It’s my honor to introduce the Program Committee for FOSS4G North America 2015. The committee represents a variety of views on the geospatial open source community that will really inform the creation of a great program.

Kate Chapman

Kate Chapman is a founder and the Executive Director of the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team (HOT), a non-governmental organization dedicated to helping support communities, governments and humanitarian responders in their utilization of OpenStreetMap in crisis response and contingency planning. She was a keynote speaker at FOSS4G 2013 in Nottingham and is currently on the steering committee for FOSS4G Asia, to be held in Bangkok, Thailand in December 2014 (that conference is still accepting abstracts; submit here! http://www.foss4g-asia.org/2014/programmenu/submit-paper/)

Regina Obe

Regina is a member of the PostGIS steering Committee and has been an OSGeo Charter Member since 2009. She is coauthor of PostGIS in Action (Manning Publications, 2011) and co-owner of the Paragon Corporation, a Boston-based consulting firm.

Jody Garnett

Jody is a senior software engineer working with Boundless who is serving on the Project Steering Committee of GeoServer, GeoTools and uDig projects. He has been an OSGeo charter member since 2006 and actively participates in outreach to new projects as a member of both LocationTech and OSGeo.

Andy Petrella

Andy is the Lead Developer at NextLab in Liège, Belgium. He specializes in GIS software development as well as distributed systems, and holds degrees in Mathematics and Informatics with a specialization in Geometrology-Geomatics Sciences from Université of Liège.

Beth Tellman

Beth is a National Science Foundation Fellow and Gilbert White Fellow as a doctoral student in Geography at Arizona State University. She uses geospatial data and software to research how changes in land use impact ecosystem services for flood mitigation. She co-founded and directed an NGO in 2009, the CEIBA Foundation, to facilitate rural Salvadoran communities in attaining disaster resilience. She holds an MESc in Environmental Science from the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies.

Rob Emanuele (Chair)

Rob is a geospatial software developer working at Azavea in Philadelphia. He is the lead of the GeoTrellis project, and currently guiding the project through the LocationTech incubation project.