Election 2017 Candidate Manifestos

A space for the candidates for election to the Board to share some information about themselves, their aspirations for OSGeo, what they would like to change, improve or introduce and what role they would like to play on the board.

A space for the candidates for election to the Board to share some information about themselves, their aspirations for OSGeo, what they would like to change, improve or introduce and what role they would like to play on the board.

Vicky Vergara

About me

I am a person that sets goals and does what is possible to achieve them. I also tend to modify those goals depending on the situation.

I am an Economist by accident, a Computer Scientist by choice, with the heart of a teacher.

I arrived to OSGeo because I wanted to go to Japan and I wanted to do something that could combine the Economics and Computer Science, I had in mind a Geo-Economic Information System.

There was an opportunity to study GIS in Japan, but as things turned out, I was not blessed with the scholarship, so could not go to Japan to learn GIS. I removed the goal of going to Japan and added the goal of learning GIS by my self.

I used many of the OSGeo projects like QGIS, MapServer and postGIS, I also compared Mexico's INGEI data with OSM data. Four months later I had a map to work with, so, the goal of learning GIS was “completed” (you never stop learning).

With my data and map ready, the first idea that came to my mind was to make a route from my house to my dad's house, that is when I arrived to pgRouting. There were some issues because of the INEGI data, and I had to modify code so that I could route from my house to my dad's house.

Because of these modifications, I offered myself as translator as a way to thank pgRouting developers for being open.

That is when I started talking with the pgRouting developers, Steve Woodbrige & Daniel Kastl, and I was invited to include the modifications I made into the 2.0 release of pgRouting (September 2013). So my life as open source developer started.

The following year, 2014, Steve invited me to participate on an open project “Trash collection for Montevideo” and while we developed, he mentored me about the benefits of being open and taught me how to work as a team on an open source project.

On 2015, I was invited again to fix bugs for pgRouting, and on our discussions, it was decided that a full rewrite was to be done, so I became the full time pgRouting main developer.(removed from the goal stack the idea for the Geo-Economic Information System) This same year I was blessed to be nominated and accepted as a charter member of OSGeo. Since this year, I have been a mentor on the OSGeo-GSoC program.

Because of pgRouting being on the rewrite process, I started visiting #osgeolive IRC room, to make sure that pgRouting could be installed, I didn’t want the rewrite to break the installation on OSGeo-Live.

I must mention that on 2015 I also achieved the long discarded goal of going to Japan, when I went to FOSS4G Tokyo on 2015. (you never know when the change of goal finally make you reach the original goal)

This year, on May 2017, on one of the visits to osgelive IRC, there was a PSC meeting and I was invited to stay. The OSGeo-Live project members were always glad to help me, so when I was asked to help as communications liaison I accepted with pleasure. Started to "do" besides communications liaison, made some modifications to the documentation, fixes, debugging, and eventually (like 42 days later), on June, I was invited to become PSC of OSGeo-Live.

I consider myself the luckiest person in the open source world, I do 24/7 open source, thanks to Daniel Kastl and Georepulic.

My vision

• OSGeo Foundation is here to serve the Flora of the world.
• OSGeo Foundation is here to serve the Fauna of the world.
• OSGeo Foundation is here to serve the Climate of the world.
• OSGeo Foundation is here to serve the People of the world.
• OSGeo Foundation is here to serve the Countries of the world.
• All OSGeo community members are PSC (Propose, Suggest and Comment)

What you have done within the community in the past

• pgRouting contributor on version 2.0
• pgRouting main developer since version 2.1
• Contributor and PSC of OSGeo-Live since version 11.0
• Very proud OSGeo-GSoC mentor of:
  • Sarthak Agarwal
  • Andrea Nardelli
  • Rohith Reddy
  • Maogang Wang
  • Vidhan Jain

What your interests are in terms of the board

In general: promote the use and development of Free and Open Source Software In particular: promote the use and development of the OSGeo projects, OSGeo incubation and OSGeo community Free Open Source Software.

Any things that you would like to change or introduce

Given my location and maternal language, the following points have a stronger implied emphasis to Latin America, but its not limited to this area.

• Encourage developers to build open projects using OSGeo projects that can help communities from pot hole control to emergency plans, from planting trees to avoid forest deprivation, from Archeology to Economics, etc.
• Promote the use of open source as tools, in particular OSGeo projects that give an ample variety of backend and frontend tools for systems development.
• Promote the participation of Latin American students/developers/users to participate from simple tasks as translation up to code contributions on OSGeo Projects
• Promote the participation of Latin American students/developers/users to create new OSGeo Community projects that can be used by local communities.
• I went to the OGP summit in Mexico 2015 https://www.opengovpartnership.org/ and I think there is a lot of possibilities for using OSGeo projects. Do more research, and maybe starting to see how my own country is advancing towards the openness and more details on how OSGeo can be/its being used.
• Support and ancourage smaller open source projects to join OSGeo, and make OSGeo more valuable for them
• Reach out to Latin-American local chapters and encourage them to play an active role in OSGeo

What role you would wish to fulfil on the board (if any)

As an Economist, I don't want to handle money (remember it was by accident).

Candidate

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