The Who’s Who of the Frugos Unconference

Last Saturday I had the pleasure of attending the first FRUGOS unconference – which was a meeting of 20 or so open source GIS enthusiasts who live along Colorado’s Front Range. Brian and Sean organized, while Tom played host. Peter and Sean both had nice writeups of the conference – so I won’t repeat what they’ve said.

Instead, here is a list of attendees and what they do. The list is taken from my notes, so I’m sure I’ve messed up some details and missed a person or two. If so, let me know, and I’ll fix any mistakes.

Gregor Allensworth-Mosheh
Gregor is one of
the people behind HostGIS and gave a couple of interesting talks – both of which I sadly missed but
Peter has the scoop on his blog.
Norman Barker
Norman, visiting from England, is one of the main developers of hibernate support for PostGis.
Peter Batty
Take a look at Peter’s nice summary of the unconference. Peter and I have worked together for a number of years – including at Smallworld, GE and Ubisense. More recently Peter was the CTO of Integraph, but is now looking for a new gig. Check out his blog at http://geothought.blogspot.com/.
Tom Churchill
Tom hosted the meeting at is the founder of
Churchill Navigation, which makes extremely cool software for the next
generation personal navigation devices.
G Hussain Chinoy
Hussain is an active developer on NASA’s opensource WorldWind project.
Besides giving a great demo of both the .NET and Java versions of WorldWind, he also provides a fascinating glimpse into the
politics of WorldWind, NASA and OpenSource.
Scott Davis
Scott recently started his own consulting
company, and has just finished Pragmatic GIS. Can’t wait to get my copy! His blog is at http://www.davisworld.org/blojsom/blog/.
Tom Gehring
Tom worked a number
of years on IBM mainframes, and recently decided to change careers and get
involved with GIS [Not sure if I have spelled Tom’s last name correctly].
Randy George
Randy is with CadMaps and has worked extensively with vector map technologies such as SVG, VML, and more recently, XAML. Check out the Cadmaps blog at http://www.cadmaps.com/gisblog.htm.
Sean Gillies
Sean is one of the main organizers of Frugos, and works as a web developer for the
University of North Carolina for their ancient world’s project. It sounds like a great project – mapping
whatever information they can find about ancient Greece and Rome. Sean
is a big Python user and has one of the best know GIS blogs – http://zcologia.com/news.
Chris Haller
Chris works part time at the University of Colorado medical center and part time at PlaceMatters. In his free time he’s works on a Social
Mapping site called iCommunityTv that combines maps and multimedia. Check it out at http://blog.eparticipation.com/.
Chris Helm
Another Chris who is at the
University of Colorado. Chris works with Bruce on GLIMS, which is a database of the world’s glaciers based on reflections from a radiomter. GLIMS is a big Postgresql/PostGIS database with a MapServer front end. Output is done via OGR or KML.
Dan Moore
Dan is a Web
developer and has done a fair bit of work with Google maps.
Jim Olsten
Jim has worked extensively
with GIS for a variety of projects including NEPA impact studies, etc.
Trent Pigeno
Trent is a GIS/web developer, and works with
Brian at the Timoney Group.
Trent recently traveled to South America (I think it was Chile), where he did some volunteer
GIS work, before returning to the states [Not sure if I have spelled Tom’s last
name correctly].
Bruce Raup
Bruce works at the National Snow and Ice Data Center in Boulder. He is the technical lead for the Global Land Ice Measurements from
Space (GLIMS)
database and is a heavy user of GRASS, OGR and his own Perl scripts.
Charlie Savage
Well you already know me since you’re
reading this blog.
John Spinney
John
works for OpenWave, which is one of the main
providers of software and browser that run on mobile phones. John’s blog is at http://www.maperture.net/.
Brian Timoney
Brian is one of the main organizers of Frugos, and runs the Timoney Group in Denver,
which does map consulting work based on open source software, with a focus on
the petroleum industry. One of the
interesting things Brian mentioned was that a number of their customers want to
use Google Earth as a document management system.
Bill Thorp
Bill works for the National Park Service in Fort Collins, and is
involved with cataloging and managing their numerous web services. You can see
a nice picture of Bill at http://science.nature.nps.gov/im/contactsim/index.cfm – just scroll down a bit.
Eric Weisbender
Eric has the
honor of being listed last! Eric is a
GIS specialist for Western Area Power
Administration
, which is part of the Department of Energy. He’s a strong proponent of open source
software, including PostGIS, OGR, Hibernate, etc.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Top