Travel Grant Interviews
Dorothy is one of our Travel Grant Receipients. We owe thanks to OSGeo for their financial support and advice which made the Travel Grant Program possible.
Please attach a photo of yourself or if your prefer, something you think the geospatial community might find interesting (your city, town, favourite place etc.)
Bird of Paradise flower. To me it represents beauty, anticipation and excitement which can be relative to what the FOSS4G SotM conference is to me right now.
How did you first become involved in the geospatial community?
In 2010 when I did my MSc in GIS at the Kingston University in London, UK. One of my spatial database projects was based on using PostGIS/PostgreSQL and MapServer. I then started using QGIS for most of my work hence my involvement with the geospatial community.
How would you describe the reputation of open source software in your area?
The organisation I work with use licensed software (ESRI’s ArcGIS, ERDAS ER Mapper, etc) but some GIS specialists like myself are using Open Source for most of our work and bringing them into the licensed software environment because we are limited to the number of extensions available to our organisation. We are also hosting our geochem data on the CCOP web portal which utilizes open source software (Java, PHP and GeoServer).
What geospatial tools do you rely on?
For work, I am encouraged to use ArcGIS and ER Mapper. For consulting and other mapping and analysis work, I use QGIS.
What trends or future applications are you most excited by in the geospatial industry?
It is the seeing of what open source can offer in terms of interoperability of data between open source and proprietary software and also building a vibrant community of all geospatial developers and users which in turn can facilitate the sharing of data openly.
What are the most important steps you believe the community can take to improve its diversity?
I must commend the organizing team for this FOSS4G SotM Oceania event in Melbourne. It is at such events that this community can get together to improve its diversity and also impact those who are still learning or deciding to be part of this exciting community. Most importantly, more awareness needs to be done to improve diversity.
If you had to eat one thing for the rest of the year, what would it be?
Is this a trick question? I love a variety of dishes so this is kind of hard but if I had to do this it would be mixed vegies and smoked fish.