Sol Katz Award for Geospatial Free and Open Source Software - Call for Nominations

[Jeff McKenna]

The Open Source Geospatial Foundation would like to open nominations for 
the 2006 Sol Katz Award for Geospatial Free and Open Source Software.

The Sol Katz Award for Geospatial Free and Open Source Software (GFOSS) 
will be given to individuals who have demonstrated leadership in the 
GFOSS community. Recipients of the award will have contributed 
significantly through their activities to advance open source ideals in 
the geospatial realm.

Sol Katz was an early pioneer of GFOSS and left behind a large body of 
work in the form of applications, format specifications, and utilities 
while at the U.S. Bureau of Land Management. This early GFOSS archive 
provided both source code and applications freely available to the 
community. Sol was also a frequent contributor to many geospatial list 
servers, providing much guidance to the geospatial community at large.

Sol unfortunately passed away in 1999 from Non-Hodgkin's Lymphoma, but 
his legacy lives on in the open source world. Those interested in making 
a donation to the American Cancer Society, as per Sol's family's 
request, can do so at 
https://www.cancer.org/asp/donate/don_multi_donate.asp?navToScreen=don_1.

Nominations for the Sol Katz Award should be sent to 
SolKatzAward at conference.osgeo.org with a description of the reasons for 
this nomination.  Nominations will be accepted until midnight UTC on 
August 31st 
(http://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/fixedtime.html?month=9&day=01&year=2006&hour=0&min=0&sec=0). 
A recipient will be decided from the nomination list by a selection 
committee designated by the OSGeo board.

The winner of the Sol Katz Award for Geospatial Free and Open Source 
Software will be announced on September 15th at the FOSS4G 2006 
conference (http://www.foss4g2006.org/) in Lausanne Switzerland.  The 
hope is that the award will both acknowledge the work of community 
members, and pay tribute to one of its founders, for years to come.