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	Joana: 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. Tom: Youssef Harby is an engineering professional currently focused on cloud-native geospatial technologies. Since 2019, he has worked with various GIS and remote sensing projects with global organizations such as IFPRI and UNEP, as well as several major government and private organizations in Saudi Arabia. Youssef's geospatial enthusiasm includes various personal and company projects, such as developing weather station IoT solutions and transforming datasets into cloud-native formats. He is an active contributor and user of numerous FOSS4G projects. Youssef is passionate about raising awareness in the Middle East and North Africa region about geospatial topics via his YouTube channel. He is committed to collaboration, knowledge sharing and innovation in our field, is engaging and a pleasure to collaborate with. Profile: Youssef Harby Wiki: Youssef Harby	Joana Simoes & Tom Kralidis
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: Edouard 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:Tobias 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: Dave 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: Sami 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: Vasil 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: Claudio Iacopino	Angelos Tzotsos
17	Bill Dollins	United States of America	Bill Dollins, has been a member of OSGEO US since 2014. As a consultant, he has delivered solutions based on open-source geospatial software since 2006 - mostly PostGIS, GDAL, GeoServer, and QGIS, but not limited to those. Bill has been very involved in helping to find financial support for OSGeo projects he works with and for the OSGeo US chapter's activities. During his time at a commercial SaaS company, he convinced his company to sponsor QGIS due to its heavy usage. In 2023, he was on the organizing committee for FOSS4G North America (Baltimore). In 2024, he was a co-chair and sponsor for FedGeoDay in Washington, DC - focused on government use cases for open-source geospatial. He was also on the steering and sponsorship committees for the 2024 FOSS4G North America (St. Louis). Bill is a valuable team member for the OSGeo community because of his advocacy for using open source geospatial tools in US government agencies as well as the commercial sector. Profile: Bill Dollins	Michele Tobias
18	Mathieu Pellerin	Cambodia	Mathieu is a very active open source user, advocate and developer. His open mindset and passion for sharing high quality maps and code with the world and connecting to communities makes him a very good candidate for an osgeo charter member. Profile: Mathieu Pellerin Wiki: Mathieu Pellerin	Matthias Kuhn
19	Scott McHale	Canada	It is my privilege to nominate Scott McHale as a wonderful positive influence on the OSGeo Community. I expect many have already encountered Scott has been conducting a survey, and putting together recommendations on how to make joining OSGeo less awkward for all involved. Scott founded the OSGeo Alberta Chapter in 2019, and has been inspired to make our community better ever since. A recent addition to the marketing committee he has managed to charm everyone with kindness, patiently reaching out to our committees and projects that make up our foundation. Please join me in recommending Scott McHale and wishing him every success. Wiki: Scott McHale Profile: Scott McHale	Jody Garnett
20	Alberto Vavassori	Italy	I am pleased to nominate Alberto Vavassori, a young researcher and PhD candidate in Geomatics Engineering at Politecnico di Milano, Italy. Alberto is actively committed to promoting open-source geospatial technologies, with contributions both in scientific code development for urban climatology and Earth Observation and in educational initiatives (see e.g., GIS4Schools - https://gis4schools.readthedocs.io and Copernicus4Schools - https://copernicus4schools.readthedocs.io). He is a promising new member of the OSGeo community to further geospatial literacy and open-source geospatial tools within the academic context and beyond. Profile: Alberto Vavassori	Daniele Oxoli
21	Maxime Collombin	Switzerland	Maxime has been an advocate of open-source geospatial software and standards for several years, and a user of multiple OSGeo tools such as pygeoapi, ldproxy, GeoServer, QGIS and QGIS Server, contributing to the community through reporting issues and advocating use of these tools in Switzerland through his previous work at the Media Engineering Institute of HEIG-VD, and will continue to do so in his new position with the Swiss government. Maxime has also been heavily involved with the Styles & Symbology Standard Working Group within the OGC, as a co-editor for CartoSym 2.0, for which he has been a great team member. Maxime participated in several joint OGC / OSGeo code sprints, including in person in Bussigny in 2023, and online for the 2024 edition in Evora, as well as additional OGC code sprints involving the OSGeo community such as the July 2024 sprint in London. Through these code sprints, Maxime engaged with OSGeo projects such as GeoStyler and pygeoapi about the potential implementation of new OGC standards. Maxime also attended the Firenze FOSS4G Community Sprint in 2022 where we worked together towards CartoSym 2.0. Maxime has recently launched the CartoSymTranscoder open-source project which aims to provide transcoding capability between CartoSym-CSS, CartoSym-JSON as well as SLD/SE. This capability should provide an easy transition to implement support for the next generation of OGC Cartographic Portrayal standards in tools such as Map Server, GeoServer and pygeoapi, supporting the new conceptual model and encodings in the next generation of Web mapping APIs such as OGC API - Maps, OGC API - Tiles and OGC API - Styles. Maxime is interested in joining the OSGeo Standards Committee, to continue close collaboration between OSGeo and OGC on cartographic portrayal in particular, continue in his role as co-editor for CartoSym 2.0, as well as developing open-source implementations of the Standard. Wiki: Maxime Collombin Profile: Maxime Collombin	Jérôme Jacovella-St-Louis	'