My Mission
To foster better, fairer, and safer societies through the advancement and use of free and open geospatial data and technologies.Biography
Ben Hur is an advocate of a fair, free, and open future who works at the intersections of the openness, data, technology, and geospatial fields. He has several years of experience providing training, support, and consulting services on data literacy and open geospatial applications such as QGIS, GRASS, and PostGIS. He is the co-founder and CTO of the Civic Literacy Initiative in addition to his other local organizations: BNHR.XYZ, an open data and open geospatial consultancy that he established; and SmartCT, an openness and citizen-centric tech non-profit that he co-founded.
He supports and takes an active role in the open data and open geospatial communities in the Philippines both as an individual and through his organizations. He is an organizer of the annual Pista ng Mapa (Festival of Maps) conference and of other local FOSS4G events in his country and he has also been a participant of regional and international FOSS4G conferences. He believes in the power of open mapping and open geospatial to promote and protect a just and fair society and has utilized open geospatial data and technologies in projects such as counter mapping.
Through BNHR.XYZ, he supports the QGIS project as a QGIS certifying organization and as a QGIS Sustaining Member.
He shares and creates content about open data and open geospatial on his website, social media (Facebook, Mastodon, Twitter), and YouTube.
He obtained his Master’s degree in Geomatics Engineering from the University of the Philippines where his Master’s thesis was about the use of geospatial analysis and visualization in Philippine basketball.
