The Open Planning Project is pleased to announce that they have hired long time GeoServer community member and contributor Gabriel Roldán as a software developer and solutions consultant.  He will remain based in Spain, and hopefully should help raise awareness and cooperation with other Spanish open source projects and organizations.

Gabriel first started on GeoServer in 2003, as one of the first outside contributors.  He did the integration of gt2wms to add WMS support to GeoServer, with a nice core rearchitecture to allow more services.  He also started the ArcSDE module and added SVG output to GeoServer.  We are very excited to have him soon working full time on GeoServer.

One concern in this is that TOPP developers are dominating the community, which is not desired at all.  Thankfully there are more contributors coming on all the time, indeed some were talked about in the last post.   But none of the new ones are yet on the Project Steering Committee, which sets the direction and makes major decisions about the future of GeoServer. It is likely that Gabriel will step down from the PSC, at least until there are enough other members that TOPP doesn’t have a majority.  Which is to say, please continue to get involved, and your hard work will be rewarded by a position on the PSC.  We want the community to truly drive this project, TOPP sees itself as a steward to help make a truly open, sustaining project that benefits all.