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

[Frank Warmerdam]

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. 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.