OpenPlans is a group of passionate people working to create better transportation systems and a more open civic sector. We care about open source, open standards, and turning raw data into useful information.
If our mission resonates with you, maybe it's time to join us.
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 (recently acquired by Wedbush), Lime Medical LLC and Lime Labs LLC.
Mark founded OpenPlans in 1999 after realizing the incredible potential of the open source movement to create tools that catalyze civic engagement. Mark is OpenPlans’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.
Chris leads development of our growing Civic Media properties, including Streetsblog, Streetfilms, and GothamSchools.
Chris previously worked in IT consulting for Fortune 500 companies and trained for several years at a Zen Monastery. Chris joined OpenPlans in 2006 in an effort to find work better aligned with his personal vision and values. He considers working at OpenPlans to be a nourishing part of his life as it provides meaningful projects to contribute his talents and energy.
Chris graduated from the University of Waterloo with a degree in Systems Design Engineering. He blogs at cjyabraham.com
Camille has applied her powers of “outsight” (the opposite of insight) to projects ranging from performing arts to international business development. At OpenGeo, she provides support to the business team that interfaces with clients and builds vital partnerships for the growth of the organization. Previous to OpenGeo, Camille lived and worked for 3.5 years as a journalist, translator, and non-profit project coordinator in Slovenia.
Camille is a native Californian but a committed Brooklyner. She has a degree in Political Science from the UC Berkeley and she completed the Internship in Building Community at Columbia University. She is a budding “geek to street” interface and has worked (and continues to work) on FLOSS and free culture projects.
Phil has been leading the development of the Open311 standard so that cities can leverage web enabled citizen services in an open and interoperable way. Over the past few years he has taken Open311 from an idea to a standardized protocol for publicly tracking civic issues in dozens of cities around the world. In partnership with Code for America, Phil is also a co-founder of Civic Commons, an initiative to help governments more easily share technology. While Open311 remains his primary focus, he also facilitates broader collaboration between cities and other government bodies around open government initiatives and the development of open standards, open source software, and best practices for civic technology.
You can follow Phil on Twitter @philipashlock.
In 2002 Ken, along with 3 partners, founded IONIC Enterprise, a geospatial web-services pioneer focusing on the early implementation of OGC standards. Ken ran sales at IONIC until 2007, when the company was purchased by Leica Geosystems, now Erdas. Subsequently, Ken was responsible for overseeing civilian sales of geospatial enterprise and desktop software and services in the United States, Canada and Latin America for Erdas.
Earlier in his career, Ken ran sales for several divisions of the global IT company, Renaissance Worldwide. Prior to that, his Civil Engineering background led him into the commercial real estate industry where he ran major downtown commercial development projects in Philadelphia and Washington, DC. Ken is an active community member and currently sits on the Board of the Squaw Valley Mutual Water Company and the Board of the Sacramento Chapter of EO, the global Entrepreneurs Organization.
Jessica Campbell is a graduate student at New York University’s Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute, which she will graduate from in May. Before pursuing journalism she spent five years teaching middle and high school English in Brooklyn. She studied English and Classical Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, where she was a reporter for The Daily Pennsylvanian.
Evan is an entrepreneur with a background in network security, open source solutions and transportation advocacy. For nine years, Evan ran a successful network security business, consulting for everyone from Fortune 500 companies to small businesses on a range of emergency and forensic projects.
Evan has been involved in local politics and advocacy for some time. He co-founded the Young Progressive Majority in his native Los Angeles, and he has worked for the Tri-State Transportation Campaign.
Evan holds a Bachelor of Arts degree in political science from Columbia University.
Andy provides the creative vision for a range of successful projects. He has designed interfaces for community mapping tools like Community Almanac and FixCity Bike Racks, and he developed the look and feel for Streetfilms.
Outside of OpenPlans, Andy 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.
Andy holds a BFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art, and he has a decade of experience in design, both print and web. You can follow him @andycochran.
Elena graduated from Mt. Holyoke College with a degree in Critical Social Thought, with concentrated studies on public space and democratic life. A relatively new New Yorker, Elena has recently traveled the United States conducting interviews for StoryCorps. She’s been a story listener, workshop facilitator, community organizer, and fundraiser. She is thrilled to be supporting the work of OpenPlans while learning more about the inner-workings of a non-profit.
Philissa founded GothamSchools‘ newsroom in September 2008 and previously launched Insideschools’ first news blog. At Insideschools, she also visited and reviewed schools all over New York City and contributed to the third edition of New York City’s Best Public High Schools. She is also a founding member of the Brooklyn Food Group supper club.
Philissa studied the history and policy of education at Brown University, where she edited the Brown Daily Herald student newspaper.
Rachel is New Yorker by birth but a Chicagoan at heart, she has written about education, urban affairs and culture for the New York Times, the Chicago News Cooperative and the San Diego Union-Tribune, among other publications. She recently graduated from the University of Chicago. You can reach her at rcromidas@gothamschools.org or follow her on Twitter @rachelcromidas.
Adam helps OpenPlans with fundraising, from research to writing to database maintenance. He has a Masters of City Planning from the University of Pennsylvania, and he is currently a PhD Student at the CUNY Graduate Center Geography Department where he focuses sustainable transport and relevant technology.
When not deep in a textbook, database, or some other document, he can be found wandering around Brooklyn, probably searching for food.
Martin has been working with geospatial software for over 15 years, as a developer and technical architect. He founded the JTS Topology Suite project in 2001, and continues to be the project’s primary maintainer. He also initiated the JUMP Universal Mapping Platform, JCS Conflation Suite and RoadMatcher projects. He has worked on many kinds of geospatial software, including road network conflation, route planning, geocoding, spatial data translation, and web-based incident tracking. Martin is a long-standing member of OSGeo, and in 2011 he received the Sol Katz award for achievement in open source geospatial software.
Martin’s primary focus is on geospatial data management, processing and analysis, with an emphasis on the Java platform.
Geoffrey Decker joined GothamSchools in 2011 from the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism, where he covered Brooklyn schools for NYTimes.com‘s The Local blog and contributed to the New York Times. As a regular contributor to Brooklyn’s Patch.com sites, Geoffrey covered school closures and other co-location battles throughout central Brooklyn. He has also covered crime, politics, and government for NBC New York and high school basketball for Bed-Stuy Patch. Geoffrey studied journalism at Marist College.
Anthony keeps everything running smoothly here at OpenPlans. Prior to joining the team, Anthony worked in architecture, business development and co-founded a screenprinting company. He’s been to a few continents, biked across a few midwestern states and has generally been around and seen alot.
His interests include planning, architecture, typography, transit, urban history, travelling, personal technology, and diagramming. He was born and raised in NYC and probably won’t leave – due to the city’s propensity to change, improve and constantly surprise.
Justin, a long-time GeoTools and GeoServer developer, has been building geospatial solutions since 2001. In affiliation with OpenGeo, Justin leads most major architectural decisions for GeoServer, such as the transition to Spring and Maven. He has also lead core WFS work and KML support. In GeoTools he maintains the PostGIS datastore, and he has done cutting edge work on a new model for JDBC classes.
When not coding and leading development, Justin writes and delivers workshops on the OpenGeo Stack and GeoServer. He graduated from The University of Victoria with a BSC in Computer Science. You can follow Justin @j_deolive.
David’s background is in software marketing, where his work helped secure deals with some of the largest multi-national media companies. He came on board to utilize this experience in creating and executing marketing campaigns for OpenGeo. He’s looking forward to engaging clients and partners with programs and content that are timely, helpful and thought provoking.
David attended Binghamton University where he received an MBA. He’s currently pursuing a Masters in City and Regional Planning at Rutgers University, focusing on Transportation Planning and Policy. When David isn’t working at a computer, he’s probably on his bike or advocating for safer streets within a more sustainable transportation system. David thinks he always needs another bicycle; he has three, but the small apartment he shares with his wife has severely limited that growth.
A widely-regarded expert on environmental and transportation filmmaking, Clarence has been a fixture in the NYC transportation advocacy movement since the mid ʼ90s. 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.
Since joining OpenPlans in 2004, he has produced more than 100 short films on sustainable transport and livable streets issues, almost all entirely one-person productions.
His work has been featured in dozens of bike and film festivals around the world. Under his stewardship, Streetfilms has exploded as the world-wide media hub for sustainable transport advocates. He 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.
Nearly all of Clarenceʼs video is shot while walking, riding a bike or using mass transit – he does not own a driverʼs license.
Bart has been building geospatial software for over a decade, most recently with Javascript as his language of choice. Bart is a committer to OpenLayers and GeoExt, and he has a strong interest in the standards of the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC). He is also part of the Project Steering Committee (PSC) of GeoExt.
Bart has a Master’s in physical geography from Utrecht University in the Netherlands.
David was hooked on transit at an early age; at three months old he was among the youngest passengers aboard the inaugural train trip of his hometown transit system, MARTA, and has been riding ever since. Prior to joining OpenPlans, he spent five years at the Atlanta Regional Commission, where he worked on transit policy issues and helped established a regional open transit data initiative. In his spare time, David developed one of the earliest open source multimodal trip itinerary planning applications, and later became an active contributor to the OpenTripPlanner project.
David received a Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science from Brown University and a Master’s in City and Regional Planning from Georgia Tech. He lives carfree in Atlanta, which is not as difficult as it sounds.
Galen is a geographer by training and at heart. He previous lead data management and geospatial analysis activities for several climate change adaptation and disaster risk management projects for the World Bank in Latin America and the Caribbean. He brings to OpenGeo a background as a GIS analyst and a deep understanding of the client perspective and client needs. His goal is to make sure that all of our clients are happy and want to keep doing great work with us.
Rhonda has been playing with maps for as long as she can remember, and she has been working with geospatial software since her first college geography classes. She joined OpenGeo to help facilitate client-developer dialogue and to provide extra support on the West Coast.
Prior to life at OpenGeo, Rhonda spent several years with GreenInfo Network, helping to implement and manage geospatial solutions for nonprofits and public interest groups. When she is not in the office, you’ll likely find her in the kitchen, walking her dog, or exploring the neighborhoods of her adopted city — San Francisco, CA.
Rhonda holds a BA in Geography from Macalester College and an MS in Geology/Paleontology from the University of Minnesota.
Ben provides the editorial vision for Streetsblog NYC, where he breaks stories that help create more livable streets. After seven years at Project for Public Spaces, Ben joined the staff of Streetsblog early in 2008, just as the push to enact congestion pricing in New York City was peaking.
Since then he has covered slightly more successful transit funding campaigns, the transportation angle on local elections, the day-by-day transformation of New York City streets, and a few road rage incidents. He has written more words about the Prospect Park West bike lane than he would care to discuss.
Ben loves the Mets, and he holds a Master’s in Journalism from Columbia University.
Ben Goldman is a freelance writer and city planner who is covering the federal transportation beat while Tanya Snyder is away. He holds a Bachelor’s degree in French from New York University, and a Master of City Planning degree from the University of Pennsylvania. He lives on Capitol Hill with his girlfriend and their two cats, Schuylkill and Potomac.
Before joining GothamSchools in 2008, Elizabeth covered education at The New York Sun and 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, and she was recently a Spencer Fellow at Columbia University.
Matt is a political science and communications student studying civic engagement, Gov 2.0, and the political structures of online communities. Originally from Texas, Matt is in New York researching opportunities for new tools to help citizens engage with budgeting processes. He is interested in developing new concepts, such as location based spending data, to engage citizens to help improve their communities by interacting with, reporting on, and directly contributing to the public spaces that they frequent in their communities.
Matt blogs and tweets about his research and is very interested in connecting with others in the civic engagement and Gov 2.0 fields.
Contact Matt via LinkedIn or hallm0013@gmail.com
Vanessa is a big fan of wikis, bike lanes, and other simple technologies that level the playing field. Today, she manages OpenPlans’ central operations. As interim Director of Civic Media, she has also managed our portfolio of impact journalism projects, including Streetsblog, Streetfilms, and GothamSchools. She joined OpenPlans in 2006 as a recruiter, helping the organization hire technical talent as staff size tripled.
Before OpenPlans, 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 helped small businesses with their IT needs and studied pollution in the desert.
Vanessa graduated from Duke, where she studied English and Biology. She is interested in helping innovations move around, whether in software or crop genes.
Claudia joined OpenPlans in late 2009, looking to return to her non-profit roots after more than a decade managing financial operations in corporate environments. She previously worked as the controller for the U.S. subsidiary of Messe Dusseldorf – one of the world’s leading trade show organizers – and as a senior international accounting consultant for Bloomberg LP.
Living Brooklyn is so much fun that she barely has time to miss her native Germany. Since she can’t get enough of forms, she spends her free time volunteering with New York Cares, tutoring SAT students.
Claudia holds a BA from the University of Michigan and an MBA from Baruch College.
Frank leads the talented Civic Works team, exploring how technology, planning, citizens, and government come together. He thinks we can make better places and beat climate change with the winning combo of planning, technology and public participation.
Frank holds a Masters in City Planning from MIT. He blogs intermittently on open source planning, tweets slightly more, and is one half of Holobiont. He co-organizes Planning Corps, a network of volunteer planners providing assistance to non-profits.
Contact Frank at @fkh, via frank@openplans.org, or at 720 432-2378.
Andreas made first contact with geospatial software 15 years ago as a student of Urban and Regional Planning at the Vienna University of Technology. Starting as desktop GIS user, he developed plugins for better thematic mapping as part of his master’s thesis. When he discovered that existing planning methods involve huge barriers to positive change, he decided to create software for better planning.
Andreas has been programming since his first Sharp pocket calculator.As a core committer to OpenLayers, he is known for contributing major improvements to vector rendering and for integrating OpenLayers into Mapbuilder. As a founding PSC member of GeoExt he is involved in creating a rich collection of web mapping widgets based on the Open Geospatial Consortium’s standards. Andreas also shares his knowledge teaching at the Vienna University of Technology, speaking at conferences, or training clients.
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.
Chris began his work in open source geospatial software when he joined OpenPlans 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 OpenPlans as its Managing Director. Managing GeoServer development and nurturing the project’s sustainability, he grew OpenPlans’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. He graduated from Stanford.
Jeff has been fascinated by all things geospatial since he had his first peek at a landsat atlas in grade school. He loves the entire open source geospatial stack, from emerging schemaless ‘big’ datastores to mobile devices. His past geospatial projects range from aeronautical cartography and vertebrate paleontology, but he is still a rasterphile at heart.
As a member of the GeoNode team, Jeff works with the user community to solve challenging problems related to the collaborative use of geospatial data. He’s excited to be able to help people use technology to describe, analyze and understand the earth, and share that knowledge with others.
Noah joined Streetsblog as a New York City reporter at the start of 2010. When he was a kid, he collected subway paraphernalia in a Vignelli-map shoebox.
Before coming to Streetsblog, he blogged at TheCityFix DC and worked as a field organizer for the Obama campaign in Toledo, Ohio. Noah graduated from Yale University, where he wrote his senior thesis on the class politics of transportation reform in New York City. He lives in Morningside Heights.
Naama provides community and user support to OpenPlans software projects. She leads our research into current opportunities and challenges for meaningful community participation.
Naama is interested in the evolution of cities and in improving our understanding of how people interact in our constantly changing urban landscape. She has previously worked at the New York City Department of City Planning (the Brooklyn Office), and as an architect in Tel Aviv. Naama is proud to call New York City home and is fascinated by the city’s ability to reinvent itself over and over again.
Naama holds a Masters in Urban Planning from New York University.
Contact her at nlissar@openplans.org
Jeff collaborates with stakeholders to articulate product vision, advocate for end-users, and lead teams of designers and developers in building tools for public transit. Previously, Jeff worked on a support system for emergency responders, developed new media projects at an art/technology research lab at Carnegie Mellon University, and most recently, managed large-scale tech projects for leading consumer brands.
Jeff attended Carnegie Mellon University, where he received a Bachelor’s degree in Information Systems and a Master’s degree in Information Systems Management. He spent his childhood constructing waterworks and street sweepers, and is currently a principal collaborator with Publicworks Office.
Robert is a software developer with a passion for creating applications that are both useful and easy to use. He has extensive experience with developing web applications, and enjoys working through multiple layers of the software stack. Additionally, he has worked with many different problem domains, and is excited about developing his geospatial expertise at Opengeo.
Robert is fluent in several software languages, and is comfortable in a wide range of environments. He also has a great deal of experience with multiple web frameworks, and approaches to web development. He is particularly curious with functional languages and lisp dialects, especially how they can be applied in innovative ways to current problems.
Juan has been developing geospatial applications for over a decade in the energy, environmental, defense, telecommunications and retail industries, among others. He also has experience training GIS professionals in applying geospatial techniques to solve environmental issues.
As an architect, analyst and developer, Juan has been involved in large enterprise efforts that required integration of geospatial capabilities with other IT systems. Juan became interested in open source early on in his career, and has implemented the OpenGeo stack in several high volume projects. He holds a degree in Forestry Engineering from the Universidad Politécnica de Madrid.
Damien is the force behind Streetsblog Los Angeles, the advocacy journalism site that’s bringing better transportation options to the City of Angels.
Before moving west, he was the NJ Coordinator for the Tri-State Transportation Campaign, and he has lent his media relations know-how to a number of advocacy campaigns. Damien graduated from American University.
You can follow Damien @lastreetsblog.
Aaron believes that software can be used to build for a better world, and he loves designing applications to make cities more livable, beautiful, and just. Prior to OpenPlans, he was a fellow at Code for America where he partnered with the City of Philadelphia to build solutions to help foster civic engagement. He specializes in JavaScript and GIS development and has contributed to such applications as reroute.it, septa.mobi, changeby.us, walkshed.org, and phillystormwater.org.
Besides a tech geek, Aaron is an outdoorsman, an urbanist, and a devoted husband and father.
Christa leads individual and institutional fundraising for Streetsblog and Streetfilms. Before joining OpenPlans, Christa managed sustainable funding efforts for a variety of nonprofits including Equity Foundation and StoryCorps. She’s thrilled to be strengthening the support base for OpenPlans’ civic media work.
Hailing from the Pacific Northwest, Christa holds degrees from Western Washington University and University of Oregon. She’s committed to sharing stories of community transformation through activism and perseverance, she is writing a creative non-fiction book about the queer history of the Pacific Northwest, and she serves on the board of MIX NYC.
Rolando joined OpenPlans in 2006 and soon became our first staff web-designer. Today, he is OpenGeo‘s lead interaction, graphic, and web designer. In addition to working with all of their software, he works on GeoSilk, a set of icons for geospatial applications.
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 the OpenGeo Suite the best in the industry.
Before OpenGeo, Rolando worked at Brown University’s Instructional Technology Group developing educational uses for emerging technologies. He graduated from Brown magna cum laude with a degree in Sociology and Urban Studies.
Sam Pepple enjoys solving problems. For the past six years, Sam has been most interested in tackling communication problems involving time-space phenomena: designing maps and graphics. Maps are the most powerful graphic type, with a very high communicative potential. When? Where? and [with the best maps we may approach] Why?
Previously, he worked for National Geographic in a variety of roles: designing, researching, editing, and producing maps. Before that, he studied with Dr. Margaret Pearce at the Ohio University Department of Geography.
Outside of OpenGeo, Sam is involved in a variety of mapping projects, most notably the Rock Creek Park Atlas, an interactive platform for data collection, dissemination, collaboration, and map creation in Washington DC: facilitating community’s participation in telling their unique narratives, histories, and cartographies through maps.
Sam is an active member of the North American Cartographic Information Society (NACIS). He is currently serving on the NACIS Board of Directors and has helped organize the annual conference for the past two years.
Outside of maps, he spends considerable amounts of time drinking coffee and chatting with friends, riding bicycles, and looking at typefaces. What is the point of life? His answer is eloquent and simple and was borrowed from his friend Ms. Tiffany Williams: “is to make the world a little more bearable for me and as many other people as possible.”
Follow Sam here: @DrSvalbard
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.
Mjumbe thrives on working with amazing people on projects that empower others to understand, use, and affect their environments. Before joining the Civic Works team Mjumbe was a fellow at Code for America, and before that a research programmer at the University of Pennsylvania working on modelling and simulation tools for the social sciences. He still loves modeling.
Mjumbe has a deep appreciation for fine craftpersonship. He believes above all that people should be allowed the opportunity to do what they’re passionate about. Having been given this opportunity, he endeavors to apply his passion to move humanity forward.
Elizabeth joined Streetfilms after four years as a producer for the independent TV/Radio program, Democracy Now! 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, and you will usually find Elizabeth commuting on her second-hand spectrum bicycle.
Elizabeth 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.
Matt first made heavy use of desktop GIS and raster analysis software while completing a master’s degree in rangeland ecology from Texas A&M University. After working as a part-time field biologist / part-time cartographer and GIS manager for a small wildlife consultancy outside of Austin, TX; he began focusing on application development and desktop GIS customization. By 2007 these experiences lead to him specializing in geospatial web app development full-time. He works in a variety of programming languages, but is most happy when working with Javascript or Python. Matt has contributed to and been an active community participant of the OpenLayers, MapFish, and GeoExt projects. He is a strong advocate of open-source software in general and especially open-source geospatial software.
Mike has been working in technical support for over a decade, from his college media lab and system administration to the retail world. He considers himself an advocate on behalf of users of software, and is reviving the lost art of quality documentation. At OpenGeo, Mike is the co-architect of a complete rewrite of the GeoServer documentation, as well as frequent author on the GeoServer Blog.
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 have been OpenGeo’s first Outreach Engineer.
Mike has a Bachelor of Science in Physics from Rutgers University. He dials in from Portland, OR.
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.
Gabriel has been a GIS and open source developer for over a decade, working on route finding, vehicle tracking, and web mapping.
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.
Gabriel lead the first migration from ESRI web mapping software to GeoServer, by building the ArcSDE datastore and WMS for GeoServer, and adding SVG output. When he joined the GeoTools community in 2003, he contributed the first ArcSDE data reader, which he still maintains. He recently rearchitected its raster support to match ArcSDE’s capabilities.
Working in professional open source is an incredible opportunity for continuous learning and improvement, both technically and as a human being. OpenPlans’ vision and mission provide Gabriel a platform for full ethical commitment to his technical work.
Gabriel graduated from Universidad Nacional de Rosario, Argentina, where he studied architecture and computer science.
Tim thinks every problem has a spatial solution. He has been working with web technologies since web browsers first made their splash, and began developing geospatial software in 2001. Tim is a project steering committee member and core contributor to OpenLayers – the coolest toolset around for maps in a browser.
As a member of the OpenGeo front-end team, Tim helps guide product development and pushes for enhancements on our core open source projects. His work has included extensive contributions on vector handling in OpenLayers, OWS Context and KML parsing for the OWS-5 testbed, and lead on the Community Almanac project for the Orton Foundation. He also enjoys giving professional trainings and workshops .
Before finding OpenPlans, 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.
Angie manages the Streetsblog Network, highlighting the best in progressive transportation blogging from around the country, and she reports for Streetsblog Capitol Hill on regional land use and transportation issues.
Angie is co-founder and editor of Rustwire.com, which covers contemporary urban affairs in the industrial Midwest. She is a strong advocate for more livable streets, particularly when it comes to the revitalization of older, so-called ‘rustier’ cities.
Angie holds a masters degree in urban planning from Cleveland State University’s Levin College of Urban Affairs. Prior to OpenPlans, she worked as a newspaper reporter covering municipal governments throughout her home state of Ohio and in Southeast Michigan.
Ian has been developing scientific and spatial software for 10 years and has been an advocate and user of open source since he first installed Linux. As a former contributor to Geotools, he is happy to return to the fold.
Ian has degrees in Geology and Computer Science from Colorado State University. His first maps were drawn by hand using a compass and colored pencils and detailed the geology of various locations in Colorado. He prefers web mapping now, but still collects rocks.
He works from various hotspots in Fort Collins, Colorado where he lives with his wife and son.
Eva is a User Experience and Visual Designer supporting public transit apps and tools. She is a huge proponent of the iterative design process: understanding people problems in greater depth, designing better tools that address who users really want to be, prototyping and evaluating concepts and designs, rinse and repeat for best results, then working with agile software developers to make these products and services real and awesome.
Eva received a Master’s in Human-Computer Interaction from Carnegie Mellon University and she has a Bachelor’s in Computer Science from Mills College. She has long been interested in how people can collaborate and interact better with maps. Previously she has worked on user research and interaction design projects involving a remote patient aftercare and follow-up system for a major heart center, collaborative GIS analysis tools, and as a geospatial web developer.
Robin shoots, edits, and manages the operations of Streetfilms, the video site that spreads transportation best practices worldwide. Her short films include Daylighting: Make Your Crosswalks Safer, and Stop the Pollution, Pick A Solution.
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. You’ll find her making music, chasing maple seed pod helicopters, cooking, and riding her bicycle.
Samuel has worn multiple hats during his 12-year affair with spatial technologies: user, print cartographer, web-mapper, integrator, scripter/programmer, trainer, analyst, manager.
He cut his teeth developing data processing workflows for the British Columbia and Canadian governments, using FME, Avenue, and JUMP/JCS/JTS. Later, Sam travelled throughout North America delivering the FOSS4G gospel to anyone who would listen.
Since 2007, Samuel has been providing spatial integration and implementation support to emergency management, security and defense organizations throughout the world. He has worked extensively in the Middle East and Australasia with a commercial mapping application that implements several Open Source spatial components.
Sam lives with his wife and cat in a cottage near the beach in Cordova Bay BC, speaks French, and is mostly vegetarian. He is a back-country skier, a mountaineer, and a triathlete. Running is his truth. Cycling reminds him of being 11. Swimming scares the daylights out of him.
Tanya reports from Washington on federal transportation policy and national advocacy groups.
Before joining Streetsblog, she covered Congress for Pacifica Radio’s Washington Bureau and for public radio stations around the country. Tanya also worked as a reporter and editor for WTOP, the Washington area’s most listened-to radio station, bringing bikes and pedestrians into their traffic reporting.
For Tanya, livable cities is no abstract issue. As an urban bike commuter who’s never owned a car, her own safety and mobility depends on complete streets.
Aaron discovered his passion for technology, data, and software through experience with applied weather science. Graduating from the University of Utah with a BS in meteorology, he worked for the National Weather Service where he honed his geospatial information and software skills and became an advocate for open data and open source software. In 2012, Aaron joined the OpenPlans Transportation team where he works to make data more available and cities more livable through his work on the MTA’s Bus Time. Outside of work, Aaron loves to bike, hike, create music, and enjoy great coffee and food.
David builds web-based tools for transit, including OpenTripPlanner, and he is a long time advocate for free software and open data.
David 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 office where the ninjas can’t get him.
Kevin builds mapping and trip planning tools to help keep users informed about their transportation options. He has a long-time interest in planning, transit and open government. He joined OpenPlans by way of the Sunlight Foundation. Much of his career has been in early-stage research and development, including a software startup and several years as a partner in an industrial design consultancy.
Kevin has a BA in environmental and urban studies from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Michael’s interests can be boiled down to 3 things: maps, Macs, and coffee. His first computer was an Apple II when he was less than a year old and he’s been at it ever since. Michael runs the build systems that ensure the latest updates to all components get rolled into new Suite builds.
Prior to OpenGeo, Michael worked in support, training and professional services for a commercial geospatial software company and more recently as a programmer for a geo-data services company.
When not working (and often while working) Michael is known to enjoy drinking the best coffees he can find and seeking out new coffee shops wherever he travels. He lives in Victoria, BC with his wife and cat.
Julia loves developing software that is a joy to use. She wants the world to become more hospitable to life and love, and enjoys using her skills to contribute to that positive vision. When she’s not writing code, she’s working diligently toward being an excellent human.
Brandon is a statistician who works to develop and apply the benefits of intelligent systems to the area of transportation. He believes that a community openly developing intelligent services will enable people to drastically improve their environments in even unanticipated ways.
Growing up outside of Detroit, Brandon never experienced the benefit of public transportation, and while living in Munich he developed an attachment to easy and dependable transit that couldn’t be met upon his return. Today, he lives in Chicago, where he no longer needs a car, and he would like to help make such situations possible for more people.
As a graduate student at the University of Chicago, Brandon studied Bayesian methods for real-time modelling. Professionally, he has developed high-frequency blackbox trading strategies. Outside of work, he likes to entertain his fascination with genetic anthropology, genealogy, Israeli music and long sentences.
Paul Winkler is a largely self-taught programmer who has been a member of various open-source software communities for over a decade. At OpenPlans, he has developed collaboration tools for community organizing and participatory transportation planning. When not mucking around with Python and Linux, he plays bass and guitar. Paul lives in Brooklyn with his wife Abby and baby daughter Riley; among other things, the three of them share an irrational and exuberant love for The Who.
Paul is a graduate of Bard College, with a degree in Rather Unpopular Music.
Philip is interested in the intersection of culture, infrastructure, and public space. At OpenPlans he is currently working on advocacy projects with our founder Mark Gorton.
Prior to joining OpenPlans Philip attended the Yale School of Architecture where he cemented his passion for the intersection of urban design and culture, slept rarely, learned how to draw, and built a house.
Before that he worked as an Art Director and Art Department Coordinator in the New York film production community, sang, played, and composed as Hotbird 7, and got more sleep.
Philip tweets about cities, streets, and culture @philipwinn
David has been working with open-source software for more than 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.
Alyssa has a wealth of experience in information architecture, editing, graphic and interaction design, and project management. Past projects include Hero Reports, Cherry Blossoms, and Selectricity. In 2009, she joined OpenGeo as an Outreach Engineer, where she applies her skills to open geospatial solutions for our clients.
Alyssa holds degrees from MIT’s Media Lab, NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Program and Wellesley College.
Zozos thrive in livable streets—places with bike lanes, great mass transit, and lots of people on foot. At one time, New York was filled with Zozos, but their numbers have dwindled since the early 1900′s, when the streets were still filled with people rather than cars.
New York has recently been making strides toward more livable streets, and we’ve had reports of a few Zozo sightings. Zozo made his first public appearance with Streets Education at Celebrate Brooklyn’s family day in 2009. He is thrilled to be out and about, joining in the celebration of better public spaces in New York!