New Member Nominations 2013

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The Charter Member nomination period runs from 2013-07-09 to 2013-07-23! The list of nominees for the 2013 Charter Member Election is maintained by the Chief Returning Officer (cro at osgeo.org).

To submit a charter member nomination:

  • Please confirm with the nominated person first!
  • Please email cro@osgeo.org with their name, country, contact email and paragraph describing why you are recommending this person as a Charter Member
  • Please also feel free to cc: the nomination to the OSGeo discussion list - discuss@lists.osgeo.org - so the community can be nudged along and have a sense of what is going on.
  • Also, you might want to reference your OSGeo Advocate profile.

The list of nominees will be maintained by the CRO here:

_______Name_______ ______Country______ Notes
Just van den Broecke The Netherlands From: Bart van den Eijnden

I'd like to nominate Just van den Broecke for OSGeo charter membership. Just has invested a lot of his time in getting the Dutch language chapter of Osgeo set up recently [0].

He has worked with a lot of the OSGeo software projects and has also developed tools in the open source domain on top of this such as Heron Mapping Components [1] and Streaming ETL [2].

In 2012 he organised the OSGeo track at the Geospatial World Forum 2012 (GWF) and he is a regular visitor/speaker to/on FOSS4G and the Bolsena hacking event as well.


Phillip Davis USA From: Phillip Davis

I would like to nominate myself for the OSGeo Charter membership. As the Director of the GeoTech Center [0] and Project Manager of the NISGTC [1] and a 30 year educator, I have a broad, international, interest in promoting Open Source software. My immediate goal is to secure $2M in NSF funding to create a national FOSS4G Academy here in the US [2]. Please also check out my LinkedIn profile [3].


Marc Jansen Germany From: Bart van den Eijnden

I'd like to nominate Marc Jansen for OSGeo charter membership. Marc is actively involved in the OpenLayers [0] and GeoExt [1] projects and works for the German company terrestris [2]. He also co-created the GXM (GeoExt Mobile) [3] library based on Sencha Touch and OpenLayers. Marc also co-wrote a book [4] in German on OpenLayers.

In 2012 Terrestris hosted a code sprint on GeoExt 2 in Bonn at their office, which was a great experience. A lot of the initial code for GeoExt 2 was actually created at an internal code sprint by terrestris in Malta.

I have met Marc many times at code sprints and FOSS4G conferences, and was surprised to see he's not actually already a charter member.


Volker Mische Germany From: Bart van den Eijnden

I'd like to nominate Volker Mische for OsGeo charter membership, since to my GREAT surprise he is not already a charter member.

Volker hardly needs any introduction. He is the creator of GeoCouch [0] and works at Couchbase [1]. I'm sure many of you have seen his talks @FOSS4G conferences on this subject.

He also contributed to OpenLayers [2], has co-created a library that integrates OpenLayers with jQuery (MapQuery).

Volker is very active member in the OSGeo community already, and was involved in the organisation of FOSS4G in 2009 in Sydney [3].

See also his engagement with FOSS4G 2013 [4].

Marco Lechner Germany From: Athina Trakas

I would like to nominate Marco Lechner as OSGeo Charter member.

Marco is a well known and constant supporter of the the OSGeo community and since many years involved in planning and execution of the German speaking FOSSGIS Konferenz [0].

He is president of the management board of the FOSSGIS e.V. [1], the legal association supporting Free Software for Geoinformation and Open Geodata in Germany. The history of FOSSGIS goes back to the German GRASS User Community founded in 2001. The FOSSGIS e.V. is the OSGeo German speaking Local Chapter and acts as a legal entitiy for the German speaking OpenStreetMap [2] community.

Codrina Maria Ilie Romania From: Jeff McKenna

It is my honor to nominate Codrina [0] as a Charter Member of OSGeo. Passionate about FOSS4G and Open Data, she is well known for her enthusiasm in Romania and Denmark.

Earlier this year, I was planning on giving training in Copenhagen, I might have mentioned this on the OSGeo Board mailing list, and then I received a direct email from her introducing herself and asking if we should have an OSGeo meetup in Copenhagen when I was there. Even though she recently moved from Romania to Denmark, she was somehow able to be the sparkplug to bring together a large group of Open Source geospatial passionate people in Copenhagen.

Little did I know that this meeting would also spark an invite to me to the (at the time) upcoming FOSS4G-CEE event in Bucharest [1], hosted by the geo-spatial.org / Romanian Chapter team [2]. I would of course end up attending the event, and watched as her and the geo-spatial.org family brought together hundreds of FOSS4G and Open Data enthusiasts from countries all over Europe.

Codrina may not write code, but she has that rare passion, that strength, that guts, that allows her to network and share her FOSS4G knowledge. She holds workshops [3], writes user guides, and organizes events [4], that bring together developers, decision makers, students, and users - these thankless tasks are so very important. I've heard from others how she repeatedly attends hi-tech events with no other females present, introduces herself and starts promoting FOSS4G and Open Data.

I feel this is an international leader to-be, someone who sees the world as a very small community, willing to travel to bring the community together. It is my honor to help her grow and allow her to provide input to the shape of the OSGeo foundation.

It is for all these reasons I am nominating Codrina to become a Charter Member of OSGeo.

Eli Adam USA From: David Percy

I would like to nominate Eli Adam as Charter Member.

Eli is active on the OSGeo Journal [0], and several other committees at OSGeo. He was also instrumental in establishing the Portland, Oregon open source GIS group as an official chapter of OSGeo [1]. He has worked on a statewide campaign to get government standardized on GeoMoose for parcel data (he may have contributed code, too). As a government employee, he brings a very useful perspective.

I'm sure Eli does a whole lot of other great stuff, he has so much energy and is so helpful!

Alessandro Furieri Italy From: Markus Neteler

Alessandro is an Italian developer working as a freelancer. In the FOSS4G world he is quite known as the main developer and maintainer of both the SpatiaLite and RasterLite projects [0]. Furthermore, he is a QGIS contributor [1] (the SpatiaLite data provider), and he contributed some code to GDAL/OGR [2] as well (GML Topology advanced parser, SQLite/SpatiaLite driver).

Alessandro is active in the Italian community: During the last three years he was the President of the very productive OSGeo's Italian Local Chapter - GFOSS.it [3]

Vincent Picavet France From: Jáchym Čepický

I would like to nominate Vincent Picavet as a Charter Member of OSGeo.

I know Vincent personally as QGIS [0] and PostGIS [1] enthusiast and developer, and I share his ideas about OSGeo and it's environment, which I had the chance to know a little bit during our chats at both FOSS4G-CEE events (his idea it was, to rename it to FOSS4G-NSCNEE for Not-So-Central-Neither-Eastern-Europe, which I like).

Vincent was always involved in open source world, particulary in the GIS field. He is a founding member of Francophone OSGeo local chapter [2] and its current treasurer. He has initiated the first FOSS4G event in France (FROG2013) and organized other FOSS4G-related events in France (QGIS day 2011, PostGIS session 2011...)

Vincent talked at a lot of international and local conferences on various FOSS4G subjects (among others about QGIS) and especially spatial databases (PostGIS).

Vincent founded Oslandia [3] in 2009 with Olivier Courtin, providing services around FOSS4G and focusing on quality and innovation for opensource GIS.


Taichi FURUHASHI Japan From: Venkatesh Raghavan

Furahashi-san is the driving force behind the FOSS4G-Japan events and the main organizer of FOSS4G-Tokyo [0] event. He is also very active in the OSM community and took the lead in organizing SotM-Tokyo in 2012 [1]. He uses, develops and promotes OSGeo Source and Open Data in several of his projects both nationally and internationally. His recent work related to the March 11 2011 earthquake in Japan is also widely appreciated.

Find out more about Furuhashi-san on his Google+ web pages [2]


Nobusuke IWASAKI Japan From: Venkatesh Raghavan

Iwasaki-san's passion for FOSS4G in unmatched. He is one of the the main organizer of FOSS4G-Japan event [0] and also a regular at FOSS4G Global events. He is a very active user, developer, trainer and promoter of OSGeo Source geospatial and Open Data at several forums and also in his projects both nationally and internationally. Apart form several scientific works using Open Source and Open Data, his work on i18N of OSGeo software and OSGeo-Live is also a great contribution.

Find out more about Iwasaki-san on his web page at: [1]


Daniel Kastl Germany From: Venkatesh Raghavan

Daniel-san is a regular at FOSS4G since beginning. He leads the pgRouting [0] project which has become one of the regular and workshops at FOSS4G related events [1]. He is very active a a mentor in GSoC [2] and has trained several young developers. He is also very active in the OSM community. He is a very active user, developer, trainer and promoter of OSGeo Source and Open Data at several forums and projects.

Learn more about Daniel-san at on his LinkedIn profile page at [3].


Helmut Kudrnovsky Austria From: Margherita Di Leo

Dear All,
it is my pleasure to nominate Helmut Kudrnovsky from Austria as an OSGeo charter member.

Honestly I had to double check the list of current charter members for I was really surprised not to find him there yet! Helli is an enthusiastic propagator of GFOSS, and a key resource for the GRASS GIS community [0], due his commitment on testing and improving the compatibility for MS Windows.

Furthermore, he is always prompt in helping users in ML [2]. I was lucky to meet him in person during EGU 2013 conference [1] in Vienna and he helped us with the organization of our session on FOSS in Geosciences.



Maxim Dubinin Russia From: Anne Ghisla

I would like to nominate Maxim Dubinin [0] from Russia as Charter Member.

I met Maxim at Lisbon QGIS Code sprint, and I noticed his attention to details and solid belief in open source values.

He is the founder of GIS-Lab.info [1], the reference community of GIS/RS specialists in Russia since 2001. He believes that information sharing and creativity are key qualities to improve the world. He is interested in bridging the gap between GIS and OSM community, for example by bringing data from OSM to GIS and people from GIS to OSM. [2]. He is most noticeably a stable QGIS contributor and translator [3]. He founded NextGIS [4], so far the only opensource geospatial solutions provider focusing on Russia.

I believe that he would be a great Charter member, thanks to his long-time experience with open source geospatial, and his human qualities altogether.


Sarawut NINSAWAT Thailand From: Venkatesh Raghavan

Sarawut-san is a leading figure on Open Source, Open Data in Thailand [0] and also worked extensively on Sensor Observation and Web Processing Service. He is engaged in teaching Geospatial Technologies at Asian Institute of Technology. He is a very active user, developer, trainer and promoter OSGeo Source and Open Data at several forums and projects. He would be an asset to OSGeo as Charter Member using experience in Japan and Thailand.

Learn more about Sarawut-san at on his LinkedIn profile page at [1].


Nikos Ves Greece From: Margherita Di Leo

I'd like to nominate Nikos Ves [0] for OSGeo charter membership.

Nikos is an agricultural engineer from Aristoteleio University of Thessaloniki (Auth), Greece. He got involved with GFOSS during his Msc courses, and since then he's promoting it in academic environment and research while helping others in whatever problems they have (orientation, suggestions of right tools, bug hunting).

I met Nikos during the GRASS GIS Community Sprint in Genova, Italy where he managed to translate about 20% of GRASS to Greek. [0]. He's very active in gis.stackexcange forums helping other members with their GFOSS problems, mainly with gdal, postgis and python [1].


Ian Edwards United Kingdom From: Jo Cook

I'd like to nominate Ian Edwards for OSGeo charter membership. Ian is the current Chair of the UK local chapter [0], and is a crucial member of the local organising committee for FOSS4G 2013 [1]. He also has lots of extremely useful Drupal skills that he's hoping to use on the WebCom committee [2] (not that he needs to be a Charter Member for that of course) and is involved with the OSGeo Live Project [3].


Harish Kumar Solanki India From: Ravi Vundavalli

It is a pleasure to nominate Harish Kumar Solanki [0] for the OSGeo Charter. He is a great propogator of FOSS GIS. On his own he has taken up several training programs in the 'National Institute of Rural Development' (NIRD), India and promotes OSGeo software for use in the public authorities [1].

His work includes extensive Watershed management. Solanki is a lead trainer / propagator of FOSS GIS India.


Nathan Woodrow Australia From: Anita Graser

It's my honor to nominate Nathan Woodrow for OSGeo charter member.

Nathan has been an active developer and member of the QGIS project [0] for the last three years and he is working as Technical Consultant and QGIS Specialist at Digital Mapping Solutions (DMS) [1]. He co-founded the Australian QGIS user group [2] which is spreading the word about open source GIS down under. Nathan will also be one of the keynote speakers at this year's FOSS4G [3].



Borys Jurgiel Poland From: Anne Ghisla

I would like to nominate Borys Jurgiel from Poland as Charter Member.

Borys [0] is an active QGIS developer since 2008 [1,2]. He also enthusiastically popularizes FOSS and OSGeo world while making presentations and training courses on QGIS.

With Robert Szczepanek and Milena Nowotarska, he established "QGIS Polska" [3] group, where they provide training courses and maintain the Polish forum about QGIS together with other OSGeo projects [4], where they take part to the discussions and answer to users' questions. They all are of course part of the OSGeo Polish Chapter [5].

I feel that Borys would be a great Charter Member, because he is effectively both a coder and a communicator.


Silvana Comboin Brazil From: Suchith Anand

I would like to nominate Silvana Comboin [0] as OSGeo Charter member. Silvana has provided us huge support in our education efforts esp. in her lead in establishing Open Source Geospatial Labs in Brazil [1]. Last year, she established the first Open Source Geospatial Lab in Brazil at Federal University of Paraná and now is actively helping and supporting colleagues in other universities in Brazil and across South America to start Open Source Geospatial Labs in their universities. Silvana has strong research background in Geospatial Science, SDI and GI standards. Previously she was working at the Brazilian National Mapping Agency before moving to Federal University of Paraná as a professor at the Geomatics Department. She also coordinate the Standards Workgroup of the Brazilian NSDI (INDE).

Thanks to efforts of Silvana and other Brazilian colleagues we are getting huge momentum in our education efforts globally [2]. For example, last month she co-organised the first meeting of the ICA-OSGeo Labs in Brazil at São Paulo , parallel to MundoGEO # Connect Latin America 2013 [3].

I also had the privilege of meeting her last year when she visited Nottingham University and discuss ideas. I believe Silvana Comboin will be an excellent OSGeo charter member and will help in further building up our global strength. Thanks.


Minpa Lee Korea From: Sanghee Shin

As an active Korean chapter member, he has contributed many things to our local chapter including organizing annual FOSS4G Korea event, training and education of open source GIS and others.

First, he is a regular organizer and speaker of FOSS4G Korea[2][3] event and several open source GIS trainings. [4]

Second, he is also an excellent and famous open source GIS programmer especially in Java, WPS and QGIS. He has developed and maintained QGIS plugin called 'TMS for Korea'[5] that ignited huge interest in QGIS here in Korea. As a skilled Java programmer, he developed and released uDig plugin called 'GXT Toolbox for uDig' that extended the uDig's analysis functions drastically.[6] He is currently leading the DBMS driver development project bridging GeoTools/GeoServer/uDig and some proprietary Korean DBMS.[7]

Lastly he put much efforts to open source GIS trainings and translations too. He was involved in developing on-line open source GIS curriculum.[8] He translated many GeoTools/GeoServer related documents into Korean and shared them with other Korean people through his personal blog[9] and was a co-translator of QGIS Korean Manual.[10]

So, I definitely believe that his enthusiastic activity will be great asset to OSGeo international community and will bring much fresh energy to us.

Sanghee


Tuong Thuy VU Malaysia From: Venkatesh Raghavan

My pleasure to nominate Tuong Thuy VU [0]as OSGeo Charter Member

Tuong Thuy VU has been leading FOSS4G and OSGeo activities in Malaysia. He is one of the the main organizer of FOSS4G events in Malaysia and is also a key person in strengthening network in Vietnam and Southeast Asia [1]. He is a very active user, trainer and promoter OSGeo Source and Open Data at several forums [2] and also in his teaching and research projects .


Maria Arias de Reyna Spain From: Jeroen Ticheler

I would like to nominate Maria Arias de Reyna as OSGeo Charter member.

Maria [0] is an active promotor of open source software and open data in Spain and serves on the board of the Spanish speaking local chapter [1] of OSGeo. She's a true FOSS evangelizer, OpenStreetMap evangelizer and hardcore Linux Debian user.

She has also been involved in FOSS development for quite some time, first mainly on routing and at GeoCat on GeoNetwork opensource [2]. She develops plugins for gvSIG [3] and works with many OSGeo packages on a daily basis.

You can read more about and from her at http://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/User:Delawen#Maria_Arias_de_Reyna.

We need women like her in OSGeo that combine personal dedication, technological knowledge and a drive to change the world we live in!


François Prunayre France From: Jeroen Ticheler

I would like to nominate François Prunayre as OSGeo Charter Member.

François [0] is one of those rare people that have dedicated huge amounts of energy and time in quietly developing and supporting open source software. François is one of the absolute first developers to join the GeoNetwork opensource project [1] back in 2004 if I remember well. Since that moment he has never tired to take GeoNetwork to a higher level. He's responsible for about a third of the total commits to the project, an endless row of new proposals and experiments.

That's not all. François also provides training at FOSS4G [2] conferences, develops the Spatial ETL [3] in Talend and on the geOrchestra project [4]. He's been participant to all Bolsena Hacking events [5], moderates the French mailinglist of GeoNetwork and a lot more.

In short, he has a truly impressive status that is still building up day by day. François is a great person to work with and who deserves recognition by the larger OSGeo community. Please support me in this nomination.


Yann Chemin Sri Lanka From: Margherita Di Leo

Let us nominate Yann Chemin [0] from France / Sri Lanka (rather "citizen of the world"), for OSGeo Charter membership.

Yann is a researcher at IWMI [3,9], Visiting Lecturer at University of Colombo [4] and Visiting Lecturer/Consultant at University of Moratuwa [5], Sri Lanka.

His research interest lies in water, land and planetary remote sensing [1].

One of his major goals is to provide extensive information on soil and vegetation from remote sensing sources, that are often the only data sources available in developing countries.

We (Anne & Madi) met Yann at GRASS Community Sprint in Genova in 2013 [6], after many years of email exchange and contributions on GRASS GIS documentation. We had the opportunity to meet him again [7] in GRASS Community Sprint in Prague [8], where we discussed extensively on how open source geospatial software can improve education and land management in Sri Lanka, where he currently lives.

We believe that Yann would be a very effective Charter Member. He is a passionate promoter of open source geospatial, a skilled researcher and a great communicator.

Anne, Margherita and Jachym


Pekka Sarkola Finland From: Ari Jolma

Pekka has been working with geospatial since mid-90's. He is a well known person in the Finnish GIS community. Pekka participated in FOSS4G in Denver in September 2011, and he has since been working actively to expand and build the Finnish OSGeo community. Pekka would be the third Finnish OSGeo charter member.

Pekka was the main force behind the Finnish application for FOSS4G 2013 (which was received well but lost in the final vote against Nottingham). Pekka has organised two FOSS4G meetings in Finland [1]. He is an active member in the Finnish chapters of OpenKnowledge Foundation and OpenStreetMap. He was responsible of the Open Geodata stream in the first OKFestival in Helsinki 2012 [2]. Pekka is a member of the organizing committee of OGRS 2014 [3].

Pekka's company, Gispo Oy, [4] helps customers to benefit from FOSS4G software and open geospatial datasets. Pekka writes regularly a blog in Finnish [5] and tweets in English and Finnish [6]. Pekka is also guest lecturer in the Aalto University.

Pekka is a great advocate for FOSS4G software in Finland and overseas. He is eager to help many users to benefit from open source and open data solutions in various industries. His professionalism and business knowledge is beneficial to the OSGeo community.


Micho García Spain From: Jorge Gaspar Sanz Salinas

I want to nominate Micho García[0] as OSGeo Charter Member:

Micho is a FOSS4G freelance developer, part of the geomati.co[1] network. He has been a key leader at the OSGeo Spanish Language Local Chapter[2] (member of the board of directors from 2009 to 2012), doing advocacy about OSGeo, our Local Chapter and Free Software in general in many events, not only in Spain but also in South America. He is also one of the leaders of the Galicia micro-chapter Geoinquietos group[3] that recently have organized a small (but very promising) event in Spain called GeoCamp[4].


Yoichi SEINO Japan From: Venkatesh Raghavan

Seino-san is a one of the leaders of Open Source, Open Data and Debian community in Japan and also working on GIS application in Archaeology. He is engaged in teaching Open Source Geospatial Technologies at several national and international workshops. He is a very active user, developer, trainer and promoter of OSGeo Software and Open Data. He would be a great choice as OSGeo as Charter Member and contribute through his experiences in Japan and elsewhere.


Peter Baumann Germany From: Gerald Fenoy

Hello,
it is an honor for me to nominate Peter Baumann [0] as OSGeo Charter Member.

I suppose that everybody know Peter Bauman first for the amazing work he make at OGC [1] and on rasdaman project [2] which is currently in the OSGeo Incubation Process. Peter mixes between research and business, he is professor at Jacobs University Bremen and also the founder and CEO of rasdaman GmbH [3]. Peter is very active as an OGC member and in general in real life he is what I would call a "passionate community guy", always open to discussion, sharing his view / ideas and trying to find ways to make OSGeo projects collaborating with each other. Peter Baumann was one of the Keynote speakers at the FOSS4G-CEE [4] this year as our president was.

I think that Peter can be a real asset for OSGeo for promoting OSGeo with the passion, knowledge and relevance which characterize himself.


Sergio Acosta y Lara Uruguay From: Suchith Anand

I would like to nominate Sergio Acosta y Lara from Uruguay as OSGeo Charter Member. Sergio has been actively involved in many Open Source Geospatial initiatives such as gvSIG Batoví [0].

He has been working to help spread OSGeo through various conferences [1] and events [2] in South America. He also wrote several scientific publications as well as took part in many research activities in the field of geoinformation science. He is currently in charge of the GIS Office at the Dirección Nacional de Topografía -Ministerio de Transporte y Obras Públicas (MTOP; Ministry of Transport and Public Works) in Uruguay.


Mark Leslie Australia From: Jody_Garnett

I would like to nominate Mark Leslie as Charter Member. Mark Leslie is a long time member of the open source community, participating in the GeoServer [0] and PostGIS [1] communities. In Australia Mark is active in supporting the OSGeo Aust-NZ chapter [2].

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