2026-09-01 –, Phoenix Hall
This session will focus on the very early days of the open source geospatial community, including GRASS, UMN MapServer, the first FOSS4G conference in Bangkok, and the establishment of OSGeo.
The OSGeo community was built through the vision, dedication, and collaboration of many pioneers of the open source geospatial movement since the 1990s.
In this keynote session, we are honored to welcome three of those pioneers—Prof. Venkatesh Raghavan, Jeff McKenna, and Markus Neteler, all recipients of the Sol Katz Award—to share their experiences and reflections on the formative years of our community. Together, they will look back on the emergence of projects such as GRASS GIS and UMN MapServer, the first FOSS4G conference in Bangkok in 2004, and the events that ultimately led to the establishment of the OSGeo Foundation in 2006.
This keynote keynote session is highly beneficial for every attendee.
I make my conference contribution available under the CC BY 4.0 license. The conference contribution comprises the abstract, the text contribution for the conference proceedings, the presentation materials as well as the video recording and live transmission of the presentation:
Dr Markus Neteler is a co-founder of mundialis in Bonn (https://mundialis.de/) and ESMERALDA (https://esmeralda.earth). His main topics are remote sensing, analysis of large-scale geodata and free software GIS development. He has been GRASS release manager (https://grass.osgeo.org/) since 1997 and is a founding member of FOSSGIS, the Italian GFOSS and OSGeo.org. In 2006, he was awarded the Sol Katz Award; he received the Life Achievement Award 2022 from the OpenGeoHub Foundation.
Venkatesh Raghavan (aka Venka) is Professor Emeritus at the Graduate School of Science, Osaka Metropolitan University, where he has made significant contributions to geospatial science and education. He received his D.Sc. in Geologic Remote Sensing from Osaka City University in 1994. He currently serves as President of the Japan Society of Geoinformatics and Association of GeoInformatics Laboratories for Earthsciences, and as Editor-in-Chief of The GIS-IDEAS Journal. A long-standing advocate of Free and Open Source Software for Geoinformatics (FOSS4G), he has helped advance its development and adoption worldwide for more than three decades.
Toru Mori is a geospatial industry leader and long-time advocate of FOSS4G in Japan.
He is the founder of Orkney, Inc., which helped introduce open source geospatial technologies to the Japanese market, and worked with Prof. Venkatesh Raghavan on the early internationalization of GRASS GIS and MapServer.
In 2006, he founded the OSGeo Japan Chapter and served as its first representative, helping launch FOSS4G conferences in Japan.
He is also an OSGeo Charter Member.
Today, he serves as a board director of MIERUNE, where he continues to promote open geospatial technologies and support the broader OSGeo community.