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T he Free and Open Source Software for Geospatial (FOSS4G) ‘State of the Map’ summit taking place in Melbourne this November has announced a dynamic initial line-up of keynote speakers.

The event will feature a full day of workshops, two days of presentations, a community day and program of social events in Melbourne from November 20-23.

The event is now open for registration, and accepting proposals for workshops, papers and presentations.

Find below confirmed keynote presenters for the regional event and their biographies.

Paul Ramsey — Paul Ramsey is an open source programmer and educator. He has been working with geospatial software for over 15 years: consulting to government and industry; building a geospatial software company; and programming on open source software. He co-founded the PostGIS spatial database project in 2001, and is currently an active developer and member of the project steering committee. In 2008, Paul received the Sol Katz Award for achievement in open source geospatial software.

Pia (Waugh) Andrews — Pia Waugh is an open government and data ninja who has been working in making the world a better place for 20 years. She currently works within the (public sector) machine to transform public services through greater transparency, democratic engagement, citizen-centric design, open data, emerging technologies and real, pragmatic actual innovation in the public sector and beyond.

She believes that tech culture has a huge role to play in achieving better policy planning, outcomes, public engagement and a better public service all round. She is also trying to do her part in establishing greater public benefit from publicly funded data, software and research. In 2014,

Pia was awarded as one of the Top 100 Most Influential Women in Australia.

Pia currently leads the Service Innovation Lab in New Zealand, a cross agency funded, cross agency governed lab for collaborative, multidisciplinary, service design and delivery of life events based services that naturally traverse agency mandates.

Alyssa Wright — Alyssa brings over a decade of business experience with emerging, open, and decentralised geospatial technologies. She currently consults on strategic partnerships and product management at various initiatives including FOAM, a startup building a location protocol for the the blockchain.

With a keen eye for getting lost, Alyssa has been navigating open geospatial technologies since her time as an original member of Boundless (né OpenGeo) and Mapzen (né Samsung Accelerator). She currently serves on the board of OpenStreetMap US and as project manager for HOT’s OpenStreetMap data analytics platform.

Nyall Dawson — Nyall has been a core developer with the QGIS project since 2013. During this time, he has contributed over 8000 commits to the project, and today is one of the most active developers on the project. Nyall’s contributions to QGIS cover a wide range of areas – from improvements to the map rendering and symbology engines, enhancements to labeling and print layout functionality, right through to optimisations of the underlying spatial processing algorithms utilised by QGIS.

He is dedicated to making QGIS a unique tool capable of creating cartographic effects which to date have not been available in GIS software applications. Nyall is currently the proprietor and lead developer at North Road Consulting, an Australian spatial development consultancy which focuses predominantly on investing in and promoting use of open source GIS applications.

Jane Elith — Jane Elith is an academic in the School of BioSciences at the University of Melbourne. She specialises in species distribution models, statistical models that describe relationships between the occurrence or abundance of species and the environment. She is interested both in technical aspects of the models and their adaptation to typically available data, and also in their applications.

These types of models are used by scientists, agencies and local interest groups to inform many aspects of species management, including understanding current distributions of threatened species, predicting how distributions might change in future, supporting threat management, and controlling invasive species. Since these models are used worldwide and often by conservation practitioners in projects with small budgets, issues of data and code availability are key to widespread applicability and robust development of predictions.



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