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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 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
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.