2024 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: 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: Anita Graser (http://anitagraser.com & https://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/User:Anitagraser)
| Available as | Location | Pic |
|---|---|---|
| PSC member Board Vice-Chairperson |
Vienna, Austria |  |
Introduction / main QGIS related activities:
I'm standing for re-election to the QGIS PSC which I've been serving on since 2013.
In my day job, I'm a researcher with the Data Science and AIS team at the AIT Austrian Institute of Technology in Vienna. I’m also teaching QGIS classes at UNIGIS Salzburg and have written a couple of textbooks on QGIS (e.g. “Learning QGIS” and “QGIS Map Design”). I'm also active as a QGIS plugin developer. I've developed Time Manager, pgRoutingLayer, and most recently Trajectools.
As part of my PSC activities, I manage the grant programme process and take care of release name selection and preparation of related graphics for installers and splash screens.
Motivation:
Being a power user myself, my goal is to continue to represent the voice of the user community on the PSC.
I believe that, now more than ever, it essential to provide users worldwide with a powerful free and open tool for science, tech, and administrative work. And I want to contribute my part in proving this tool.
Candidate name: Andreas Neumann (https://atlasofswitzerland.ch/ & https://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/User:neumann)
| Available as | Location | Pic |
|---|---|---|
| PSC member Board Treasurer |
Zurich, 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 project manager at National Atlas of Switzerland at the Institute of Cartography and Geoinformation ETH Zurich. Prior positions include: project manager in the Cantons of Solothurn and 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 university and 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).
Candidate name: Alessandro Pasotti (aka @elpaso https://www.itopen.it, https://www.qcooperative.net)
| Available as | Location | Pic |
|---|---|---|
| PSC member | 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: Jürgen Fischer (@jef-n / https://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/User:Jef)
| Available as | Location | Pic |
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| PSC member | Norden, East Frisia, Germany |  |
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.
Introduction / main QGIS related activities:
Candidate name: Régis Haubourg
| Available as | Location | Pic |
|---|---|---|
| PSC member | mobile |  |
Introduction / main QGIS related activities:
Geomatics enthusiast for years, I started deploying and funding QGIS development in 2008 as a GIS and database administrator for a water basin agency.
From 2016 to 2021, I worked for Oslandia mainly on QGIS, and learned "the developer's" side of things and could professionally collaborate with other great contributors of the project.
I have been promoting QGIS in the french User group, organizing 4 QGIS french user days, and being the local chapter chair for 2 years.
Since 2022, I work for a scientific institute promoting greener construction and retrofitting methods to fight against climate change.
Without FOSS4G and open data, this project would never had been possible so, and QGIS is everywhere in it.
I believe that these experiences gave me the ability to fully understand users, needs and developer's language, while keeping the "big picture" in mind and a strong arguments to keep advocating for openness.
Vision:
QGIS is an incredible piece of software because it is an incredible contributor community first and users have the power to change the history of the project. It is becoming over the years a second family for me (yes!)
I believe QGIS is already the leading GIS project (in France for sure), still we should consolidate the way we handle all the volunteer tasks in all possible ways, like increasing the incomes to pay for the critical tasks, provide materials to help user groups promoting and raising funds too.
But I also believe we must advocate outside of our community, to help organizations and decision makers to understand how to work with FOSS software, including for big projects.
Motivation:
Having been away from close QGIS contribution for one year, it made me clear that we could make some short and middle term improvements, I would like us to help the PSC to work on :
- Address the communication channels fragmentation issue explicitly
- Streamlining to keep connected with those who couldn't make it,
- Try new funding solutions, like NumFocus approach, helping user groups to get sustaining members, or provide paying improved installers for corporations on Windows
- Revive QGIS server and client OGC certification
- And obviously have QGIS conquer the universe Introduction / main QGIS related activities:
Candidate name: Saber Razmjooei
| Available as | Location | Pic |
|---|---|---|
| PSC member | mobile |  |
Introduction / main QGIS related activities:
My first encounter with QGIS was in 2006 when I was trying to process some raster data through GRASS and then easily view the results. After a couple of years of tinkering with QGIS, I decided with a colleague to start a company and offer training and support around the software as we both saw the potential for making a living and helping support the software. We attended QGIS HFs and managed to organise a QGIS HF (Sept 2013) in Brighton, where developers enjoyed pizzas for dinner!
Over the course of the years, we have created a sustainable business model around QGIS and have been actively contributing directly to the project. The connections and friendships made with users and contributors has been the single most important achievement of my involvement with this amazing project.
Vision:
QGIS: A Vision for Growth
QGIS has become a cornerstone of open-source GIS software. However, its infrastructure, developed 5-10 years ago, no longer fully supports its current state and future aspirations. To foster further growth and attract new users and contributors, we need to implement significant changes in our operational approach.
I am eager to contribute to these changes by focusing on the following areas:
Funding and Financing:
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Strategic Partnerships: Proactively engage with major organizations and QGIS users to encourage financial contributions. Many of these organizations benefit from QGIS's free nature but overlook the long-term value of supporting its development.
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Highlighting the Value Proposition: Clearly communicate the benefits of contributing to QGIS, such as cost savings, enhanced capabilities, and competitive advantage.
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Sharing Success Stories: Encourage organizations to share their experiences with QGIS, including cost savings and investments in the project.
Onboarding Contributors:
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Mentorship Programs: Implement a program similar to Google Summer of Code to attract and mentor young developers.
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Educational Initiatives: Collaborate with universities and teaching institutes to establish QGIS as a standard educational tool.
Community Engagement and Development:
- QGIS Marketplace: Develop a platform connecting developers with potential funders or contributors for specific features, bug fixes, or crowdfunding campaigns.
Motivation:
QGIS is an amazing tool. I would like the users to understand the awesomeness of QGIS and the amount of work that goes behind the scenes for them to freely download and use it. This will help widening the contributions and contributors to the project.