New Member Nominations 2022

This list of nominees is maintained by the Chief Returning Officer (cro@osgeo.org). This page is write protected and can only be edited by either CRO

#	Nominee Name	Country	Positive attributes	Nominated by
1	Bianca Federici	Italy	"Bianca is an active member of the Italian community. She is a professor at the University of Genoa software teaching and researching using free GIS for a long time. She has been part of the organisation of several national organisations since 2007 and was co-chair of the FOSS4G 2022" Profile: Bianca Federici	Luca Delucchi
2	Seabilwe Tilodi	South Africa	"Seabilwe is a GIS specialist with a background in geology and agroclimatology working at Kartoza. She is passionate about the application of open-source software and open data to solve complex problems. She does awesome work training on open-source software such as QGIS, in particular for high school students and teachers. She is one of the organizers of the QGIS Open Day virtual event series where she takes care of the social media outreach. Many of you will remember her from FOSS4G 2022 where she presented a lightning talk on ""Classroom GIS in South Africa"". Her numerous contributions to the QGIS contributor meeting in the lead up to FOSS4G were extremely valuable." Profile: Seabilwe Tilodi	Anita Graser
3	Tomas Holderness	United Kingdom	"Tomas is an active member of the open geospatial community and has spoken at every FOSS4G global event since 2016 and FOSS4G UK in 2019.  Tomas is a recognised leader in serverless computing for geospatial and has spoken and blogged extensively on the subject at FOSS4G and Geomob events as well as on podcasts.  Tomas is the CTO of Addresscloud a business providing services to the insurance industry based on open source geospatial technology, sponsors of FOSS4G UK 2019, OSGeo in 2021 and FOSS4G Firenze in 2022." Profile: Tomas Holderness	Mark Varley
4	Besfort Guri	Kosovo	"It is my pleasur to nominate Besfort Guri as OSGeo Charter Member. Besfort is active in OSGeo since some years now. Besfort Guri is heavily involved in FLOSSK which is the local OSGeo Chapter for Kosovo since 2020 (https://www.osgeo.org/local-chapters/osgeo-kosovo/) Besfort is a member of FLOSSK since 2009 as well as the President of the Executive Board at FLOSSK. Besfort leads OSGeo and OSM local chapters in Kosovo. Besfort was part of the organizing team of different conferences. He is in the FOSS4G 2022 organizing committee that will invite the community to Prizren, Kosovo. He runs a small company focused on Geographical Information System and Web Development. " Profile: Besfort Guri	Astrid Emde
5	Markus Mayr	Austria	"Markus is a long time and very active member of the OpenStreetMap community organizing the OSM meetup (Stammtisch) in Vienna as chair of the OSM Austria LocalChapter. The OSM meetup is also the place for the Viennese FOSSGIS members, the German local chapter of OSGeo, to meet. Markus is organizing the presentation of OSGeo related projects at mainly Austrian GIS-specific events like the GI_Salzburg (formerly AGIT)." Profile: Markus Mayr Wiki: Markus Mayr	Stephan Meißl
6	Darafei Praliaskouski	Belarus	"Darafei is a long time PostGIS and OpenStreetMap contributor.  He is also a member of the PostGIS project steering committee.  He is an active speaker in FOSS4G conferences and code sprints, OSM conferences, and PostgreSQL conferences. In addition to being an invaluable member of the PostGIS development team, he also reports bugs and tries to help out with pgRouting, GEOS, and GDAL projects. He has encouraged several of his staff to get involved in open source, in particular with PostGIS, PostgreSQL, and GEOS." Profile: Darafei Praliaskouski	Regina Obe
7	Daniel Baston	United States	From Brian M Hamlin "Dan Baston has been porting Java Topology Suite functionality to libGEOS (C++) since 2016, and was promoted to libGEOS PSC in October 2019. Dan is a PostGIS committer since 2015. In data science, the R language is as active today as it has ever been. In addition to rigorous spatial mathematics engineering with libGEOS and PostGIS, Dan bridges the OSGeo world to R as a substantial committer to GEOS client-library R-sf. It is notable that r-spatial is joining forces with OSGeo at this time, and Dan's contributions directly bring these technical communities together. It is my honor to nominate Daniel Baston as OSGeo Charter Member in 2022." From Regina Obe "Dan Baston is a long time contributor to both GEOS and PostGIS projects and one of the core maintainers of GEOS and a member of the GEOS Project steering committee. He has also made several contributions to the GDAL project and supports development in R. Dan is a thoughtful contributor, both in how he handles users providing their first pull requests and his willingness to help users with bugs or build issues even if it is not an OS platform he is familiar with. In addition to his general contributions you will often find Dan at OSGeo code sprints and on occasion FOSS4G events." Profile: Daniel Baston	Brian M Hamlin Regina Obe
8	Lars Schylberg	Sweden	From Astrid Emde "I would like to nominate Lars Schylberg as OSGeo Charter Member. Lars is active in OSGeo since many years. He is active on both MapServer mailing lists and a real power user. Lars is a familiar face and speaker at conferences like FOSS4G. Lars Schylberg is a senior technical fellow at Saab corporation. He has a MSc in Land Surveying and a PhD in digital cartography from the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH) in Sweden. Throughout his carrier he has been involved with software development and international standardization." From Seth Girvin "Lars has been a long-standing member of the OSGeo community, and has been present at numerous conferences and codesprints. His MapServer talks at FOSS4G are always greatly received, and bridge the gap between technology and cartography." Profile: Lars Schylberg	Astrid Emde Seth Girvin
9	Hans van der Kwast	Netherlands	"Hans is really active in spreading the OSGeo love. As a teacher, he is promoting FOSS all the time, and because his teaching is especially aimed at young people from the global south, his influence is worldwide. He is a board member and co-founder of the Dutch QGIS User Group, wrote a book on QGIS for Hydrological Applications with Kurt Menke, and (also together with Kurt) is working on quality control for the QGIS certification programme. His pro-active personality (and love of geobeers), together with his thorough involvement in organizing and promoting open GIS, makes him the perfect addition to the Charter Members." Profile: Hans van der Kwast	Erik Meerburg
10	Federica Gaspari	Italy	"Federica studied at Politecnico di Milano, her research interests include GIS, photogrammetry, web-mapping and collaborative mapping. She is active in the OpenStreetMap community, serving as faculty advisor of PoliMappers (the group of Politecnico di Milano connected with YouthMappers). During the FOSS4G 2022 she was one of the co-chair of the social media committee, she is also member of SotM working group and member of local committee in 2018 and 2022." Profile: Federica Gaspari	Luca Delucchi
11	Torsten Friebe	Germany	"I would like to nominate Torsten Friebe as OSGeo Charter Member. Torsten is active in OSGeo since many years. He is in the TMC and the chair of the deegree project, which is an OSGeo project since 2010. He also promoted OSGeo software at fairs. He is involved in OGC and worked on the implementation of OGC standards since 1999. He is a familiar face and speaker at conferences like FOSS4G and FOSSGIS." Profile: Torsten Friebe	Astrid Emde
12	Amy Burness	South Africa	"Amy is a scientist, cartographer, and QGIS enthusiast working at Kartoza as a GIS technician. She is the heart and soul of the QGIS project's Open Day virtual event series. Every month, she plans the sessions, coordinates the speakers and hosts this live stream where she speaks with users and developers from all kinds of backgrounds and levels of experience. The events are recorded and available through the QGIS Youtube channel. Many of you will remember her from FOSS4G 2022 where she presented a lightning talk on ""QGIS and Community: The QGIS Open Day"" and recorded interviews with many participants. Her numerous contributions to the QGIS contributor meeting in the lead up to FOSS4G were extremely valuable." Profile: Amy Burness	Anita Graser
13	Stefan Blumentrath	Norway/Germany	"I recommend Stefan as an OSGeo Charter Member. He is now contributing for a long time to the GRASS GIS project, as a coder for the GRASS GIS source code as well as for GRASS GIS addons. As a community member, Stefan has always a helping hand in the mailing list." Profile: Stefan Blumentrath Wiki: Stefan Blumentrath	Helmut Kudrnovsky
14	Krishna Lodha	India	"It is my pleasure to nominate Krisha Lodha.  Krishna is an active contributor to FOSS GIS projects such as pygeoapi, geostyler, as well as the Doing Geospatial with Python workshop.  He also is also an active content creator of blogs/videos outlining the FOSS stack (see her youtube channel).  Krishna is driven in providing outreach and awareness to the FOSS4G community, and is personable, a pleasure to collaborate with and a team player." Profile: Krishna Lodha Wiki: Krishna Lodha	Tom Kralidis
15	Hannes Reuter	Luxembourg	"Hannes Reuter is an open source geospatial user and ambassador. Since 2013 he works at the European Commission in the team of GISCO (the Geographic Information System of the COmmission), where he always pushes for the adoption of open source geospatial solutions to bridge technical feasibility and functional requirements. Hannes is a regular participant and speaker at international FOSS4G conferences and he was among the organisers of the European Track titled A European approach to geospatial open source at the recent FOSS4G 2022 in Florence." Profile: Hannes Reuter	Marco Minghini
16	Johannes Kröger	Germany	"It is my pleasure to nominate Johannes Kröger as OSGeo Charter Member. Johannes is active in the Open Source geospatial World since many years. He is active in the QGIS project writing plugins, submitting bug reports, fixing bugs and also teaching QGIS at FOSS Academy. He is also a regular fellow in GDAL's IRC chat channel, answering questions and presenting or teaching about GDAL on conferences. He is a familiar face and speaker at conferences like FOSS4G and FOSSGIS. As part of his activities in the German society for cartography (Deutsche Gesellschaft für Kartografie e. V.) he organizes the annual News-Infographies-Analytics-Maps symposium and co-organizes the monthly CartoHack." Profile: Johannes Kröger	Astrid Emde
17	Simeon Fitch	United States	"Simeon has prior involvement in several OSGeo projects. He is the architect of RasterFrames, a committer on GeoTrellis, contributor to GeoMesa, but I know him as the newest developer of the Rust GDAL bindings. In each of our interactions there, he was thoughtful and patient. I think these are great qualities for an OSGeo charter member and am happy to nominate him for this position." Profile: Simeon Fitch	Laurențiu Nicola
18	Francesco Frassinelli	Norway	"It is my pleasure to nominate Francesco Frassinelli as an OSGeo Charter Member. Francesco is an experienced open source software developer, currently working at the Norwegian Institute for Nature Research as coordinator for environmental data. He has contributed to several open source geospatial projects, including GeoNode and Geopaparazzi as well as open source projects related to OpenStreetMap such as the Tasking Manager. His experience and passion makes him an excellent candidate for Charter membership." Profile: Francesco Frassinelli	Marco Minghini
19	Wladimir Szczerban Llatas	Spain/Venezuela	"Wladimir has been involved with the geographic FLOSS since 2005.He is an active member of OSGeo and is involved in the OSGeo-es chapter and the OSM-es community. He was part of the local organization team of the 2010 FOSS4G in Barcelona." Profile: Wladimir Szczerban Llatas	María Arias de Reyna Domínguez
20	Paul van Genuchten	Netherlands	"It is my pleasure to nominate Paul van Genuchten.  Paul is an SDI specialist at ISRIC - World Soil Information. His work focuses on enabling soil datasets on the web using common standards and open source software. Paul also provides training on open source software and INSPIRE. He is a member of the PSC of pygeoapi and GeoNetwork opensource projects, and contributes to many other projects. Paul has a spark for innovation combined with user driven requirements, and is a great team player on numerous efforts in the OSGeo community." Profile: Paul van Genuchten Wiki: Paul van Genuchten	Tom Kralidis
21	Jordi Escriu	Spain	"I am pleased to nominate Jordi Escriu as an OSGeo Charter Member. Jordi has a longstanding experience in designing and operating Spatial Data Infrastructures (SDIs) leveraging on open standards and open source software. He has been the Head of Unit of the regional SDI in Catalonia and has collaborated since 2008 in the activities around the conceptualisation of the European INSPIRE infrastructure, contributing to Technical Guidelines, acting as thematic expert and liaising with several communities around SDIs. Since 2021 he works at the Joint Research Centre (JRC) of the European Commission, where he contributes his experience to help manage and operate the INSPIRE infrastructure. He is currently leading the transition of the INSPIRE Geoportal to a GeoNetwork-based open source component." Profile: Jordi Escriu	Marco Minghini
22	Raymond Nijssen	Netherlands	"Raymond is one of the more active members in the QGIS community, internationally and especially locally in the Netherlands. A committer for QGIS, a sponsor for every other piece of FOSS. He is a board member and co-founder of the Dutch QGIS User Group, trainer and problem solver (plugins!) for many in the Netherlands, can always be counted on in helping out with the organisation of the FOSS4GNL, and is main organiser for the QGIS Hackfest in March 2020, which fell victim to Corona. But hey, that’s all in the past. He will be organiser of the upcoming QGIS Hackfest again, and we expect him to keep up the good OSGeo work in the years to come. I’m very happy to nominate him as a new OSGeo charter member." Profile: Raymond Nijssen	Erik Meerburg
23	Lorenzo Stucchi	Italy	"Lorenzo is PhD candidate at Politecnico di Milano in collaboration with Ricerca sul Sistema Energetico – RSE S.p.A. His research activity is focused on Geographic Information Systems and Remote Sensing for the renewable energy sector. He is involved in Italian OpenStreetMap Community as National Coordinator for OSM activities in Wikimedia Italia (Italian OSM Local chapter) and one of the co-founders of PoliMapper (the YouthMappers group of Politecnico). He was really involved in the FOSS4G 2022 organization helping in several aspec" Profile: Lorenzo Stucchi Wiki: Lorenzo Stucchi	Luca Delucchi
24	Nestor Gustavo Lopez	Argentina	"Gustavo is an active member of the Argentinian Geo community, working for government institutions as GIS Technician in Geo related topics for almost 12 years, supporter of free open source software, member of Geoinquietos community, Committee member and treasurer of Geolibres Asociacion Civil, IDERA’s (Infraestructura de Datos Espaciales de la República Argentina) Metadata Work group Coordinator, Qgis, Geoserver and Geonetwork User, Responsable of Geo Metadata in ARBA, FOSS4G 2021 Buenos Aires Collaborator." Profile: Nestor Gustavo Lopez	Ariel Anthieni
25	Melvin Lizano Araya	Costa Rica	"Melvin has supported the use of free and open source software for many years, teaching courses in Geography, as well as professional updating workshops for Ministries or Public Institutions. He has also organized many activities disseminating free geographic information technologies." Profile: Melvin Lizano Araya	Sergio Acosta y Lara
26	Walter Shilman	Argentina	"Walter is a member of the Argentinian community Geoinquiet@s. He is currently working in a company of Open Source (mainly gis-based) in Latin American. Soon to be informatical engineer. With a few contributions for open source projects, hope to be increasing, for example Geonode, Geonetwork, Kobotoolbox." Profile: Walter Shilman	Horacio Castellaro
27	Tatiana Pará Monteiro de Freitas	Brazil	"Tatiana is the leader of one of the GeoForAll Iberoamerica labs in Pará (Amazonas-Brazil). She is an enthusiast of FOSS4G and very active promoting the use of these technologies in her country and continent." Profile: Tatiana Pará Monteiro de Freitas Wiki: Tatiana Pará Monteiro de Freitas	Sergio Acosta y Lara
28	Ben Hur Pintor	Philippines	"I would like to nominate Ben Hur Pintor. Ben Hur has been a passionate advocate for open source geospatial and open data for many years. He's especially active in the Philippines, where he's been a key organiser of Pista Ng Mapa, the ""Festival of Maps"", bringing together the PH FOSS4G community in person and online. He shares his knowledge by providing training and support locally and internationally You can tell he's a true believer in open source principles by his frequent social media posts advocating for openness and transparency. I believe he would be a very positive addition to the OSGeo charter membership." Profile: Ben Hur Pintor	John Bryant
29	Marian Neagul	Romania	"It is my pleasure to nominate Marian Neagul. Marian has been a passionate and energetic contributor to our Romanian and international community for many years now. Marian used his strong computer science experience to help the community and several of our important software projects. It's a regular attendee to FOSS4G events and a participant in geospatial standardization efforts with Open Geospatial Consortium and the European Space Agency. I think Marian would be a great addition to the OSGeo charter membership." Profile: Marian Neagul	Vasile Crăciunescu
30	Harissou Sant-Anna	France	"Harissou, known as Delazj a geo-engineer with urban planning specialty. He is probably the most prolific contributor to QGIS documentation and translation. He achieves a tremendous work to allow end-user to have a very high quality documentation for QGIS. He is a founding member of the QGIS local user group in France and  also a honorary member of QGIS.org. Last but not least, he also developed the Maps Printer QGIS plugin." Profile: Harissou Sant-Anna	Vincent Picavet
31	Harry McCormack	United Kingdom	"Harry has been in the geospatial domain for over a decade. He has been actively using gdal package to handle satellite data processing, including more advanced InSAR technology. Currently, he is leading a team of over ten developers under the Innovation Team of CGG to develop cutting-edge geospatial solutions. I firmly believe he would have a lot to share and learn from this new membership. More about Harry can be read here. Thanks a lot." Profile: Harry McCormack	Mohammed Zia
32	Mariana Gasparotto	Argentina	"Mariana is a Professor of Spatial Data Infrastructures at the Universidad Nacional Tres de Febrero (Buenos Aires, Argentina) where she widely spreads the use of Free and Open Source Software for Geospatial. She was a Member of the Scientific Committee and took part of the Local Organizing Committee of FOSS4G Buenos Aires 2021. She also served as a reviewer of scientific works for FOSS4G Firenze 2022" Profile: Mariana Gasparotto	Ariel Anthieni
33	Emma Hain	Italy	"Emma has been a long term user of, and advocate for, open source geospatial tools and communities in Australia. She is a valuable member of the local QGIS community and has a deep understanding of industry transformation to open source geospatial software. I first met Emma at FOSS4G SotM Oceania 2018, and worked with her on the 2019 FOSS4G SotM Oceania local organising committee. She is full of ideas, inspiration and passion delivered in a caring and community-centered way. Emma served on the OSGeo Oceania board for two years (2020, 2021) and remains a key member of the Oceania open source geospatial community. Emma currently works at Nyall Dawson's company, North Road, where part of her responsibilities is to build the Australian QGIS community through management of the QGIS AU Twitter and LinkedIn accounts and associated activities. She is also currently one of the Program Chairs for the Pacific Geospatial Conference which incorporates FOSS4G SoTM Oceania." Profile: Emma Hain	Adam Steer
34	Claudia Vitolo	Italy	"It is my pleasure to nominate Claudia as an OSGeo Charter Member. She is an experienced Earth Observation Senior Scientist and a very active and powerful supporter and promoter of the open source ethic in the geospatial field. Her relentless contributions to the community, such as the mentoring activities for the Google Summer of Code, Kaggle and ECMWF Summer of Weather Code, or working for establishing the R-Ladies Global and the WomenInGeospatial+ communities stand proof of her strong engagement to the same principles and values as OSGeo." Profile: Claudia Vitolo	Ilie Codrina
35	Julien Moura	France	"Julien has been a strong advocating voice for geomatics in general and opensource in particular. He co-created Geotribu, the leading news blog for everything geo in France, and is currently one of his most active maintener and contributor. Julien develops OpenSource GIS software, especially QGIS Python plugins, be it at work for Oslandia or sometimes on his free time. He alsocontributes to conferences ( FOSS4G, QGIS days FR… ). He has an extensive knowledge of the FOSS4G ecosystem and continues to advocate for more opensource and opendata in this domain." Profile: Julien Moura	Vincent Picavet
36	Stefanie Lumnitz	Italy	"It is my pleasure to nominate Stefanie as an OSGeo Charter Member. She is a spatial data scientist, heavily involved in open source activities, be it coding (she is a core developer for the Python Spatial Analysis Library), mentoring (Google Summer of Code mentor for dask-geopandas and PySAL) or community engagement work. Stefanie is a long-standing active supporter and promoter of the open source/open science principles in the Earth Observation domain and thus I fully support her to become and OSGeo Charter Member." Profile: Stefanie Lumnitz	Ilie Codrina
37	Ivan Ivanov	Bulgaria	"Ivan is contributing to various open source projects like QGIS and QField. He is also actively expanding the footprint and impact of open source geospatial tools through his activities around forming a bulgarian QGIS user group."" Profile: Ivan Ivanov	Matthias Kuhn