Board Member Nominations 2023

#	Nominee Name	Country	Statement	Nominated by
1	Jeroen Ticheler	The Netherlands	Jeroen has been a strong supporter of OSGeo for as long as I know. He is a person of integrity and commitment. He has been part of code sprint events organization (Bolsena), and in general has supported many FOSS4G events. He has worked for the FAO and established the GeoNetwork opensource project and is Project Officer for the project. He already has experience on the OSGeo Board of directors 2007~2008. And with the upcoming 20 years of OSGeo's existence I think it would be great to have him back. I think that his experience and knowledge is a great asset for the Board of Directors.	Vicky Vergara
2	Codrina Maria Ilie	Romania	I would like to nominate Codrina Maria Ilie for a position in the OSGeo Board of directors. Codrina is a very well-known member of the OSGeo community for many years. Since 2010 she has been a volunteer trainer in the Romanian geospatial community, she is a regular participant and speaker in international FOSS4G events and she has herself been one of the main organisers of FOSS4G 2019 in Bucharest. Codrina has been an OSGeo Charter Member since 2013 and she is a strong advocate for FOSS4G. As a member of the OSGeo Board in the last four years, she has shown an incredible passion, motivation and commitment that the next board would still very much need. She has very well represented OSGeo in the interaction and relation with other international communities such as INSPIRE and ESA.	Angelos Tzotsos
3	Marco Bernasocchi	Switzerland	Nomination statement from Angelos Tzotsos: I would like to nominate Marco Bernasocchi for a position in the OSGeo Board of Directors. Marco is an open source advocate, consultant, teacher and developer with a background in geography with a specialization in geographic information science. Marco is currently the chair of QGIS PSC and the director and founder of OPENGIS.ch (since 2011) where he and his team develop, train and consult clients on open source GIS. He is a long-time contributor to QGIS (and FOSS4G in general) and a charter member of OSGeo since 2018. He has served at the board of directors for the last two years, showing a strong passion for Open Source and making an impact in the community. I feel his contributions are also needed for the next board. Nomination statement from Codrina Maria Ilie: It is with great pleasure that I nominate Marco for a new OSGeo board member term. Marco is a passionate, yet pragmatic open source advocate, with a deep and practical understanding of the open source ecosystem, not only from a coder’s perspective, but also from the business perspective. His experience as the CEO of the successful foss company he founded in 2011, opengis.ch, is of great value to the challenges and expectations that the OSGeo board is facing. Additionally, as a longstanding contributor to the QGIS/QField projects, Marco has also been elected and serves the open source community as the QGIS.org PSC Chair since 2020.	Angelos Tzotsos and Codrina Maria Ilie
4	Rajat Shinde	India	I would like to nominate Rajat Shinde for a position in the OSGeo Board of Directors. Rajat is involved in OSGeo since 2017 as a student for Google Summer of Code for the MapMint project and then as a mentor for the GSoC. He has contributed to OSGeo software like the ZOO-Project. He actively participates in FOSS4G events and is part of OSGeo India. Rajat holds a PhD in Geo-informatics and currently works for NASA. Rajat has served at the board of directors for the last two years, gaining valuable experience in decision making as the youngest member of the board, showing strong passion for our community. I feel Rajat represents the future of OSGeo and his contributions are needed for the next board.	Vicky Vergara
5	Vicky Vergara	Mexico	Vicky is a tireless promoter of the OSGeo Foundation and loves encouraging new people she meets to contribute and get involved. Whenever there is a FOSS4G conference, she is often there helping out at the OSGeo booth. She is on the Project Steering committee of pgRouting, OSGeoLive, and SAC. She has also been heavily involved in Google Summer of Code for over a decade, where she has mentored many who have later become part of the OSGeo family.	Regina Obe
6	Matthew Hanson	United States of America	It is with great pleasure that I nominate Matt Hanson to be part of the OSGeo board elections. Matt, or better known to the geospatial community, GeoSkeptic is one of the main initiators and developers of the STAC SpatioTemporal Asset Catalogues standard. As a Software Engineer by day, at Element 84, he works on developing geospatial processing frameworks in the cloud, continuing the development of the open source family of tools - stac-utils - to support STAC uptake within the remote sensing community. After attending his first FOSS4G in Denver in 2011, he became an active contributor to multiple foss4g projects and an enthusiastic advocate for open source and a supporter of OSGeo and its work. Since 2017, Matt is an OSGeo Chapter Member and now he has accepted to put his three decades of remote sensing carrier experience to use for the benefit of open source community, as an OSGeo board member.	Codrina Maria Ilie
7	Besfort Guri	Kosovo	Besfort has been a hacktivist since 2009 in Kosovo, as a member of FLOSSK (Free Libre Open Source Software Kosova – flossk.org). He has been serving as a board member since 2015, and since 2020 he has been acting as President of the Executive Board of FLOSSK. Since 2010 a mapper at OpenStreetMap, and a member at OSM Foundation since 2018. In 2019 FLOSSK became a Local Chapter at OSM, and Besfort is leading this Local Chapter, in 2019, FLOSSK with a lead of Besfort, organized State of the Map Southeast Europe – sotmsee.org. He is serving as a member of the Advisory Board of the Board of OpenStreetMap Foundation. Besfort has been active in OSGeo for some years now as well, he has been serving as Charter Member since 2022. FLOSSK has been the local chapter of OSGeo since 2020, and he is leading as well this local chapter. He was part of the organizing team for the canceled FOSS4G 2021 Europe, now he is Co-Chair of the Program Committee at FOSS4G 2024 Europe. He was chair of FOSS4G 2023 in Prizren. He runs a small company called OpS-IN (Open Spatial Information Network) where he develops different GIS systems. His two biggest projects that he implemented through the company are "SPAK – Spatial Planning Application for Kosovo", and "ACLIS – Albanian Cadastral Land Information System" Both projects have the entire architecture of the system, based on OSGeo projects, like PostgreSQL / PostGIS, QGIS, GeoServer, Open Layers etc.	Astrid Emde