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

The Open Source Geospatial Foundation would like to open nominations for the 2020 Sol Katz Award for Geospatial Free and Open Source Software.

The Sol Katz Award for Free and Open Source Software for Geospatial (FOSS4G) will be given to individuals who have demonstrated leadership in the FOSS4G community. Recipients of the award will have contributed significantly through their activities to advance open source ideals in the geospatial realm.

Solomon Katz Sol Katz was an early pioneer of FOSS4G 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 FOSS4G 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://donate.cancer.org .

Nominations for the Sol Katz Award should be sent to SolKatzAward@osgeo.org with a description of the reasons for this nomination. Nominations will be accepted until end-of-day August 21st Anywhere on Earth. A recipient will be decided from the nomination list by the OSGeo selection committee.

As the world is currently in challenging times, the winner of the Sol Katz Award for Geospatial Free and Open Source Software will be announced online during the next OSGeo Annual General Meeting on 2020-09-10. 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.

It should be noted that past awardees and selection committee members are not eligible.

Past Awardees:

  1. Even Rouault
  2. Astrid Emde
  3. Andrea Aime
  4. Jeff McKenna
  5. Maria Brovelli
  6. Gary Sherman
  7. Arnulf Christl
  8. Venkatesh Raghavan
  9. Martin Davis
  10. Helena Mitasova
  11. Daniel Morissette
  12. Paul Ramsey
  13. Steve Lime
  14. Markus Neteler
  15. Frank Warmerdam

Selection Committee 2020:

  • Jeff McKenna (chair)
  • Frank Warmerdam
  • Markus Neteler
  • Steve Lime
  • Paul Ramsey
  • Sophia Parafina
  • Daniel Morissette
  • Helena Mitasova
  • Martin Davis
  • Venkatesh Raghavan
  • Arnulf Christl
  • Gary Sherman
  • Maria Brovelli
  • Andrea Aime
  • Astrid Emde
  • Even Rouault

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