Board Member Nominations 2017

The Board Member nomination (part of the Election 2017) will be open from 2017-09-25 to 2017-10-08 (two weeks). The list of nominees for the 2017 Board Member Election is maintained by the Chief Returning Officer (cro at osgeo.org). This page is write protected and can only be edited by SysOps.

The following nominations have been received for the OSGeo Board in 2017 through the Election 2017 process.

• The nomination period ends on 08 October 2017.
• This list is presented in the order nominations were received.
• Candidate statements and support by OSGeo participants or members, if they have been provided, are linked to immediately after the candidate name as a bulleted list.

María Arias de Reyna (Spain)

Nomination by Jeff McKenna

It is my pleasure and honour to nominate María Arias de Reyna[1] for the Board of Directors of OSGeo. You may remember that I nominated María last year for the Board, but since then she has gone on to give several great keynote talks at various events around the world, bringing much-needed discussions of diversity and sharing to the forefront of events.

María is well known in the OSGeo community for her relentless efforts as a core contributor for the GeoNetwork project, and for her longtime contributions to the SIG Libre conference (the Spanish FOSS4G). Locally she is very active through the OSGeo microchapter network Geoinquietos, and more recently also through the Spanish national geomatics association, AESIG. She works for GeoCat providing SDI solutions all over the world.

So you can see, María is a leader locally, nationally, and internationally. You can often find her live-tweeting[2] at every FOSS4G event, and sharing her passion for all things OSGeo. I see in her a very strong voice, full of youthful energy and passion, and a true leader that is absolutely ready for the global spotlight.

Please show your support for María, and help to bring her passion to the Board of the OSGeo foundation.

1. https://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/User:Delawen
2. https://twitter.com/delawen/

Support

• thread
• Seconded by: Jeffrey Johnson, Dirk Frigne, Steven Feldman, Arne Schubert, Maurico Miranda, Mayte Tuscano, Marco Lechner, Suchith Anand, Just van den Broecke, Jorge Sanz, Angelos Tzotsos, Luís Moreira de Sousa

Astrid Emde (Germany)

Nomination by Venkatesh Raghavan & Jeff McKenna

It gives us great pleasure to nominate Astrid Emde as a member of the OSGeo Board.

Astrid [1] needs no introduction for most in our community; for the few who may not yet be fully aware of Astrid’s contributions, she is an (hyper) active member of OSGeo for many years. She is a PSC member of the Mapbender [2] and OSGeo Live projects [3]. Apart from being a regular contributor at global and regional FOSS4G conferences, Astrid is the force behind the German language OSGeo Local Chapter FOSSGIS e.V. [4] ever since its inception. She is also involved in showcasing OSGeo at mega-events like INTERGEO [5] and scientific conferences like AGIT [6].

Astrid relentlessly promotes OSGeo by organizing community events, code sprints, workshops on a variety of OSGeo software, and documentation/translation. More recently, her excellent communication skills are being put to effective use in our Marketing Committee.

We would like to thank Astrid for kindly agreeing to spare her time for the added responsibility of serving the OSGeo Foundation as a member of the Board.

1. https://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/User:Astrid_Emde
2. http://www.mapbender.org/
3. https://live.osgeo.org/
4. https://www.fossgis.de/
5. http://www.intergeo.de/intergeo-en/
6. http://www.agit.at/

Support

• thread
• Seconded by: Anita Graser, Jody Garnett, Maria Brovelli, Marc Vloemans, Cameron Shorter, Dirk Frigne, Markus Neteler, Jachym Cepicky, Steven Feldman, Scott Clark, Werner Leyh, Vicky Vergara, Codrina Maria Ilie, Marco Lechner, Suchith Anand, Just van den Broecke, Jorge Sanz, Angelos Tzotsos, Luís Moreira de Sousa

Venkatesh Raghavan (Japan)

Nomination by Angelos Tzotsos

It is my pleasure and honor to nominate our President Venka Raghavan[1], from Japan, for re-election for the OSGeo Board of Directors. Venka's contributions to FOSS and FOSS4G are inspiring to our community. He is the 2012 winner of the Sol Katz Award, he created the term “FOSS4G” back in 2004, using it as the name of an international event in Thailand, and since then he has promoted FOSS4G all over the globe.

Venka has also been directly involved in OSGeo since its inception, in fact he was on the first OSGeo Board of Directors from 2006 to 2007. He is also a long-time board member of the OSGeo Japan chapter. He has served the OSGeo community for the last 2 years with great commitment and passion from the position of the President.

A professor at Osaka City University in Japan, Venka constantly encourages his students to leverage FOSS4G in all of their research. His influence in Asia wide reaching, being easily the most influential FOSS4G leader there. Venka also helps organize the GIS-IDEAS Symposium every 2 years in Vietnam, which is always FOSS4G-based.

Venka is happy to be a part of the OSGeo Board again, helping the foundation that he helped form at the beginning. So please welcome back Venka to the Board of Directors.

1. https://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/Venkatesh_Raghavan

Support

• thread

Jody Garnett (Canada)

Nomination by Cameron Shorter

I would like to nominate Jody Garnett to serve on the OSGeo Board for another 2 year term. If I were to select a few words to describe Jody's last term I'd say that he has been:

Impactful, insightful; inspiring to others; leading by example; experienced in the ways that open source communities work; prepared to tackle the less exciting problems; encouraging; practical and realistic. Jody's contributions to the OSGeo board has been hugely valuable to date, and I'm incredibly grateful that he has accepted to run for another term.

For background: Jody has served on the OSGeo board for 2 years, he chairs the OSGeo Incubation committee, was on the FOSS4G 2007 and FOSS4G 2009 organising committees, has presented regularly at conferences and workshops, is on the Project Steering Committees for UDig, GeoTools, GeoServer, and is a regular contributor to numerous OSGeo email lists.

Support

• thread
• Seconded by: Michael Smith, Marc Vloemans, Angelos Tzotsos, Suchith Anand, Ben Caradoc-Davies, Andrea Antonello, Dirk Frigne, Silvia Franceschi, Vicky Vergara, Steven Feldman

Sanghee Shin (South Korea)

Nomination by Angelos Tzotsos

It is my pleasure to nominate Sanghee Shin[1], from South Korea, for re-election for the OSGeo Board of Directors. Sanghee has been involved in FOSS4G for a long time, he is the founding member of the OSGeo Korean Chapter, which chapter actually hosts a local FOSS4G-Korea event every year since 2011. He has succesfully organized FOSS4G 2015 Seoul and has since served at the Board of Directors for 2 years. Sanghee as a Board member combines a great sense of community with a strong perspective of business.

Sanghee has accepted this nomination, so please welcome him back to the OSGeo Board of Directors.

1. https://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/User:Sanghee

Support

Vicky Vergara (Mexico)

Nomination by Regina Obe

I'd like to nominate Vicky Vergara [1] to the OSGeo Board of Directors. I think she'll be a great asset to our outreach efforts.

Vicky has been heavily involved in OSGeo activities in both development and outreach. On the Development side, she's the main maintainer of the pgRouting community project in all areas documentation, coding, testing, and refactoring. On related work she also helps with maintenance and development of the QGIS pgRouting Layer and maintaining and enhancing the osm2pgrouting loader tool.

On the outreach side, she's been a mentor for a number of years for GSoc. She also got recently involved with OSGeo-Live helping in streamlining the documentation and general workflow. She speaks often at FOSS4G conferences most recently Korea, India and she's off to Argentina. She is fluent in a number of languages (Spanish, English, and some Japanese and other languages I don't know). She has a balanced perspective on things being first an Economist and second a Computer Scientist. She is very energetic and when you are around her you can't help but to be excited too.

1. https://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/User:Cvvergara

Nomination by Daniel Kastl

It's my pleasure to nominate Vicky Vergara [1] as a member of the OSGeo Board.

Vicky is an economist and computer scientist, pgRouting fan and developer, and she is a free software advocate. She is very active in several OSGeo communities and FOSS4G projects, and she is very passionate about the projects she is involved in [2].

Vicky's contributions and commitment to the pgRouting project [3] have helped to make it an agile OSGeo community project with active new users and contributors. Beside being a core contributor and PSC member of the pgRouting project, Vicky is also a PSC member of the OSGeo Live project [4] and a very active mentor for OSGeo's Google Summer of Code program [5].

Vicky lives in Mexico City and works for remotely for Georepublic. She will also be able to speak for the Latin-American local OSGeo communities, that are currently not well represented in the OSGeo board.

I'm sure, that Vicky would be an excellent board member!

1. https://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/User:Cvvergara
2. https://github.com/cvvergara
3. http://pgrouting.org/
4. https://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/Live_GIS_Management
5. https://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/Google_Summer_of_Code_2017

Support

Helena Mitasova (United States)

Nomination by Angelos Tzotsos, Markus Neteler, Venkatesh Raghavan,

It is a great honor for us to nominate Prof. Helena Mitasova for the 2017 OSGeo Board Elections.

Prof. Helena Mitasova hardly needs any introduction. Her activities that encompass the entire gamut of the OSGeo Foundation goals, speak for themselves. She was awarded the Sol Katz Award in 2010 for her long standing contribution to the OSGeo Foundation and FOSS4G communities.

Recently, she has been one of the driving force behind the Geo4All initiative. She is also instrumental in the conclusion of several MoUs with international professional organizations. Her deep insight in area of Education and Research will help to strengthen our outreach. Further, her invaluable experience on the present OSGeo board will also be an asset.

We thank her for agreeing to be nominated for the 2017 OSGeo Board elections.

1. http://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/User:Helena
2. http://www.geo4all.org/
3. https://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/MOU_OSGeo_All

Support