Venkatesh Raghavan is Professor of Geoinformatics at the Graduate School for Creative Cities, Osaka City University, Japan. He coined the FOSS4G acronym in 2004 to denote Free and Open Source Software for Geoinformatics and has been promoting FOSS4G ever since. He is also one of the founders of OSGeo and currently serves as Charter Member and also plays active role in OSGeo Local Chapters in Asia. His research interest includes Geospatial Services, Sensor Web and Remote Sensing for change detection. He also also team leader and member in several Geoinformatics projects, i.e., ZOO WPS Platform Project, and vast experience in conducting national and international training programs and development of learning materials for RS/GIS using FOSS4G. On 25th October 2012, Venka was named as the recipient of the 2012 Sol Katz Award, at the inaugural FOSS4G-India event in Hyderabad.

Venka is also the Asia chair of our education outreach initiative GeoforAll (along with Thuy Vu) and had been actively working to expand OSGeo education and outreach by establishing dedicated Open Source Geospatial Labs in universities across Asia to further expand geospatial education opportunities to all. His details at https://wiki.osgeo.org/wiki/Venkatesh_Raghavan .

Also welcome to our new OSGeo Vice Presidents Professor Helena Mitasova and Dirk Frigne, leading the Geomajas project with Geosparc.

Now the OSGeo foundation is becoming truly more international, with an Indian president, an US-American, and an Belgium vice-preseident.