[OSGeo-Discuss] Board Election: Markus Neteler

[Markus Neteler]

Dear charter members and community,

I feel honored to be renominated again for the upcoming board election -
this election is important to continue the work done for OSGeo and to meet
the new challenges. This year we have a great choice between many new nominees
and two board member standing for re-election.

For those not knowing me: I am one of the founding members of OSGeo
and involved in FOSS4G since 1993 (as user) and since 1998 (as developer)
with most activities dedicated to the GRASS GIS project.

I am very community oriented which means that I try to avoid making
OSGeo any kind of elite group or the like. Moreover I work on integration,
trying to connect people not knowing each other and trying to lower
the barriers to contribute to OSGeo projects, be as ordinary user, be as
power user or even more. "Growing developers" was the motto of one
of the FOSS4G conferences which I like very much.

If you are interested, you can find the collection of proposals I made
in OSGeo, here:
http://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/User:Neteler
... some done, some in progress, some more to come :)

Important for me is also the fact that most folks here are not
native English speakers. Local chapters are important (I was involved
in the establishment of the German and the Italian FOSS4G
associations which later became OSGeo chapters) and need to
be partially better connected to OSGeo-international. Furthermore,
software needs to be translated to different languages. Here
good progress was done but it needs to become easier to
contribute. We'll work on that.

Finally, I am interested (and contributed) to OSGeo-Edu and
OSGeo-Geodata which I pushed a lot in the very beginning of
OSGeo in 2006 to avoid a pure software foundation. I am sure
that we could deliver a great portal to the existing community and
especially newcomers with a good material collection. For OSGeo-Edu
it has been started, for OSGeo-Geodata we may have a catalog in
future.

In this sense I'll continue to contribute!

Best,
Markus