[OSGeo-Discuss] Charter Member Nomination: Stephen Woodbridge

[Stephen Woodbridge]

Hi All,

Many thanks to Dan Putler and Daniel Kastl for their nomination of me.

I have been passionately involved in programming and algorithms since I 
was 14 when I took a summer course in Fortran II at Swathmore College. 
Yes, I am that old! :) I have been involved in development as a 
programmer, manager, QA manager, project manager, marketing manager, but 
10 years ago I got tired of corporate life and went back to programming 
and consulting on my own. At that time, I wrote my own prototype 
mapserver and then I ran into Mapserver. I decide it made more sense 
work with it and found the world of OpenSource. From mapserver, I have 
spread into working with many of the OSGeo projects and many of the not 
yet big enough for incubation projects.

I am on the PSC for Mapserver, PAGC, and pgRouting and actively involved 
with using other projects like mod_geocache (now mapcache), OpenLayers, 
PostGIS, and GDAL/OGR. I also have been a Google Summer of Code Mentor 
for the last three years for pgRouting projects. I try to bring a few 
things to each of the communities that I interact with:

1. I try to help users by answering questions and being constructive, 
with the intent that if I can answer it then that frees up the more 
important staff to focus on programing and other project activities.

2. My many years of corporate life taught me much about the software 
development process and more importantly that projects have products and 
users and we need to think about them when we make decisions in a 
project. I try to be a user advocate.

3. As a user of these projects, I am constantly trying to make them 
better and easier to use. So I report bugs, encourage others to report 
bugs, recommend enhancements, provide use cases, and occasionally 
provide patches, answer other use questions, etc.

I am passionate about all the products I use, I advocate them to my 
clients and recommend they fund development projects when they have 
needs. I like to share my enthusiasm and ideas with others.

The bottom line for me is that I would be honored to be elected as a 
charter member, but regardless of that, I enjoy doing what I'm doing, I 
love solving problems and helping our community grow. I am interested in 
being able to do more for OSGeo.

We have a great slate of candidates and I know many of them and they 
would all be great additions to the OSGeo ranks in my opinion.

Thank you and best regards,
   -Steve Woodbridge

On 11/14/2011 11:19 AM, Dan Putler wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> We, Dan Putler and Daniel Kastl, are nominating Stephen Woodbridge to be
> a Charter Member of OSGeo. We have both worked with Steve as part of a
> project team, Daniel Kastl on pgRouting and Dan Putler on PAGC. We have
> both found him to be an outstanding colleague and important contributor
> to these projects.
>
> Steve is one of the original, and on going, members of the Project
> Steering Committee of the MapServer Project. He is also a member of the
> Project Steering Committees of pgRouting and PAGC. In addition, he has
> acted for several years as a mentor to Google Summer of Code students
> who have worked on OSGeo Summer of Code projects.
>
> In addition to the projects he is directly involved in, Steve has been a
> important contributor to the user mailing lists of several other
> projects. We feel his helpfulness to other participants on the
> PostGIS-Users mailing list is particularly noteworthy, but he is an
> important (and helpful) contributor to other lists as well.
>
> Given his contributions to geospatial FOSS software and users of that
> software, we believe that Steve would be a worthy Charter Member of OSGeo.
>
> Dan and Daniel
>
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