OGC Appoints Three New Members to its Board of Directors

The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) has announced the election of Patty Mims, Javier de la Torre and Prashant Shukle to its board of directors. The new appointments bring experience in defence & intelligence, homeland security, cloud-native GIS, data science, environmental data analysis, artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), Earth observation and more.

“Technology-enabled global location services offer the opportunity for us to enable solutions to improve the effectiveness and security of our global village,” commented OGC Chair Jeffrey Harris. “The addition to our board of these talented and respected geospatial community leaders will add great value. Their diverse sets of experiences will inform the strategy of the consortium to help instil innovation across people and devices to speed delivery, discovery and decision-making.”

Who is who?

Patty Mims is the director of Global National Government at Esri. In this role, Patty oversees all Esri’s work across the U.S. Federal Government, including Intelligence, Defense, Public Safety, & Federal Civilian; Non-Profit Programs globally; as well as international support to national government organizations around the world. Patty also currently serves on the Board of Directors for US Geospatial-Intelligence Foundation (USGIF) as well as the Chairperson for the Board of Advisors for the College of Natural Resources, Virginia Tech. Patty has spent her 25-year career in the GIS industry supporting the missions of defence, intel, homeland security, federal and international customers. Patty is based in Virginia, USA.

Javier de la Torre is Founder and Chief Product Officer of CARTO, based in Madrid, Spain. After starting his career in biodiversity and environmental data analysis, Javier decided to build CARTO to enable geospatial interoperability in the cloud. He leads R&D, accelerating open source and a cloud-native approach in the GIS industry. Javier is passionate about conservation and climate change and is a board member of the Tierra Pura foundation, as well as having founded Vizzuality, a data science company working on some of the world's most pressing environmental use cases.

Prashant Shukle is currently the Chief Operating Officer of KorrAI, an advanced geospatial artificial intelligence company based in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada. He also serves as a strategic advisor to Space Strategies Consulting Ltd., an Ottawa-based think tank specializing in Earth observation and space strategies, and the World Geospatial Industry Council, advising on public-private partnerships while acting as the editor of the WGIC’s Policy Watch publication. Prashant also sits on the Board of Directors of PLACE, a non-profit data trust specializing in hyperlocal mapping data in the public interest. A passionate advocate for the earth observation and geospatial industry, he previously served as the Director-General of the Canada Centre for Mapping and Earth Observation where, among his many roles, he managed Canada’s only geospatial data standards programme, GeoConnections. In 2018, Prashant was awarded the OGC Lifetime Achievement Award for his contributions to the global geospatial standards community.

The three new members of the OGC Board of Directors join existing board members:

• Jeff Harris - Chairman of the OGC Board of Directors, Consultant to industry and the US Government
• Nadine Alameh - CEO at OGC
• Bart De Lathouwer - President at OGC
• John Fratamico - Chief Technology Officer (Emeritus) at Leidos
• Chris Holmes - Open Fellow & VP Product/Strategy at Planet
• Sanjay Kumar - CEO at Geospatial Media and Communications
• Kumar Navulur - Senior Director of Global Strategic Programs at DigitalGlobe
• Ed Parsons - Geospatial Technology Evangelist at Google
• Faraz Ravi - Fellow & Director, OEM Partnerships, Reality Modeling at Bentley
• Velu Sinha - Partner at Bain & Company
• Eric Souléres - SVP Head of Engineering Operations & Quality Communication, Intelligence and Security at Airbus Defence and Space
• Jantien Stoter - Professor - TU Delft
• Frank Suykens - CTO Platforms at Hexagon Geospatial
• Rob van de Velde - Director at Geonovum
• Steven Witt - CEO and Founder Anno.AI
• Jen Ziemke - Associate Professor of International Relations at John Carroll University

The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) is an international consortium of more than 500 businesses, government agencies, research organizations, and universities driven to make geospatial (location) information and services FAIR - Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable. OGC’s member-driven consensus process creates royalty free, publicly available geospatial standards.