Sol Katz Award

To my astonishment, I received the Sol Katz Award for 2008 today. For the record, here is the acceptance speech I gave via video to the FOSS4G closing plenary session:

This is a big honour for me, to be in the company of people like Frank Warmerdam, Steve Lime and Markus Neteler as a Sol Katz recipient.

Those guys built core pieces of open source software with their bare hands, from the ground up, and that alone marks them out as special, but they also helped build their communities, and that's a big part of their contribution, too.

In my case, community building is almost my only contribution.

I have added some very small amounts of code to PostGIS and uDig over the years, but until only a few months ago my main contribution was community building, by finding the funding or staff time to develop the projects, providing some design guidelines, and by working on the mailing lists to help people with problems.

So I want to start out by thanking a few of the people who did much of the actual work on the projects I have been identified with over the years, the PostGIS spatial database and the uDig desktop application.

Dave Blasby, a brilliant programmer, who wrote the first versions of PostGIS when he was at Refractions, and who taught me by osmosis many of the technical fundamentals I exercise to this day.

Sandro Santilli, who was so impressive as a volunteer contributor to PostGIS that I hired him sight-unseen to maintain PostGIS, which he did from his home in Rome, for a number of years.

Mark Cave-Ayland, who is still involved in PostGIS, and the "go to" guy when the problems get really hard.

Jody Garnett and Jesse Eichar, who took the uDig project from a sketch in a funding proposal to a working application, and have continued to nurture and improve it up to this day.

Those are just a very few of the people who have contributed to making the PostGIS and uDig projects successful, there are so many more, and I thank them all. Thank you so much!

I hope, that my receiving this award will inspire other non-technical members of the open source community. Open source is collaborative in all kinds of ways, not only do we share code, but we share effort, and money. For a manager, contributing money or staff time to open source is often a karmic investment – the return is impossible to foresee, and yet, in my experience, there always seems to be a return in the end, you are repaid for your investment many times in many ways, most of which you don't expect.

I can't accept an award honoring my investments, in time and money, to open source, without also honoring two men who are largely unknown in the open source GIS community.

Graeme Leeming and Philip Kayal were my business partners for ten years at Refractions Research, during the time we developed PostGIS and uDig, and without their willingness to invest in my crazy schemes, we would never have achieved what we did.

Their willingness to join in my enthusiasms and get off the beaten path of consulting was critical to making the projects successful, and all of us took risks together to make the projects great. So thanks Graeme and Phil, and also all the folks at Refractions.

I hope you have all had a great FOSS4G, I am sorry I could not be with you in person this year, but I'm looking forward to raising a pint with you all in Sydney, Australia next year.