System: copy left with Registration number SW2658/2006) with many added functionalities mainly customised for Indian researchers. He became instumental in establishing Indian mirror site of GRASS. He designed website http://wgbis.ces.iisc.ernet.in/foss , where one can find excellent collection of software related to GIS, Image Processing, Statistics, Web Servers, etc. He presented the work related to GRDSS in FOSS4G Conference at Bangkok, Thailand in 2004. A Computer Science Engineer with Masters Degree in Geo-Information Science from International Institute for Geo-Information Science and Earth Observation, (ITC), Netherlands; presently pursuing his Ph.D at Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Bangalore where he developed computer algorithms for multi-satellite sensor spatio-temporal data analysis. To his credit, there are 11 paper in International and National Journals, 2 book chapters, 14 Conference Proceedings and 2 Technical Reports. He is Member of IEEE Inc. (New York) and Member of Association of Computer Electronics and Electrical Engineers. He is strong promoter of GIS using FOSS.
Danilo Furtado	Portugal	Member of the Portuguese osgeo local chapter community since the beginning, and an active member in the organization of the Portuguese FOSS4G meeting (SASIG 2008, 2009 and 2010). Involved with FOSS4G software since he started working in the Portuguese Mapping Agency: http://www.igeo.pt/, mostly in webGIS and OGC specifications. He helped to put online several web services with national data on top of map server with ogc specs: http://mapas.igeo.pt/ Member of Portuguese National SDI working group (SNIG) and also the Spanish SDI (IDEE). Actively promoting MapServer and Quantum GIS through training workshops. I'm proposing him for his role in the community as well as for his work (with foss4g) while he worked for the national geographic institute. He has been active in promoting the Portuguese effort to create a Local Chapter, and spearheaded the introduction of FOSS4G inside the cartography authority in Portugal. He has kept his efforts throughout these past years, and even though changing jobs recently he reaffirmed his intentions of continuing promoting Open Source GIS. In short, he is one of the most involved people in Portugal promoting OSGeo’s objectives.
Harish Karnatak	India	Dr. Harish Chandra Karnatak is working as a Scientist with National Remote Sensing Center, ISRO Hyderabad. By education, he has a PhD in computer Science with specializations in Geoinformatics (Enterprise and Distributed GIS). He has more than 10 year experience in executing remote sensing and GIS application projects at national level in India. He is been an active promoter of open source GIS in India and initiated the utilizations and applications of FOSS tools for national level R&D and operational projects in ISRO and successfully implemented in more than five projects. BHOOSAMPADA-The web GIS based information portal of ISRO (operational since January 2009)(http://applications.nrsc.gov.in:15001/), Indian Bio-resource Information Network (IBIN- www.ibin.co.in) -System of distributed database (operational since July 2006), Geo-visualization System for Tsunami Early warning System (INCOIS Hyderabad, Intranet application), National Database for Emergency Management (NDEM- Still developing) are few of his developments using UMN Mapserver, Geoserver, OpenLayer API’s, Ka-Map, PHP, PostgreSQL, POSTGIS and Apache Web server. He is an active member of OSGeo-India since 2006 and participating in various activities for promotion of open source GIS software in India.
Furuhashi Taichi	Japan	I would like to nominate Furuhashi-san as a charter member for OSGeo. I have had the honor of attending FOSS4G in Tokyo recently, and seeing how he has helped organize the strong event in Japan each year. Furuhashi-san is one of the most active members of the OSGeo-Japan community. He is also very active in the OSGeo-Brazil community, making frequent trips there. His ability to communicate with international individuals the power of Open Source geospatial through many different mediums makes him an asset to the OSGeo foundation. Furuhashi-san is the creator of the famous "mola-mola" FOSS4G animations (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Skrm6B2x_hI), and is definitely one of the most innovative promoters of FOSS4G around the world.
Miguel Tavares	Portugal	Miguel is a portuguese Geographic Engineer and works on Geographic Information Services for Câmara Municipal de Águeda (City Hall). He is a OSGeo Portugal local chapter member since the beginning and as been very active in the group. Local chapter activities: SASIG event organizing team, OSGeo Portugal local government workgroup, OSGeo Portugal OpenStreetMap workgroup. He is also interested in Promoting Free and Opens Source software in local governments, Free data, PPGIS, Bird Watching and Portugal native trees and shrubs.