FOSS4G 2009 Speakers

Warwick Watkins is Director General of the NSW Department of Lands, Surveyor General of NSW and Registrar General of NSW. Warwick holds a number of positions in the Australian spatial industry: Chair of the Australian and New Zealand Land Information Council (ANZLIC); Chair of the Australian Spatial Council; Chair, Spatial Information Systems Limited; Director, AuScope Limited; Commissioner of Soil Conservation; Norfolk Island Surveyor General; Deputy Chancellor of the University of Technology, Sydney; President of the Board of Surveying and Spatial Information (BOSSI); and Deputy Chair of the CSIRO Water for a Healthy Country National Research Flagship Advisory Council Advisory Board.

Raj Singh is Director of Interoperability Programs at the Open Geospatial Consortium. He works on multi-firm software prototyping projects, helps design information architectures, and manages ogcnetwork.net, a web site developed by and for geospatial developers. He is one of the designers of GeoRSS (georss.org) and helped develop the Geospatial Profile of the Federal Enterprise Architecture. Currently Dr. Singh is leading leading a major project to advance information sharing in building construction and design software. His passion is aligning geospatial standards with the general IT industry, and increasing the pervasiveness of geospatial services throughout society. Dr. Singh obtained a Masters in City Planning and a PhD in Urban Studies & Planning from MIT, and a BA in Economics from Brown University.

Paul Ramsey is an geospatial consultant with OpenGeo, an expert in open source software, and a founder of the PostGIS open source spatial database project. Paul is a director of the Open Source Geospatial Foundation, and has been a long time advocate for making intelligent use of open source in systems design. Paul speaks and teaches frequently at conferences on the use and abuse of open source geospatial software." His keynote is titled: Beyond Nerds Bearing Gifts: The Future of the Open Source Economy

Raul Vera began his career at Google in July 2007. Raul has been involved in digital-media technology (video animation, graphics, image processing, printing) for over 25 years, as software developer, architect, entrepreneur, and team leader. Raul's management experience spans both Australia and the USA. Raul is responsible for leading and expanding the Geo team at Google Australia, and works extensively in new product development.

Senator Kate Lundy has represented the Australian Capital Territory in the Australian Federal Parliament since 1996. In that time she had many portfolios in opposition including IT, Manufacturing, Consumer Affairs, Sport and Health Promotion. Senator Lundy is currently Chair of the Joint Standing Committee for the National Capital and External Territories. She is a long-standing member of the Senate Environment, Communications and the Arts Committee. Senator Lundy has participated in every Senate Inquiry relating to telecommunications and Information Technology of the last thirteen years and continues to be a strong advocate for the use of digital technology and ICT innovation to strengthen and transform the economy for future growth and enhance social inclusion within society.

Andy Pitman is a Professor in atmospheric science and co-director of the Climate Change Research Centre at the University of New South Wales. His expertise is in climate modelling, with broad interests extending across climate change, climate impacts and land cover change. He is a lead author on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, national lead of the International Geosphere Biosphere Program, Chair of a major committee of the World Climate Research Program and the convenor of the ARC Research Network for Earth System Science. He is a member of the advisory board of Risk Frontiers - an industry funded centre that explores questions of climate, volcanic and hydrological risk for the insurance industry.

The Hon Richard Marles MP is the Australian federal Parliamentary Secretary for Innovation and Industry. The Innovation, Industry, Science and Research portfolio covers a range of functions and responsibilities including the sustainable growth of Australian industries, by developing a national innovation system that drives knowledge creation, cutting edge science and research, international competitiveness and greater productivity. In his role, Parliamentary Secretary Marles has administrative responsibility for Australian Intellectual Property, the National Measurement Institute and the Australian Building Codes Board.

Cameron Shorter is the FOSS4G 2009 chair, and will open the FOSS4G conference. He is the GeoSpatial Solutions Manager at LISAsoft where he leads software development teams in the integration of Open Source with Proprietary systems using Open Standards. He has been on the Project Steering Committee of three OSGeo projects, mentored GeoTools through incubation and chairs the Australian/New Zealand chapter of OSGeo. He writes and presents on the intersection and tensions between Business Drivers, Open Standards, and integrating Open Source with Proprietary solutions.