New Member Nominations 2024

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	Gresa Neziri	Kosovo	Gresa is an architect and urban planner from Pristina, deeply involved in the promotion and development of open-source geospatial technologies. As the co-chair of FOSS4G 2023, she has played a key role in fostering collaboration and innovation within the global geospatial community. Gresa also leads efforts to engage and empower the next generation of mappers in Kosovo, working closely with the local community of young mappers to develop their skills and contributions to OpenStreetMap and other open data initiatives. I believe Gresa would be a very good addition to our charter members list. Profile: Gresa Neziri	Angelos Tzotsos
2	Youssef Harby	Egypt	I would like to nominate Youssef Harby for OSGeo Charter member. Youssef has been contributing to several FOSS/OSgeo projects and he is a great advocate for the use of FOSS4G technologies in Egypt. Youssef has participated in community events such as the OSGeo/OGC/ASF Joint Code Sprint and the FOSS4G Europe conference, and he has the intention and the energy to organise something in his region. Profile: Youssef Harby Wiki: Youssef Harby	Joana Simoes
3	Petr Ševčík	Czech Republic	Petr has been part of the FOSS4G community since 2018 and has attended multiple FOSS4G conferences since then as both speaker as well as session chair. He is a specialist in radar data and a skilled software engineer as well as cartographer using any geo-related Open Source package in the Python world he can get his hands onto. He mainly contributed to SAR related open source tools. Profile: Petr Ševčík	Joachim Ungar
4	Caitlin Haedrich	United States of America	Caitlin joined the GRASS GIS project some time ago, improved the GRASS-Jupyter-coupling. By joining GRASS GIS community sprints and educating open source GIS in the last years, she confirmed her spirit of open source GIS software development and community. Wiki:Caitlin Haedrich Profile: Caitlin Haedrich	Helmut Kudrnovsky
5	Cholena Smart	Australia	Cholena is an open-source-focused geospatial web developer in Western Australia. She has been a passionate, mostly "behind the scenes" hard core contributor to many open geospatial community events since 2018, collaborating with others, building event, project, and community websites, and doing great designs like this year's FOSS4G Oceania logo. Cholena has a strong community-oriented ethos, which would make her a great addition to the OSGeo charter membership. Profile:Cholena Smart	John Bryant
6	Matthias Daues	Germany	Matthias is a very enthusiastic advocate of OpenSource / Free Software in general and of FOSS4G in particular. He is a long-time user of many classic OSGeo components and has a focus on databases, where PostGIS & pgRouting are exemplarily very close to his heart. Both in his daily work within a large German communications service provider and in his private life, it is a pleasure to listen to him talk about the possibilities and opportunities that arise from the use and further development of open source. He has spoken about the software he loves and the solutions he has helped to build at the conference FOSSGIS (from the German.speaking local chapter of OSGeo). It would be a great enrichment for the community to welcome him as an OSGeo charter member. Profile:Matthias Daues	Marc Jansen
7	Vincent Sarago	France	Vincent Sarago is a geospatial developer at Development Seed, building open source tools, infrastructure and web interfaces that process and visualize geospatial data. He is well known to the Geospatial community as the creator of RemotePixel.ca, used by many to access and process satellite data such as Landsat and Sentinel through simple and intuitive interfaces. He is the maintainer of a large number of Open Source Geospatial tools such as TiTiler, TiPg or rio-tiler and he loves engaging with the community. I believe Vincent would be an excellent addition to our charter members list. Profile: Vincent Sarago	Angelos Tzotsos
8	Hamidreza Ostadabbs	Germany	Hamidreza Ostadabbs is the Head of the Geoinformatics Department at Die STEG, based in Stuttgart since 2018. He also serves as a lecturer at the Stuttgart University of Applied Sciences, specializing in GIS Studio, smart data components, and AI modeling. Highly engaged in organizing and supporting FOSS4G( https://2024.europe.foss4g.org/team/) events across different continents, Hamidreza graduated in Surveying Engineering from Tehran and obtained his master's degree in Geoinformatics and Photogrammetry from the University of Stuttgart. Hamidreza is passionate about open-source tools like QGIS and PostgreSQL, he is also a Python Plugin developer. Hamidreza is actively involved in education through various platforms, including university lectures and private institutions, along with contributing educational content on social media platforms like YouTube. I believe Hamidreza would be a very good addition to our charter members list. Profile: Hamidreza Ostadabbs	Angelos Tzotsos
9	Ponciano da Costa de Jesus	Timor-Leste	"Ponsy" has been working hard to raise awareness and develop skills in the Timor-Leste community, through workshops in open mapping. He founded G-SIG, a Timorese not-for-profit organisation that frequently runs educational sessions for the community, and is a passionate advocate for OSGeo tools, methods, and principles. He's an energetic leader in his community and I think the OSGeo charter membership would be richer for his inclusion. Wiki: Ponciano da Costa de Jesus Profile: Ponciano da Costa de Jesus	John Bryant
10	Edouard Choinière	Canada	Edouard joined the GRASS GIS project recently and became an integral part regarding CI, unit tests, module and library improvements, bug fixing and much more here and there. :-) By joining GRASS GIS community sprints, he confirmed his spirit of open source (GIS) software development and community. Wiki: Choinière Profile: Edouard Choinière	Helmut Kudrnovsky
11	Tobias Wendorff	Germany	Tobias has extensive experience in the field of GIS, a knack for finding issues in the weirdest of places and is willing to follow them through. I'd like to nominate him as a charter member. Profile:Wendorff	Laurențiu Nicola
12	Felipe Matas	Chile	Felipe has been tireless tester of many OSGeo projects (including GDAL and PostGIS), and has always found a way to push these to their limits. I think he could make valuable contributions to the ecosystem, and I'm happy to nominate him as a charter member. Profile: Felipe Matas	Laurențiu Nicola
13	Dave Barter	UK	It gives me great pleasure to nominate Dave as an OSGeo Charter Member. Dave has been an active Open Source supporter in the UK for a number of years, including being an OSGeo:UK committee member, helping to organize recent QGIS User Groups in the UK and our Bovey Tracy site for FOSS4G:UK Local 2022. He has 27 years experience in developing technology focused products across many sectors including finance, leisure and government. Dave’s key skills lie in driving small teams to deliver complex solutions in compressed timescales, he is a recognized expert in geospatial technologies and UK open data. Wiki: Dave Barter Profile: Barter	Nick Bearman
14	Sami Mäkinen	Finland	One of the main contributors to open source project Oskari (https://oskari.org) since 2011 and helping National Land Survey of Finland on it's Open Source path. Sami has been an active person in our local society. He has been already years in the board of OSGeo Finland. Profile: Mäkinen	Kari Salovaara
15	Vasil Yordanov	Bulgaria	Vasil has a solid background in GIS and open-source tools for spatial analysis and outstanding publication records in these fields. Vasil also took part in different FOSS4G events in the past. I would like to nominate him as a Charter Member because I believe his skills and passion for promoting FOSS GIS in teaching and research will be a great asset to the OSGeo community. Profile: Yordanov	Daniele Oxoli
16	Claudio Iacopino	Italy	Claudio is currently working at the European Space Agency site ESRIN since 2022 in the Digital Platform Section, focusing on interoperability between Earth Observation cloud platforms, including geospatial data cubes and reproducibility of Earth Observation workflows and applications. He is actively involved in the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC), managing ESA’s contribution to open standards development and promotion. He is a strong advocate for digital innovation, open science and open innovation and as part of this endeavour, he leads the Earth Observation Exploitation Platform Common Architecture (EOEPCA) project, promoting open governance and community based open source development. I believe Claudio would be an great addition to our charter members list. Profile: Iacopino	Angelos Tzotsos	'