2018 PSC Election Candidates - qgis/QGIS GitHub Wiki

2018 PSC Election Candidates

On this page our PSC and Board candidates briefly introduce themselves and share a short motivation as to why they would like to serve on the board and what they would like to achieve.

Candidates please copy and paste the section below, adding your own details.

Candidate name:

Introduction / main QGIS related activities:

Motivation:

Candidate name: Giovanni Manghi

Introduction / main QGIS related activities: Italian native, I'm living and working in Portugal since 2002. I'm a wildlife biologist turned to GIS specialist and an "early" QGIS adopter (circa 2008). I make my living with my small company mainly with (but not limited to) GIS training. I also worked for 1.5+ years for a well known American company as a tester. I'm an OSGeo member, co-founder of the Portuguese QGIS user group and (co-)organizer of 2 Portuguese QGIS users meetings (Coimbra 2014 and Porto 2016) and 2 QGIS Developer meetings (Lisbon 2011 and Funchal 2018).

Within the QGIS project I'm known as the bug tracker maintainer (even if I'm not sure this "position" officially really exist) with thousands of replies/comments in tickets and countless hours spent doing bug triage/testing on multiple platforms and multiple QGIS versions. Because of my activity as trainer I'm also a prolific bug reporter, in fact I'm the most prolific one. From time to time I also like to do some simple contribution for the QGIS Processing toolbox.

Motivation: Help keep up the good things going! Personally I think that the actual PSC did an amazing job and I would have re-elected it entirely. As a spot in the PSC opened I accepted with enthusiasm when I was asked if I was available to eventually fill this hole.

Candidate name: Anita Graser (http://anitagraser.com)

Introduction / main QGIS related activities: I am a scientist, open source GIS advocate, and author. My background is in computer science with a specialization in geographic information science and I am currently working with the Center for Mobility Systems at the Austrian Institute of Technology in Vienna. I’m teaching QGIS classes at UNIGIS Salzburg and, since 2013, I serve on the QGIS project steering committee. From 2015 to 2017, I served on the OSGeo board of directors. I’ve published several books about QGIS, including “Learning QGIS” (currently 3rd edition), “QGIS Map Design”, and “QGIS 2 Cookbook”. Furthermore, I develop tools such as Time Manager and pgRoutingLayer plugin for QGIS. As PSC Design Advisor, I managed the design process for the new QGIS3 logo and I take care of release name selection and preparing related graphics for installers, splash screens, and website.

Motivation: My goal is to continue my work on the PSC. At the monthly meetings, I aim to be a voice of our user community, being a power user myself, as well as a moderator on GIS.stackexchange.org where I get a good overview of the issues users encounter on a regular basis.

Candidate name: Alessandro Pasotti (aka @elpaso)

Introduction / main QGIS related activities: I am an open source software developer and I live in Italy. By education I'm an agronomist with some limited topography and pedology background, but I turned to the dark side early in my career and I started programming any kind of device that has a chip inside as soon as their price dropped low enough. I started using Linux in 1994 and after some real work as an R&D data analyst for a big pharmaceutical company I started my own small business that was making map-based web applications for the touristic market (there was no Google Map and such at that time) and it is for this reason that I discovered GRASS, Mapserver, PostGIS and finally QGIS when I needed a GIS viewer.

Over the years I've made minor contributions to several open source projects and I created a bunch of QGIS Python plugins, but it is from the QGIS Lisbon Hack-Fest in 2011 that I really got involved within the community and my first big contribution was a new website for the fast growing set of QGIS Python plugins (the one that it is already in production today at https://plugins.qgis.org ).

5 years ago I re-started to write some C++ code and I'm now a QGIS core developer and a proud member of this amazing community. During the last two years I've been professionally employed to work on QGIS sponsored by the same well-known American company where worked Giovanni but I'm now back to my own (Q)GIS-centered small business trying to team up with other community members.

Motivation: (shameless copied from Giovanni's one because I feel exactly the same) Help keep up the good things going! Personally I think that the actual PSC did an amazing job and I would have re-elected it entirely. I accepted with enthusiasm when I was asked I was available to eventually fill this hole.

Unauthorized campaign advertising: If you don't vote for me, Giovanni Manghi is your man :)

Candidate name: Kurt Menke (@geomenke)

Introduction / main QGIS related activities: I’m a consultant, QGIS certified educator and author based out of Albuquerque, New Mexico, USA. For the last 10 years I have operated my own small (me) GIS consultancy, Bird’s Eye View (http://www.birdseyeviewgis.com/). I primarily work for non-profits on ecological conservation and public health issues. I have been doing GIS for 20 years and was an early QGIS and FOSS4G adopter. I began using MapServer, GRASS and PostGIS for web apps in the early 2000’s.

I’ve been using QGIS since 0.6 ‘Simon’ and teaching it since 1.0 ‘Kore’. I co-authored the GeoAcademy curriculum (https://fossgeo.org/) and then published it as "Discover QGIS". Prior to that I co-authored "Mastering QGIS" and am currently working on the 3rd edition. QGIS is my day to day tool for spatial analyses and cartography. I regularly teach everything from conference workshops to full semester courses (at my local colleges and universities). In 2015 I was part of the GeoAcademy team awarded the GeoForAll Educator of the Year award. I am an Osgeo Charter Member, a GeoForAll lab and GeoAmbassador. I recently helped revive the QGIS-US user group. I have also been involved with QGIS Certifications, helping approve QGIS organizations.

Motivation: I love the QGIS community and have been looking for more ways to contribute and be of service. I also feel the outgoing PSC did an incredible job. For me it was a great honor just to be nominated. I hope that the fact that I am not a developer, rather a power user and educator/trainer, means I might bring a different viewpoint to the PSC. That of a small business offering QGIS services but not directly working on QGIS. Since I’m a North American (I’d rather not be considered an American at the moment) I would also represent a different part of the world. I am interested in facilitating the ongoing adoption of QGIS in more and more sectors.

Candidate name: Andreas Neumann

Introduction / main QGIS related activities: I'am a geographer (specialized in cartography and GIS) and long time QGIS user (since about 2005). In my main job I am a GIS project manager at the Canton of Zug in Switzerland and partially a developer of smaller Python plugins or Python code useful for our inhouse projects. Prior to working in Zug, I was the responsible GIS manager at the City of Uster and Switzerland, and prior to that I was working as a research assistant and PhD student at the Cartographic Institute at ETH in Zurich.

Regarding QGIS, I helped to introduce QGIS in public authorities, companies and NGOs in Switzerland and co-founded the Swiss QGIS user group. Since a few years I manage the financial resources of the QGIS.ORG project. Together with the PSC colleagues I helped establish "QGIS.ORG" as a legal entity in Switzerland.

Motivation: I appreciate being involved with and working with the QGIS and FOSS4G community and love seeing the progress of the project(s) as a whole. Happy to contribute a small bit to the success of the project. I'd like to continue my work on the PSC and board, as I think it makes sense to have some continuity, esp. with legal and financial issues. I do believe that FOSS4G software enables certain groups in our society with high-quality decision making or documentation tools that otherwise wouldn't be available to them, because they couldn't afford them. As an employee of a public authority I like the ability to influence future directions of the software and to get changes in the software in a reasonable amount of time (compared with some proprietary alternatives where a small customer can't influence future directions of the software development). As a side-effect we help spending tax money wisely.

Candidate name: Marco Bernasocchi (http://berna.io @mbernasocchi)

Introduction / main QGIS related activities: I am an open source advocate, consultant, teacher and developer. My background is in geography with a specialization in geographic information science. I live in Switzerland in a small Romansh speaking mountain village where I love scrambling around the mountains to enjoy the feeling of freedom it gives me. I’m a very communicative person, I fluently speak Italian, German, French English and Spanish and love travelling.

I work as director of OPENGIS.ch which I founded in 2011. Since 2015 I share the company ownership with Matthias Kuhn. At OPENGIS.ch LLC we (4 superstar devs and myself) develop, train and consult our client on any aspect related to QGIS.

My first QGIS (to be correct for that time QuantumGIS) ever was “Simon (0.6)” during my BSc when the University of Zurich was teaching us propriertary products and I started looking around for Open Source alternatives. In 2008, when starting my MSc, I made the definitive switch to ubuntu and I started working more and more with QGIS Metis (0.11) and ended developing some plugins and part of Globe as my Masters thesis. Since three years the University of Zurich invites me to hold two seminars on Entrepreneurship and Open Source. In November 2011 I attended my first Hackfest in Zürich where I started porting all QGIS dependencies and developing QGIS for Android under a Google Summer of Code. A couple of years and a lot of work later QField was born. Since then I’ve always tried to attend at least to one Hackfest per year to be able to feel first hand the strong bonds within our very welcoming community.

In 2013 i was lucky enough to have a release named after a suggestion I saved you all from having QGIS 2.0 - Hönggerberg and giving you instead QGIS 2.0 - Dufour

Beside my long story with QGIS as user and passionate advocate I have a long story as QGIS service provider where we are fully committed to its stability, feature richness and sustainable development. Furthermore, as WorldBank consultant I am lucky enough to be sent now and then to spread the QGIS goodness in less fortunate countries.

Motivation:

One of my main motivation to be part of the PSC is to help QGIS keep this incredible growth rate by being even more attractive to new community members, sponsors and large/corporate users. To achieve this, key is maintaining the right balance between sustainable processes (that guarantee the great quality QGIS has been known for) and an interesting and motivating grassroot project where community members can bloom and enjoy contributing in their most creative ways.

Being one of the core developers of InaSAFE I’ve worked very often with Tim and I admire his work and personality immensely and I’m fully aware that stepping in his shoes - or for that matter anyone of the current’s PSC shoes - will be very difficult, but I’m ready to take on the challenge and to do my best to help QGIS and its community to grow to become even more the reference [Open Source] GIS project.

Candidate name: Régis Haubourg ( @haubourg / regishaubourg.net)

Introduction / main QGIS related activities:

I learned GIS in 2001 during my studies on agriculture and environment. Since then, I used GIS for soil mapping, land survey in remote places of Peru, hydrological pollutant modeling to protect drinkable water resources, remote sensing for integrated coastal management or network applications for irrigation assessment. I progressively got passionate by the open source side of GIS in 2004, learning PostGIS, Mapserver and OGC standards. Then, I managed GIS data and software solutions in a French water basin agency during 11 years. I lead and achieved a full Mapinfo migration to PostGIS and QGIS, starting in 2008. I have been involved in QGIS feature and bugfixing funding and pushed to make QGIS a daily decision-making tool even for non-GIS trained workers.

I discovered the QGIS community as an extremely welcoming, open minded and reactive community and tried to get be a part of it as much as possible. I became OSGeo charter member a few years ago too. In 2016, I had the opportunity to join Oslandia's team to work mainly (almost exclusively) on QGIS and PostGIS. This allowed me to participate to QGIS and OSGeo/FOSS4G meetings and finally join this awesome community in real life. Being surrounded by developers gave me the ability to understand deep architectural stakes of the QGIS project. I am now dedicating my time to project management, QGIS community management, user testing, training, consulting, lots of SQL stuff, and sometimes python code :).

As an individual volunteer, I do my best to help in various area such as QEP reviews, issue management, documentation and translation, as well as an active commitment in the French QGIS user group.

I believe that these experiences gave me the ability to fully understand user's needs AND developer's language, while keeping the "big picture" in mind.

Motivation:

I am deeply motivated to be part of QGIS PSC and would like to help particularly in these specific areas.

  • Better Developers / PSC coordination. QGIS is a do-ocraty. I think we can improve the role of the PSC by pushing stronger release policies and better coordination of active forces. The QGIS 3 release feedbacks lead to a lot of learnings and new ideas, from infrastructure to communication. Let's make them happen!

  • I want to find new ways of extending the contributor's community by helping fresh blood contribute to the project. The training certification system, discussion with big organizations betting on QGIS are great oppportunities. I would also like to improve diversity in our community, which is currently a bit oriented towards bearded nerds male members - including myself ;). To sum up things, more contributors, more diversity, more incomes to have happy and sustainable coding (and documentation, and management and every contribution I forget here)

  • Regarding OSGeo, I strongly believe that QGIS is the current leading force of OSGeo and want to keep that relationship strong.

  • I support Nodebo's QGIS roadmap goal : "Conquer the World UNIVERSE !". Let's make Open Source GIS even more awesome !

A very important point is my constant attention to clearly separate my roles in different organizations, and not mix private interests with the project's interests. As a PSC member, I will always talk in the name of the QGIS project, and in the interest of the common good of the QGIS project. I do think that my experience in public administration is a strong baseline to help me keep this straight.

Candidate name: Richard Duivenvoorde

Introduction / main QGIS related activities: Dutch, living in Haarlem. Doing GeoFoss work (Geoserver/OpenLayers/QGIS/Mapserver/MapProxy) for clients.

For QGIS I'm in PSC already for some years, officially responsible for server-work and community.

Heavy involved in the Sphinx/Docker build scripts for Website and Documentation. So more the technical aspects of this. Debian Linux user! Python (plugin) programmer. Wannabee c++ programmer :-) Doing a lot of reading/writing on User and Dev mailing lists.

Motivation: Geo is cool and I like to work and have fun in an international environment: I REALLY like the fact that we have Farsi, Russian, Chinese and Japanese sites :-) I like the friendly atmosphere of QGIS and hope it will stay this way. Sometimes afraid 'corporate/money'-matters can take over, but glad that we can handle that gracefully every time.

Candidate name: Paolo Cavallini

Introduction / main QGIS related activities: I got involved in QGIS long ago, first as an user, then more and more deeply in various activities, initiating and supporting various plugins and core functions (e.g. GDAL Tools, DB Manager), opening and managing bugs, taking care of GRASS modules, handling the trademark registration, etc . I acted as Finance and Marketing Advisor for several years. Currently I manage the plugin approval process.

Motivation: It's such a pleasure building up, in a truly cooperative and democratic way, together with truly intelligent people, a tool that enables people to freely do their job or pursue their interests, that I cannot resist helping as much as I can.