Sol Katz Award

Background

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sol_Katz

Selection Committee

• Frank Wamerdam (chair)
• Jeff McKenna
• Paul Ramsey
• Venkatesh Raghavan
• need one more.

Process

• Put out a call for nominations fairly widely on appropriate mailing lists (freegis, osgeo discuss, etc)
• Nominations are sent to SolKatzAward@conference.osgeo.org.
• Committee selects awardee
• Prepare plaque and tokens of appreciation
• Present in Foss4g2006 closing plenary

2005 Award Documents

• Call for Nominations
• Text in MUM3 Program (includes BIO submitted from his daughter)
• Pics submitted by his daughter:

2006 Call for Nominations

SUBJECT: Sol Katz Award for Geospatial Free and Open Source Software - Call for Nominations

The Open Source Geospatial Foundation would like to open nominations for the 2006 Sol Katz Award for Geospatial Free and Open Source Software.

The Sol Katz Award for Geospatial Free and Open Source Software (GFOSS) will be given to individuals who have demonstrated leadership in the GFOSS community. Recipients of the award will have contributed significantly through their activities to advance open source ideals in the geospatial realm.

Sol Katz was an early pioneer of GFOSS and left behind a large body of work in the form of applications, format specifications, and utilities while at the U.S. Bureau of Land Management. This early GFOSS archive provided both source code and applications freely available to the community. Sol was also a frequent contributor to many geospatial list servers, providing much guidance to the geospatial community at large.

Sol unfortunately passed away in 1999 from Non-Hodgkin's Lymphoma, but his legacy lives on in the open source world. Those interested in making a donation to the American Cancer Society, as per Sol's family's request, can do so at https://www.cancer.org/asp/donate/don_multi_donate.asp?navToScreen=don_1.

Nominations for the Sol Katz Award should be sent to SolKatzAward@conference.osgeo.org with a description of the reasons for this nomination. Nominations will be accepted until midnight UTC on August 31st (http://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/fixedtime.html?month=9&day=01&year=2006&hour=0&min=0&sec=0). A recipient will be decided from the nomination list by a selection committee designated by the OSGeo board.

The winner of the Sol Katz Award for Geospatial Free and Open Source Software will be announced on September 15th at the FOSS4G 2006 conference (http://www.foss4g2006.org/) in Lausanne Switzerland. The hope is that the award will both acknowledge the work of community members, and pay tribute to one of its founders, for years to come.