New Member Nominations 2020

The Charter Member nomination (part of the Election 2020) will be open from 2020-10-05 to 2020-10-18 (2 weeks). 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 SysOps.

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#	Nominee Name	Country	Positive attributes	Nominated by
1	Ujaval Gandhi	India	Mr. Ujaval Gandhi has been an active Open Source contributor and has inspired a lot of budding geospatial researchers with his famous QGIS Tutorials (http://www.qgistutorials.com) and SpatialThoughts courses (https://courses.spatialthoughts.com/). It is my honor that I am getting an opportunity to nominate him as I have been following his blogs for a long time. He provides training services for QGIS, Python and related geospatial technologies. His company, Spatial Thoughts, is the only QGIS.org certified training provider in India. Mr. Gandhi holds a Masters degree in Geospatial Information Engineering from University of Wisconsin-Madison and has 15+ years of industry experience leading large GIS teams. Also, he was one of the early employees at Google India and Part of the team that launched Google Maps in India. He advocated and transitioned the mapping operations team to open-source tools and developed and published Google Maps Engine Connector for QGIS plugin for Google Inc. Moreover, he is lead trainer for Google Earth Engine in India for Google Earth Outreach program at Google Inc. and has trained 1000+ scientists and researchers at top Indian universities on Applied Remote Sensing techniques using cloud computing. He is also a visiting faculty/researcher at the Faculty of Engineering and the Built Environment, University of Johannesburg. I sincerely respect Ujaval for his true spirit of open source geospatial awareness. Ujaval Gandhi	Rajat Shinde
4	Paulo Coronado	Colombia	Paulo has made important contributions to the use, appropriation, dissemination and teaching of FLOSS initiatives in the field of geosciences. For more than 10 years he has worked on the creation of educational material for the integration of free software and open source tools to Territorial Management Processes, especially the cadastre, appraisals and Territorial Analytical Intelligence. With the help of the GeoForAll initiative, he has implemented a laboratory specialized in the appropriation of FOSS4G tools at the Francisco José de Caldas District University (Bogotá, Colombia). He periodically organizes seminars, workshops, courses, and conferences that introduce the use of geographic information systems, spatial databases, map servers, and specialized libraries using OSGeo tools. Currently, in the framework of a doctoral research, he is proposing the development of a territorial analytical management system that acts as an abstraction layer for OSGeo tools to support multipurpose cadastre processes. With the support of GeoForAll Iberoamérica he publishes the Spanish version of the GeoForall Bulletin. Paulo Coronado Paulo Coronado	Sergio Acosta y Lara
5	Neftalí Sillero	Portugal	Neftalí is a long time supporter of Open Geospatial principles. He is Principal Researcher at CICGE-Research Centre on Geo-Spatial Sciences (Porto, Portugal) and Group Leader of the Spatial Biology Lab (https://sites.google.com/view/sblab/home). He has published more than 100 papers on spatial ecology and biogegraphy always using open source software on GIS, Remote Sensing, and spatial statistics. He coordinates the Atlas of Europe of amphibians and reptiles and its webGIS: http://na2re.ismai.pt/. I'm sure that having Neftalí as a Charter Member will be very beneficial for OSGeo.	Sergio Acosta y Lara
7	Raul Nanclares da Veiga	México	Mr. Nanclares is a member of the Mexico QGIS Users Group, he has been part of the organization team of the QGIS users Annual Meeting, an Open Source advocate. His willingness to spread out the knowledge has been shown as a speaker on the annual meeting and also during this Covid-19 times as an organizer and presenter of a QGIS webinar. I admire his knowledge, his communication skills, his willingness to share the knowledge, not only on QGIS but on other geospatial open source projects. During the three years that I have observed him, he has grown and made the open source community in Mexico larger. Born in Spain, but with a Mexican heart, I thank Raúl for his efforts in my homeland, his adoptive land. Raul Nanclares da Veiga	Vicky Vergara
8	Cameron Green	South Africa	Cameron has been an advocate for geospatial open source and open data in South Africa. Over the last four years, Cameron has not only served as a mentor and administrator for the OSGeo Google Code-in initiative but also served as a tutor for the UN Open GIS QGIS course and the upcoming PostGIS course. He has also been assisting with GeoForAll administration and has been invaluable in this role. Lastly at his university, Cameron is always assisting students with learning open source software and works not only with geoinformatics students but also students from other degrees. Cameron is a leader amongst his peers in South Africa and I am excited to see what the future in the open source community holds for him. Cameron Green Cameron Green	Victoria Rautenbach
9	Andrew Jeffrey	Australia	Andrew has taken a lead on organising the QGIS Australia user group over the last several years, and was a key organiser of a major QGIS event in Sydney in 2017 that catalysed a lot of new community activity in the region. He is committed to openness and transparency, and has been working hard on ways to help the regional community contribute to the QGIS project. His warm & welcoming attitude makes it easy for new community members to feel comfortable, and he often takes time to answer questions on the mailing list. I think Andrew would be a great addition to the OSGeo charter membership. Andrew Jeffrey	John Bryant
11	Ricardo Silva	Portugal	It is my great pleasure to nominate Ricardo Garcia Silva for OSGeo charter membership. Ricardo is an experienced software engineer with a strong GIS background. His main area of expertise is in building backend solutions for web-based systems that deal with spatial data. Ricardo has contributed to several Open Source Geospatial projects: He is core developer of pycsw and currently serving at the GeoNode PSC. I believe Ricardo would make a great OSGeo charter member. Ricardo Silva	Angelos Tzotsos
12	Laurențiu Nicola	Romania	It is my great pleasure to nominate Laurențiu Nicola for OSGeo charter membership. Laurențiu has a M.Sc. in Software Engineering, and joined the field of GIS by working on open source projects and specifically the Sen2Agri and Sen4CAP EU projects which apply Remote Sensing to agriculture. He also contributed to Orfeo Toolbox and some Rust crates, including the GDAL bindings and the t-rex Vector Tile server. He's always been a strong advocate of open-source software and is a native code and Rust programming language enthusiast. I believe Laurențiu would make a great OSGeo charter member. Laurențiu Nicola	Angelos Tzotsos
13	Edwin Liava'a	Tonga	Edwin has been a passionate advocate for OSGeo in the Pacific for many years, starting the Pacific Islands Chapter in 2012. Since then, he has tirelessly promoted the adoption of FOSS, and played a leading role in building community in the region, operating in the open so that people may learn from his example. Edwin's work has helped to lay the foundation for the growth of FOSS4G in the Pacific, and I believe that, as a charter member, he will provide an example of openness that reflects well on OSGeo's values and mission. Edwin Liava'a Edwin Liava'a	John Bryant