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

[Steve Lime]

The organizing committee for the upcoming Open Source Geospatial '05
conference
would like to open nominations for the inaugural 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
sol.katz.award at gmail.com with a
brief description of the reasons for this nomination.  Please place
"Sol Katz Award" in
the subject of the email.  Nominations will be accepted until Saturday
April 30th @
midnight.  A recipient will be decided from the nomination list by a
selection
committee.

The winner of the Sol Katz Award for Geospatial Free and Open Source
Software will
be announced at the Open Source Geospatial conference in June.  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.

--
Organizing Committee
Open Source Geospatial '05
http://mapserver.gis.umn.edu/mum/mtg2005.html