2020 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.
Candidate name: Anita Graser (http://anitagraser.com & https://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/User:Anitagraser)
| Available as | Location | Pic |
|---|---|---|
| PSC | Vienna, Austria |  |
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 Adviser, 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 https://www.itopen.it, https://www.qcooperative.net)
| Available as | Location | Pic |
|---|---|---|
| Board Vice-Chairperson PSC |
Luserna San Giovanni, Italy |  |
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 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 ).
8 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.
Motivation: Help keep up the good things going! Personally I think that the actual PSC did an amazing job and I would have it re-elected it entirely. I accepted with enthusiasm when I was asked if I was available to eventually fill this hole.
Candidate name: Kurt Menke (https://www.birdseyeviewgis.com/; https://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/Kurt_Menke; @geomenke)
| Available as | Location | Pic |
|---|---|---|
| PSC | Albuquerque, USA |  |
Introduction / main QGIS related activities: I’m a consultant, QGIS certified educator and author based out of Albuquerque, New Mexico, USA. For the last 12 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 am also a co-founder of the QCooperative, an umbrella organization offering QGIS support services.
I’ve been using QGIS since 0.6 ‘Simon’ and teaching it since 1.0 ‘Kore’. In 2014 co-authored the GeoAcademy curriculum. Since I have authored/co-authored six QGIS books. The most recent being Discover QGIS 3.x and QGIS for Hydrological Applications with Locate Press. 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 help manage the QGIS Certification Program.
Motivation: To begin, it is a great honor to be nominated. I feel the community is what makes QGIS such a special project and I’ve always experienced it as a welcoming, collaborative and supportive environment. I would love to give back and be of service at this level. I am a strong believer in the democratization of technology and data. I feel I can bring a unique perspective to the PSC for several reasons: A) I am a power user and educator/trainer, B) I run a small business based on offering FOSS4G & QGIS services in a region dominated by proprietary software, C) I am based outside of Europe in the southwestern U.S. I am interested in facilitating the ongoing adoption of QGIS in new sectors and improving the Certification program.
Candidate name: Andreas Neumann (https://geo.so.ch/ & https://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/User:neumann)
| Available as | Location | Pic |
|---|---|---|
| PSC (treasurer) | Solothurn, Switzerland |  |
Introduction / main QGIS related activities: I'm 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 Solothurn in Switzerland and partially a developer of smaller Python plugins or Python code useful for our inhouse projects. Prior positions include: project manager in the Canton of Zug, responsible GIS manager at the City of Uster in Switzerland, research assistant and PhD student at the Institute of Cartography 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, https://opengis.ch, https://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/Mbernasocchi, @mbernasocchi)
| Available as | Location | Pic |
|---|---|---|
| Board Chairperson Board Vice-Chairperson PSC member |
Laax, Switzerland |  |
Vision:
Serving as a pragmatic community conciliator - collecting thoughts from people with differing opinions and trying to find the high road through difficult issues - I want to focus my and the community's energies on our core product, QGIS.
I want to help QGIS and it's community thrive under the value proposition of:
"Making the most amazing opensource GIS that provides users with value and that meets their needs by providing great functionality and usability, being cost-effective whilst being actively supported by a vibrant and knowledgeable community.”
Sharing our work under an open-source license is part of the approach by which we achieve that value proposition as it allows broad collaboration with our developers and users community.
I see FOSS as a very socially responsible way to develop software, but even more, I see the immense technological advantage that writing open-source code brings. This is why I want our focus to be on allowing both pragmatic and ideological views to respectfully coexist and enrich each other.
One of my main motivations to be part of the PSC and to make myself available as project Chair 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, the 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 to ensure that QGIS remains an attractive project for volunteers to contribute to and help QGIS and its community to grow to become even more the reference [Open Source] GIS project.
Background / 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 (6 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 proprietary 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
In 2018 I've been honored to be nominated Co-chair of the QGIS PSC, since then I've been taking care of GitHub, the user groups, running votes, elections, doing some small work on the website, giving more talks on opensource advocacy and foremost helping in the day to day work needed to help our amazing project keep on growing.
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. For that in 2019 we started our own QGIS sustainability initiative financed through our support contracts.
Candidate name: Régis Haubourg ( @haubourg / regishaubourg.net)
| Available as | Location | Pic |
|---|---|---|
| PSC | Grenoble, France |  |
Introduction / main QGIS related activities:
I am currently chair of the French OSGeo local chapter, and main organizer of the QGIS-FR users days. Passionate of outdoor sports and nature, I live in the French Alps in a moutain area close to the city of Grenoble.
I studied agronomics, environmental sciences, hydrology, geology, etc... I discovered GIS by using it. As a DIYer enthusiast, I fell into coding my first GIS application for research application linking GIS and fuzzy logic decision making to deal with coastal integrated management. I spent eleven years managing GIS tools and databases for a water basin agency. I had the opportunity to be able to fund several feature in QGIS and got definitly addicted to Free software contribution and community. I am now a GIS expert at Oslandia, a full remote GIS open source company. I work daily with QGIS core committers and a very wide range of users, with a special focus on water network applications. Thanks to Oslandia's support, I am able to participate in most of the hackfest, FOSS4G and also some PostgreSQL events.
Motivation:
I am deeply motivated in taking a role of QGIS PSC, where I think I can be of better value than on technical contribution.
I am really aware of the current challenges we face these days, where the user base is now so huge, and their expectations growing faster than the contributing community. I would like to push forward those particular tasks:
- gather more contributors everywhere
- get the new industrial actors to understand the basics of free software economics and
- work on hardening our critical low level tasks, such as code reviewing, packaging, documentation
- keep having fun with such a nice community
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.
Introduction / main QGIS related activities:
Candidate name: Paolo Cavallini (https://www.faunalia.eu/en/intro#paolo-cavallini)
| Available as | Location | Pic |
|---|---|---|
| Board Chairperson PSC |
mobile |  |
Introduction / main QGIS related activities: I got involved in QGIS very 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. The past two years as Chair has been challenging: QGIS is rapidly evolving to a more and more professional project, with lots of positive sides and some drawbacks, increased complexity and potential conflict of interests. I believe keeping a good balance between our core values (openness and cooperation) and our new challenges (professionalism and reliability) is essential for the long term success of our project. In my view, the PSC is an essential tool to balance these different perspectives and guarantee a free and pleasant environment for everybody.
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. I will always strive to guarantee QGIS will remain free and open for all, forever.
Candidate name: Jürgen Fischer (@jef-n / https://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/User:Jef)
Introduction / main QGIS related activities: I'm the current release manager of QGIS and have been since I took over from Tim in Sep 2013 as I was already handling the packaging for Debian/Ubuntu and Windows as core committer (which I became in Nov 2007). The windows packaging relies on OSGeo4W, which I'm also the main maintainer of. I'm also doing the translation of the QGIS UI to German. I'm also GDAL/OGR committer and am maintaining the NAS driver (German cadaster format) there. Last but not least I'm also doing various occasional administrative tasks on the OSGeo infrastructure as member of the OSGeo system administration committee.
Motivation: I'd like to continue my work for QGIS.