I agree with others that we have a very strong group of board candidates this year, and that is a great sign for the strength of OSGeo. I would like to thank Tyler Mitchell for nominating me. I don't have the long and illustrious background in open source that many fellow nominees have, I have just got involved with open source geospatial solutions in the past few years. But I feel I can bring value to the board because I do bring a different perspective from most other board members and board nominees. I have worked in the geospatial industry for over 20 years, and have been CTO of two of the top three (closed source) geospatial software companies, Intergraph and Smallworld (still the leader in utility GIS, now part of GE). I am well known and well respected in the broader geospatial community outside the open source world, I regularly speak at conferences around the world and have a well read blog called geothought (in fact I just gave the opening keynote talk at AGI GeoCommunity, the main GIS conference in the UK, and have been tied up there for the past couple of days which is why I have not been able to post this statement sooner). This puts me in a good position to help increase awareness of OSGeo and I do this regularly in my conference talks. As someone who has a background in closed source software but has used open source geospatial software for my latest startup, I am in a strong position to help explain to other closed source software users why they should switch to open source solutions.
I have served on the boards of multiple non-profit organizations, including the geospatial educational organization, GITA, best known for its conferences; the executive management team of several small and large companies; and the advisory boards of several startups. I have been involved in organizing many conferences, small and large, including the recent WhereCamp5280 in Denver, and was one of the leaders of the Denver bid for FOSS4G 2010, and we will re-bid for 2011. I believe I am good at helping organizations take a strategic view of where they want to go. I am from the UK originally but have lived in the US for the past 15 years, and have had global roles at both the large software companies I worked at, and have traveled extensively in those roles, so I feel I have a good view of geospatial users and markets around the world. From my experience working on various boards, I think it is important to include people with a diverse range of backgrounds and experience. Tyler asked where people would like to see OSGeo in five years, and I would answer somewhat differently to many of those who have made pretty detailed responses. I would like to see that the number of organizations using open source geospatial software has grown dramatically over the next five years, and I would like to see a much larger ecosystem of companies providing solutions using open source geospatial software, and helping fund continued development. I believe it would be good for the geospatial industry as a whole to see greater competition, and I think that open source solutions are now mature enough that they can provide a much greater challenge to established closed source solutions than they have in the past. In order to do that we need to get additional people with commercial as well as technical experience engaged in OSGeo, and I would help with that as a board member. We need to also do this in a way that respects the spirit of the community, but I believe we can do that (partly by looking to larger open source communities than our own for lessons on how they have grown). Thank you for your consideration, and please feel free to email me if you have any questions. -- Peter Batty - President, Spatial Networking W: +1 303 339 0957 M: +1 720 346 3954 Blog: http://geothought.blogspot.com
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