New Member Nominations 2022

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Revision as of 14:58, 13 October 2022 by Cvvergara (talk | contribs) (adding Paul van Genuchten)
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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"

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." 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."

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. "

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)."

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."

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."


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."

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."

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."

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."

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."

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."

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."

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."

Marco Minghini
16 Kröger Johannes 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."

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."

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."

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."

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."

Tom Kralidis