Our Team
We make the Web more useful, data more open, and cities more livable. Our extraordinary team makes it possible. TOPP is home to talented technologists, community organizers, journalists, and policy experts.
Dan Kohn
Executive Director
Dan was previously chief operating officer of the Linux Foundation, the not-for-profit trade group working to promote, protect, and standardize Linux, and before that was a general partner at Skymoon Ventures, a seed-stage venture capital firm.
Earlier, Dan helped manage telecoms firms controlled by Craig McCaw and founded NetMarket, one of the first commercial websites. He helps run Healing Thresholds Autism Therapy.
Dan graduated from Swarthmore and Exeter. He lives in Manhattan with his wife and two young sons.
Mark Gorton
Founder and Chairman
Mark Gorton has spent the past decade building a series of innovative financial and technology companies.
He is the founder of Tower Research Capital LLC, a money management firm specializing in quantitative trading and investment strategies, as well as the founder of Lime Brokerage LLC, Lime Wire LLC, and Lime Labs LLC.
Mark founded The Open Planning Project in 1999 after realizing the incredible potential of the open source movement to create tools that catalyze civic engagement. Mark is TOPP’s primary funder, and in his role as Chairman he draws on a strong background in urban transportation advocacy and open media.
Mark holds degrees from Yale, Stanford, and Harvard Business School.
Aaron Naparstek
Board Member &
Founding Editor, Streetsblog
Aaron Naparstek has worked as a freelance journalist, community activist and interactive media producer, designing and developing web products for large corporations, small start-ups, and venture capitalists.
In 2005, he joined TOPP to found Streetsblog. Since that time, Streetsblog has played a pivotal role in New York’s transportation policy. Aaron led the expansion of Livable Streets into a national campaign, including the development of a series of Streetsblogs in other cities.
Aaron is a Marshall Memorial Fellow and the author of Honku: The Zen Antidote for Road Rage. A founder of the Park Slope Neighbors community group, Aaron also works with the Park Slope Civic Council and the Grand Army Plaza Coalition. He holds degrees from Washington University in St. Louis and the Columbia University School of Journalism.
Alyssa Wright
Outreach Engineer
A graduate of MIT's Media Lab and NYU's Interactive Telecommunications
Program, Alyssa comes to OpenGeo with breadth and wealth of experience
in information architecture, editing, graphic and interaction design,
and project management. Past projects include Hero Reports, Cherry Blossoms, and Selectricity.
In April 2009 she joined OpenGeo as an Outreach Engineer, where she applies her skills to open geospatial solutions for our clients.
Andrea Aime
Lead Software Developer
Andrea is an expert geospatial technologist with specialties in large data systems and spatial data analysis algorithms.
Over the past 8 years, Andrea has been a leader in major open source software projects, including Geotools and GRASS. His interest in GIS stems from their unique applications across the whole IT field, and he is partial to open source software because of the great communities.
Andrea joined the OpenGeo team in 2006. Before OpenGeo, he spent four years developing research prototypes sponsored by the European Union and the Italian state administration. He is a talented Java developer with an intimate understanding of technologies like Hibernate, Swing, and Spring.
Outside of consulting work, Andrea taught for four years at his alma mater, the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia, Italy. When not playing with technology, Andrea enjoys spending time with his family, playing tennis, and reading.
Andreas Hocevar
GeoSpatial Solutions Engineer
Andreas has been programming since his first Sharp pocket calculator. He holds a master's degree in Urban and Regional Planning, and he began his career in Austria as a planner. When he discovered that existing planning methods involve huge barriers to positive change, he decided to create software for better planning. Andreas joined TOPP in 2008.
Andreas' favorite means of transportation is his bicycle. In his spare time he enjoys mountaineering and backcountry snowboarding, as well as sailing and yacht racing.
Andy Cochran
Designer
Andy lends his technical and design talents to many of our projects, including GeoServer and Livable Streets Education. He studied fine arts and history at Maryland Institute College of Art, and he arrived at TOPP with more than 9 years of experience in design, both print and web.
He enjoys drawing, painting, writing and recording music, and Alton Brown-inspired cooking when he's not designing websites, logos, and printed materials. He loves living in New York City, even though his heart is buried in the bluegrass of Louisville, KY. He likes his art contemporary, his food spicy, and his country music old-timey. Andy's ridiculously ginormous music collection is comprised mostly of quirky indie-rock, twee, and Hank Williams Senior albums.
Anna Phillips
GothamSchools Staff Reporter
Anna Phillips joined GothamSchools in the spring of 2009. She covered the debate over how to govern the New York City schools and is now following the 2009 city elections.
Before joining TOPP, she interned for Politico senior politics writer Ben Smith, the New York Sun, and City Limits. Anna holds a bachelor's degree in U.S. history from Columbia University, where she was the editor-in-chief of The Blue and White, the undergraduate newsy magazine.
Arne Kepp
Software Engineer
Arne is the lead developer of GeoWebCache, a tile caching service for WMS tiles. He coded most of the 1.0 release and directs decisions on its core architecture. Now he is building a community of contributors around the project.
Arne is also a core contributor to GeoServer, focusing on KML, GeoSearch, and GeoWebCache integration.
In addition to his coding work, Arne serves as the Systems Administrator for OpenGeo, keeping our servers up and running. He has extensive experience installing, configuring, and debugging GeoServer, and running it in production environments.
Before joining TOPP, Arne founded Norway's largest Linux community site, built its community and developed and maintained the software to run it. He learned about GIS programming while working for the main Smallworld provider in Norway.
Ashley DeVries
Project & Office Manager
Ashley joined TOPP in 2008 after spending five years as a Project Manager in architecture and construction. In addition, she spent two years as the Operations Manager for the Community Food Resource Center, a direct service non-profit organization.
As an advocate for beautiful buildings and habitable neighborhoods, Ashley obtained an M.S. in Historic Preservation from Columbia University. Having watched freeway development destroy neighborhood after neighborhood in her hometown of Houston, she's happy to be at TOPP, contributing to a future with fewer cars.
In her spare time, Ashley enjoys hanging out with her incredibly awesome kids and playing bass in bands around the city.
Ben Fried
Editor, Streetsblog NYC
Ben has been writing and reporting for Streetsblog since January 2008.
Previously, he spent 7 years at the Project for Public Spaces. He is currently completing a masters in journalism at Columbia. Go Mets!
Brad Aaron
Streetsblog Deputy Editor
A native of North Carolina, Brad has worked as a reporter, editor and publisher since 1994, and has written extensively on government, business, education, the environment, urban planning and transportation, among other topics.
Brad began freelancing for Streetsblog NY in early 2007 and became Deputy Editor in February 2008. He lives in Inwood, at the northernmost tip of Manhattan, where he can always get a seat on the A train.
Bryan Goebel
Editor, Streetsblog San Francisco
Bryan Goebel is the editor of Streetsblog San Francisco. He’s been a broadcast journalist for twenty years and most recently worked as an anchor and editor at KCBS radio, pushing stories typically ignored by mainstream media.
His key areas of interest have been politics, human rights, bike-friendly streets, marginalized communities, LGBT issues and literature. He gave up driving in 1998 along with “cheeseburgers, smokes and cokes” and lost sixty pounds riding his bicycle. He fell in love with the bike and has been pedaling ever since.
He's also working on his first novel and a play and lives in the Tenderloin.
Carly Clark
Managing Director, Livable Streets Initiative
Carly manages the Livable Streets Initiative, our portfolio of transportation reform projects including Streetsblog, Streetfilms and Livable Streets Education. Carly combines strategic vision with technical expertise in making successful streets and places, and with a talent for making information fun and useful. Before joining TOPP to lead the branding of the Livable Streets Initiative, Carly was the Art Director for the Project for Public Spaces, a non-profit public space design firm.
Carly holds degrees from Wellesley College and Pratt Institute
Chris Abraham
Software Developer
Chris graduated from the University of Waterloo with a degree in Systems Design Engineering in 2001. During his degree he worked in IT consulting for Fortune 500 companies. He joined The Open Planning Project in 2006 in an effort to find work better aligned with his personal vision and values. He considers working at TOPP to be a
nourishing part of his life as it gives him meaningful projects to contribute his talents and energy in addition to being a fun social environment. In between college and joining TOPP, he trained for several years at a Zen Monastery.
Chris Holmes
Director of OpenGeo
Chris began his work in open source geospatial software when he joined TOPP as the lead developer of GeoServer in 2002. He served in this role until 2005, when he chose to pursue a Fulbright Scholarship in Zambia to examine the potential for Open Source Geospatial software to implement Spatial Data Infrastructures in developing countries.
In 2006 he returned to TOPP as its Managing Director. Managing GeoServer development and nurturing the project's sustainability, he grew TOPP's geospatial division into OpenGeo.
Chris has served on the Project Management Committee of GeoTools, the most advanced Open Source Java toolkit, since 2002, and is now the chair of the Project Steering Committee of GeoServer. Chris is additionally a founding board member to the Open Source Geospatial (OSGeo) Foundation, which is giving diverse spatially oriented projects a common banner.
Chris Patterson
Web Designer / Front-End Web Developer
Chris graduated with a degree in Philosophy from Kenyon College in 1994. Since nobody is hiring philosophers these days, he worked in the corporate world for many years. Chris has been hand-writing markup since the mid-90s, and enjoys standards-oriented web design well beyond the point of embarrassment. He is a passionate believer in the ability of the web to precipitate change, and is excited to be joining TOPP, to help ensure that those changes remain solidly in the plus column. Chris lives in Madison, Wisconsin, with his favorite wife, Molly.
Clarence Eckerson
Director of Videography
Clarence became enmeshed in the bike and pedestrian scene after riding the Transportation Alternatives (T.A.) Century in 1994. After serving three years as chair of the Brooklyn T.A. Committee, he yielded to his true passion and started bikeTV, a cable show dedicated to showcasing bicycle phenomenons and bike advocacy in the NYC area and beyond. He joined the TOPP team in 2004 after meeting Mark Gorton at a screening of a short film about Car-Free Central Park he produced.
Clarence has nearly one hundred Streetfilms to his credit and has been called "the hardest working man in transportation show biz" for his years of dedication to create videos that are both enlightening, entertaining and inspiring.
Damien Newton
Streetsblog LA Editor
Damien is the force behind Streetsblog Los Angeles. Before moving west, he was the NJ Coordinator for the Tri-State Transportation Campaign.
David Turner
Software Engineer
David Turner can cook anything. In his previous life, he enforced the GPL at the Free Software Foundation. Now he can be found programming at the back of the TOPP office where the ninjas can't get him.
David Winslow
Technical Lead
David has been working with open-source software for over 6 years, as user and developer, and is currently a core committer on the GeoServer, GeoTools, and GeoExt projects, as well as contributing to OpenLayers and PostGIS.
As a team member with OpenGeo, David implements features and fixes bugs on several pieces of the OpenGeo stack, encouraging collaboration and synergy within the stack. He also leads training sessions on the stack and speaks at conferences.
David is a graduate of Duke University who likes solving problems (not puzzles), sharing knowledge, and caffeine. Occasionally he leaves his terminal window to investigate foreign languages and other perplexing fuzzy things.
He blogs at dwins.wordpress.com.
Eddie Pickle
Director of Business Development, OpenGeo
Eddie has been working in the geospatial industry for over 25 years as an entrepreneur, manager and analyst. He is a founder and former Chief Operating Officer of OGC web services pioneer IONIC Enterprise, and he led the successful negotiation of its purchase by Leica Geosystems (now ERDAS). Eddie was previously Executive Vice President of Claritas, the world leader in marketing information (now part of Nielsen), and Managing Director at IXI, a leading financial services data firm.
Eddie's experience includes a wide range of applications, from GIS to market segmentation and market analysis. He began his career as a site location specialist and demographer for CACI, and has worked with emergency managers, banks, retailers, telecommunications companies, government agencies, media companies and others on their geospatial and marketing applications.
With OpenGeo, Eddie works to support clients, to develop partnerships and to help OpenGeo management develop and implement strategic and marketing plans.
Elana Schor
Streetsblog Capitol Hill ReporterElana Schor has covered congressional politics for more than four years, most recently at The Hill newspaper, The Guardian (U.K.), and Talking Points Memo. A native of Brooklyn, she has also published work on MarketWatch.com and in the Biloxi Sun Herald newspaper. When she's not chasing lawmakers around in the Capitol complex, she can usually be found canoeing down the nearest river or sitting on a city stoop, daydreaming about campaign-finance reform. Elana holds a masters' degree in journalism from Northwestern University.
Elizabeth Green
GothamSchools Editor
Elizabeth Green started as the education reporter at The New York Sun in May 2007 and continued until the newspaper closed in October 2008. Before working at the Sun, Elizabeth covered K-12 education for U.S. News & World Report magazine. She has appeared on CNN, MSNBC, and The Brian Lehrer Show to speak about education news.
Elizabeth graduated from Harvard in 2006 with a degree in social
studies.
Elizabeth Press
Filmmaker
Elizabeth joined Streetfilms after four years as a producer for the independent TV/Radio program, Democracy Now! She received her MFA in Electronic Arts at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute with a focus on community media. While working on her thesis, Elizabeth spent a year teaching youth video in the Dominican Republic on a Fulbright. Her videos have screened in festivals all over the world, including a grassroots organized tour with her most recent documentary, Still We Ride.
You can see a list of her Streetfilms here.You will usually find Elizabeth commuting on her second-hand spectrum bicycle.
Gabriel Roldán
Software Developer
Gabriel has been a GIS and open source developer for over a decade. He began in the GIS and Remote Sensing Department in the Instituto Politecnico Superior in Rosario, Argentina, and since then he has worked at various companies in Argentina and Spain. Over the past six years he has been improving corporate GIS and SDI software components for local government agencies, often introducing GeoTools and GeoServer as core components of their GIS software infrastructure.
Working in professional Open Source is an incredible opportunity for continuous learning and improvement, both technically and as a human being. TOPP's vision and mission provide Gabriel a platform for full ethical commitment to his technical work.
Ivan Willig
GIS Developer
Before joining OpenGeo, Ivan worked extensively with GIS and GPS technologies; in particular ArcMap and other ESRI products, but also open source alternatives like Grass GIS and QGIS. He had also worked with Mapserver, Openlayers and PostGIS.
At OpenGeo Ivan is the 'demo czar', ensuring that our demos meet the highest standards.
He also leads work on a set of high quality map tiles derived from
OpenStreetMap data served by the OpenGeo Suite, showcased at maps.opengeo.org.
Julia Torti
Recruiter &
Business Development Coordinator, OpenGeo
Julia hails from the Great State of Vermont, where she was exposed to Vermont's rich tradition of civic participation from a young age. She believes in the power and right of citizens to shape their own communities, a belief put into practice during her work on the Board of Directors for Essex CHIPS, a youth empowerment organization in her hometown.
Julia has conducted research for a project on transportation policy and climate change at the Public Policy Institute of California, a project on malaria policies in eastern Africa with the Nicholas School of the Environment, and an independent project on foreign direct investment while studying in Cameroon. Julia graduated from Duke University with a degree in political science, where she was the captain of the Duke Women's Rugby Team.
Justin Deoliveira
Software Developer
As a Geotools module maintainer and uDig commiter Justin has been
active in the open source geospatial community for some time. Since
joining TOPP, Justin has become an active developer on the GeoServer project. He graduated in 2005 from The University of Victoria with a BSC in Computer Science.
Kim Wiley-Schwartz
Livable Streets Education Director
Kim is an educator, teaching artist and afterschool advocate who has worked with at-risk youth for the past 20 years. Her work on Livable Streets education brings progressive urban design and livability ideas to NYC students.
Kim first combined the Arts and education with advocacy while living in Indonesia after the 1999 overthrow of Suharto. Connecting youth through music and drama emboldened ex-patriot students to work for better education for Indonesian children.
A music-theatre specialist and professional development expert, Kim has worked with The Metropolitan Opera Guild, TADA! Youth Theater, Project Ikat, Partnership for After School Education (PASE) and the 92nd Street Y. She lives in Brooklyn with her husband Andy and her two bike-savvy children, Isaac and Nora.
Lily Bernheimer
Livable Streets Project Coordinator
Lily holds a BA in Ethnic Studies from Brown University. Before TOPP, she worked at the Gotham Center for New York City History. Her first occupation in New York was as a children's face-painter, where she witnessed the city's potential for thriving streets while traveling to work in public spaces throughout the five boroughs.
Luke Tucker
Lead Software Engineer, Melkjug
Luke is a salty Rhode Island expat, a long time advocate of open source, and a believer in the ability of technology to facilitate positive change. Before making the leap to New York, he graduated from Brown University and worked for Tazz Networks, Context Media and contracted with a variety of businesses around Providence. When he's not tinkering with gadgets and code, he can be found running sailboats aground or wrestling quahogs into submission.
Matthew Roth
Streetsblog San Francisco Reporter
Matthew Roth is a writer and journalist living in Bernal Heights, San Francisco. He's very happy to be involved in starting Streetsblog San Francisco and hopes to elevate the dialogue around people-oriented transportation policy in the Bay Area.
In New York City, after a stint as a fact checker and researcher at The Nation Magazine, he worked myriad jobs, from school teacher to recruiter for Doctors Without Borders. In 2004, he was arrested for riding his bicycle during the Republican National Convention protests and subsequently organized legal defense and press support for the more than 400 cyclists arrested that week. He managed Norman Siegel's campaign for NYC Public Advocate, and he did public relations for Reverend Billy and The Church of Stop Shopping on their cross-country tour for the Morgan Spurlock film, What Would Jesus Buy? In 2006, he worked for Transportation Alternatives as Director of the NYC Streets Renaissance Campaign, where he became a parking wonk, spearheaded the campaign to eliminate parking permit abuse among civil servants, and helped bring Shoupian dogma to town.
Maura Walz
Staff Reporter
Before joining GothamSchools in the summer of 2009, Maura reported on charter schools around the United States for the Carnegie-Knight Foundation journalism initiative News21. She came to journalism and the education beat after working as an editor of scholarly research databases outside of Washington, D.C. Maura holds degrees from the University of Chicago and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.
Michael Keating
Business Development Manager
Michael helps launch new projects and businesses within TOPP, with an emphasis on applications for public transit. Prior to joining TOPP, Michael worked as a management consultant, entrepreneur, and urban designer, focusing on the value of environmental sustainability and clean technology in each of these roles. He holds an MBA from Harvard Business School, a Masters in Urban Planning from the Harvard Graduate School of Design, and a BA from Wesleyan University, where he double-majored in distance running and ice cream eating.
Michael Rhodes
Reporter, Streetsblog San Francisco
Michael is a reporter at Streetsblog San Francisco, and covers the city's transit system, Muni. Originally from a streetcar suburb neighborhood of St. Paul, Minnesota, he became interested in street design and transportation issues after studying abroad in London and living in San Francisco. Michael graduated from the University of Minnesota, Morris with degrees in English and philosophy.
Mike Pumphrey
Outreach Engineer
Mike Pumphrey once drew a map of all the streets in his hometown from memory when he was growing up. Today, he collects vintage road atlases. Coupled with his desire to help people understand technology, he feels ideally suited to be OpenGeo's first Outreach Engineer. Mike considers himself an advocate on behalf of users of software, and is reviving the lost art of quality documentation.
Mike has a Bachelor of Science in Physics from Rutgers University. He longs to travel the world and to not be tied to an office.
Nicholas Bergson-Shilcock
Software Developer
Nick graduated from Columbia with a degree in computer engineering. Prior to coming to New York, he went to Franklin & Marshall College, where he mostly attended club meetings.
In Nick's recent work at TOPP, he has been focusing on software to make transit easier and more enjoyable. He's helped prototype a system for real-time bus arrival prediction and is currently working on an open source multi-modal trip planner.
Nick has thought about it considerably, and he would rather give up hot water than internet access. He occasionally blogs at Unschooled.org, and frequently vows to do so more often.
Nick Grossman
Director, TOPP Labs
Nick has since spent his career at the intersection of technology, planning, and transportation, attempting to make our cities more usable and livable. As the Director of TOPP Labs, he spends his time developing new products around smart transportation, participatory planning, and open city IT infrastructure. He originally joined TOPP in 2006 to produce Streetsblog and Streetfilms.
Prior to joining TOPP, Nick worked at the Project for Public Spaces, driving bottom-up planning processes in communities around the US, and developing online tools for planning and collaboration. He also draws on experience as design director for a tech startup and as an independent web designer and developer.
Nick holds a BA in Urban Studies from Stanford University. He tweets on a daily basis and writes periodically on his blog.
Paul Ramsey
Senior Consultant
Paul Ramsey has been working with spatial data and databases for a decade, yet remains startlingly lucid. As an entrepreneur, he founded and ran a software consultancy for eight years, growing from one staff member to twenty-five.
As an open source evangelist, he speaks and teaches regularly at geospatial conferences. As a programmer, he continues to work happily and productively on the PostGIS spatial database project he started in 2001. As a father and husband, he lives happily with his family in Victoria, British Columbia. As a homeowner, he paints regularly and tries to stay on the good side of the neighbors. As a gardener, he plants potatoes every spring and eats them every summer. As a poet, he is not any good at all.
Paul Winkler
Software Engineer
Paul Winkler joined TOPP in October 2007. A largely self-taught programmer, he has been a member of various open-source software communities since 1999.
Paul is a graduate of Bard College, with a degree in Rather Unpopular Music. When not mucking around with Python and Linux, he plays bass in two bands. Paul and his wife Abby enjoy quiet evenings at home in Brooklyn, and very loud music elsewhere.
Philip Ashlock
Web Designer
Phil migrated to TOPP from Washington State, where he'd most recently
served as a web developer at Western Washington University. At TOPP, Phil crafts the visual end of our websites and user
interfaces. OpenGeo, GothamSchools, the Livable Streets sites, and Melkjug are all websites that showcase Phil's design work.
In
addition to design, Phil enjoys exploring the natural world,
photography, programming, and of course: pragmatic utopian idealism. He
also enjoys his daily bicycle commute across the East River.
Philissa Cramer
GothamSchools Associate Editor
Philissa Cramer is a journalist covering the New York City public schools. Before coming to TOPP, she worked at Insideschools.org, where she visited and reviewed more than 100 public schools. She studied education history and policy and edited the student newspaper at Brown University. Philissa is also a founding member of the Brooklyn Food Group supper club.
Rebecca Jacobs
Outreach Coordinator, Livable Streets Education
Rebecca has taught middle school in Milan, handled Special Projects at Planned Parenthood’s national headquarters, and broadened support for the Central Asia section of the World Heritage Center, UNESCO. So far, Paris has her favorite public transportation system. A Columbia grad, Rebecca likes maps, all the meanings of ‘the natural environment,’ and spontaneous dance parties.
Robert Marianski
Software Engineer
After graduating from Georgia Tech with a degree in CS, Robert Marianski began his career in the financial sector. Although he was initially excited to work on development projects that had significant impact, he found himself unhappy. He noticed that many of his coworkers did not share his idealistic beliefs of creating better software, but were more interested in providing quick and dirty solutions. When Robert found TOPP, he was delighted to see an environment where others shared his same development ideas, and actually encouraged new creative solutions to problems.
Robin Smith
Streetfilms Associate
Robin was born and raised in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains in a tiny village, where she experienced the power a small group of dedicated citizens can have. Bearing witness to some of the most negligent regional land use and transportation decisions this side of the Mississippi, Robin was inspired to pursue a degree in Environmental Studies at the University of Vermont, where she discovered video as a tool for motivating social and environmental change.
Having only lived in states beginning with the letter V, Robin decided to move to New York in 2008. You'll find her making music, chasing maple seed pod helicopters, cooking, and riding her bicycle.
Rolando Peñate
Design Lead, OpenGeo
Rolando first began working with geospatial software while still an undergraduate and found the experience so frustrating that he vowed never to use it again unless he could make it better. A few years later he found himself working with OpenGeo to make the user experience of their suite the best in the industry.
Before OpenGeo, Rolando worked at Brown University's Instructional Technology Group developing educational uses for emerging technologies. In 2006, he moved to New York City and joined The Open Planning Project as the Digital Community Director, quickly becoming our first full-time web designer and founder of their design team.
Now he works as OpenGeo's lead interaction, graphic, and web designer. In addition to working with all of our software projects, he works on GeoSilk, a set of icons for geospatial applications.
Sarah Goodyear
Streetsblog Network Community Manager
Streetsblog Reporter
Sarah Goodyear has worked as an editor and writer for a wide variety of publications, ranging from Rolling Stone to Casco Bay Weekly, an independent newspaper in Portland, Maine. Her freelance journalism has been published in the Village Voice, Ms. magazine and Time Out New York, among many other venues.
A native of New York, Sarah started writing for Streetsblog at the end of 2006, glad to finally find an outlet where the readers were as passionate as she was about traffic calming. In December of 2008, she helped launch the Streetsblog Network, bringing together nearly 300 transportation bloggers from around the country and the world.
Sarah has a degree from the University of California at Berkeley. She is also the author of a novel, View from a Burning Bridge, published by Red Hen Press. Sarah teaches writing at the Writing Institute at Sarah Lawrence College, lives in Brooklyn with her family, and owns way too many bicycles.
Sebastian Benthall
Project Manager
Sebastian has assisted artificial intelligence courses, worked on interaction design, and studied the game theory of funding open source software.
At OpenGeo, he is a committer to GeoExt and contributor the OpenLayers and GeoServer. His work has been focused on building collaborative mapping applications like Community Almanac and Vespucci, a graphical front-end to GeoServer's versioning capability.
A firm believer in both open source software and the importance of its financial sustainability, Sebastian is also a member of OpenGeo's Business Development team.
Sophia Parafina
OpenGeo Director of Operations
Sophia has been involved in geospatial software for over a decade. In her career she has been a programmer, scientist, project manager, venture capitalist, and CTO. A long-time champion of OGC standards, she brings an invaluable wealth of industry and management experience to OpenGeo.
After managing a series of Web and GIS projects for organizations like the Texas Department of Transportation and Los Angeles Airport, Sophia joined In-Q-Tel, the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency's venture capital fund, as their Senior Program Manager. There she ran programs that funded development of GML 2.0, WFS, and WMC.
In 2000, Sophia founded Ionic Enteprise, a joint venture to bring mapping technology based on Open Geospatial Consortium standards to the U.S. market. Ionic Enterprise grew to 15 employees with annual revenue of $8M before being acquired by Leica Geosystems, now Erdas, in 2007.
In 2009 Sophia joined OpenGeo, where she manages our Outreach team and guides the OpenGeo Suite toward being the greatest enterprise level web GIS solution around. She blogs at sproke.blogspot.com.
Temim Fruchter
Administrative Assistant
Temim came to TOPP as Administrative Assistant at the tail end of 2008. Temim is the drummer for The Shondes and is generally sustained by strong coffee, fancy pens and bold hot sauce. In the past, she has worked as a legal advocate, a community organizer, and a bookkeeper.
With spare time not spent banging on things or playing shows, Temim does some freelance writing, embarks on New York adventures and does local organizing and activist work.
Tim Schaub
GeoSpatial Solutions Engineer
Tim Schaub thinks every problem has a spatial solution. He is a project steering committee member and core contributor to OpenLayers - the coolest toolset around for maps in a browser. Tim punches in for work from Bozeman, Montana. Before finding TOPP, he earned his keep as an independent software developer, worked for a remote sensing shop, and spent a number of years bringing quality mapping solutions to conservation organizations in the Northern Rockies and Pacific Northwest.
On his wall hangs a BS in Mathematics and Natural Science from University of Puget Sound and an MS in Geology from University of Washington.
Vanessa Hamer
Director of Operations
Vanessa is a big fan of wikis, bike lanes, and other simple technologies that level the playing field. In 2006, she joined TOPP as a recruiter.
Pre-TOPP, Vanessa worked at Duke University & Health System, where she looked for ways to shrink the institution's environmental footprint by reshuffling the supply chain. She has also worked with small businesses and studied pollution in the desert.
Vanessa graduated from Duke with majors in English and Biology. She is interested in helping innovations move around, whether in software or crop genes.
Xavier Monsegur
Senior Systems Administrator
Xavier is a self-taught Systems Administrator and free thinker with interests ranging from systems administration and IT Security to activism and politics. A long time user and fan of Unix / Linux and the open source movement, he has been involved in the creation of two Linux distributions, as well as in public/full-disclosure security vulnerability research and assessment. He has also been an active mentor. He has an extensive knowledge in many technologies and a major thirst for knowledge.