New Member Nominations 2008

Name	Notes
Andrew Ross	In a brief period of just over one year, Andrew has become one of the leaders in the open source geospatial community. Andrew has been involved in a number of activities in the past year that have demonstrated his commitment to the foundation. This includes playing a critical role in the early stages of incubation of GEOS into the OSGeo Foundation, encouraging Ingres to become a supporting sponsor of OSGeo, and most recently - organizing the "Geospatial OSBootcamp - Geospatial Software" in Ottawa, Canada in collaboration with OSGeo. As the technical lead for the geospatial component of the Ingres database, Andrew also play an important technology development role within the open source geospatial ecosystem.
Geoff Zeiss	He has been involved with OSGeo from early on and supports the work of the foundation in several significant ways. Geoff continually gives OSGeo good promotion by including it as a success story in his many keynote presentations around the world. He also helps find new and meaningful connections between groups and individuals sharing common interests in OSGeo-related subjects. His enthusiasm, long-term ideas, industry experience, moral support and practical assistance have been a great encouragement to our mission.
Charlie Schweik	Charlie is chair of the OSGEO education committee and an effective advocate for the use of open source geospatial software in academia. He is an Associate Professor with a joint appointment shared between the Department of Natural Resources Conservation and the Center for Public Policy and Administration at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. He is also the Associate Director of the National Center for Digital Government, and an affiliated researcher with the Science, Technology, and Society Initiative at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. His research focuses on environmental management and policy, public-sector information technology, and the intersection of those domains. His recent peer-reviewed publications focus on free and open source software and the social frameworks and institutions that drive their development and use. A year ago he offered a college-level introductory GIS course using only open source software. The initial course was offered as a distance learning course and included participants from Nigeria, Uganda, Brazil, and the United States. Those materials are now available via the OSGeo Education web site. He is actively developing another course focused on remote sensing. It was through Charlie's hard work and persistence that the content for these courses will be openly distributed with a creative commons license. Charlie's formal training and experience as a computer programmer with academic interests in studying the open source movement and promoting the use of open source geospatial tools makes him well qualified to be a charter member of OSGEO.
Jorge Gaspar Sanz Salinas	Jorge is a gvSIG committer and community member and an organiser within the "hispano-hablante" OSGeo community. He is on the PSC for the Libro SIG, the Spanish-language Free GIS book, and has also worked on Spanish translations of the OSGeo website and the OSGeo Journal. Through active blogging at http://geomaticblog.net/ he has helped promote OSGeo events and projects through Spanish-speaking communities. Jorge has an important role inside the development of gvSIG. From the beginning has been the most active contributor of the Spanish Local Chapter. He's participating in the Free Gis Book too. Jorge is supporting the WebCom in many ways and he's the author of most of the translation into Spanish of the OSGeo portal.
S. Naarendra Prasad	Secretary of OSGeo India. He has visualized and made the first ever project of GIS for the City of Rajahmundry, A.P, India. This project is going to serve as a model for emulation through out the country. The project is sustainable as the students of Geoinformatics of the same city are involved in data collection. He is also an environmentalist working as principal scientist in Salim Ali Centre for Ornithology and Natural History, Hyderabad.
K. S. Rajan	He is the treasurer of OSGeo India chapter. He teaches Open Source GIS in his institute and is mentoring several students pursue projects using Open Source GIS. He has planned a one day Open Source GIS workshop in INCA international congress to be held in November 2008.
Julien-Samuel Lacroix	Julien has been involved with open source geospatial software since 2002 when he joined DM Solutions Group, and now at Mapgears where he plays a key role in the support and development of open source technologies. He is a member of OSGeo's incubation committee and is involved with the following projects: MapServer (committer), GDAL/OGR (committer), Chameleon (committer and one of the project leads), Fusion (committer and PSC member), ka-Map!, OpenLayers, FGS, and I'm sure I forgot some. In summary he has been very active with OSGeo since its creation and would make an excellent Charter Member.
Victor Olaya	Main programmer and director of SEXTANTE GIS, he's also the author of the plug-in of Sextante into gvSIG. A very important role is played by Victor on the Free GIS Book where he wrote most of the text already available. He has always been very active in the Spanish Local Chapter.
Yves Jacolin	Yves is the president of the Francophone (French language) local chapter (a.k.a. OSGeo-fr). In this role he is actively involved in most (all?) OSGeo-fr activities, coordinating the efforts of the French speaking community and representing OSGeo at various events. His contributions to the community also include the translation ofdocumentation to French for several OSGeo packages (http://softlibre.gloobe.org/doku.php).
Thierry Badard	Thierry is professor and researcher at the Department of geomatic sciences of Laval University (Quebec, Canada) and is a strong supporter of OSGeo in everything that he does. As part of his classes, he teaches the use of open source geospatial technologies to his students: MapServer, GeoServer, PostGIS, JTS, Geotools, OpenLayers, GeOxygene, SharpMap, CartoWeb, etc. He has been a member of OSGeo's conference committee since 2006, is an active member of OSGeo's Francophone (French language) local chapter, and just recently has initiated discussions with a few other OSGeo members for the coordination of OSGeo's presence in Quebec. Thierry is also mentor for one of OSGeo's Google Summer of Code projects and is the lead developer and coordinator of the GeOxygene project (http://oxygene-project.sourceforge.net/). To make a long story short, Thierry is a highly motivated individual who truly believes in OSGeo and as a Charter Member would represent the combination of educational, research and hobbyist interests, and could help bridge the gap with the corporate world given his dealings with the industry in the context of technology transfers.