Luca De Felice is a keen and passionate GIS software engineer. His educational background and working experience are in environmental sciences, with particular emphasis in the field of GIS techniques applied to risk and hazard management and monitoring. During his university studies, he started developing models for the evaluation of flood hazards. This activity continued after his graduation, with his design of GIS to build hydrologic models being applied to sample basins within a European project. For several years, he worked for a public office to contribute to the development of a hydro-geological GIS-based early warning system at the regional/national level. In this context, he learned GIS, IT environment development, database, and web mapping, applied to any kind of environmental data. Moreover, he contributed to several articles and workshops intended to disseminate novel approaches towards the development of GIS-based early warning systems.

He has been working for more than 10 years as a GIS scientific consultant in different technical contexts, where he applies his deep knowledge of GIS and IT computation in practical cases concerning the design and development of GIS-based environmental monitoring systems.

Stefano Iacovella is a longtime GIS developer and consultant living in Rome, Italy. He also routinely works as a GIS course instructor. He has a PhD in Geology. Being very curious, he developed a deep knowledge of IT technologies, mainly focusing on GIS software and related standards. Starting his career as an ESRI employee, he was exposed to, and became confident with proprietary GIS software, mainly the ESRI suite of products.

Over the last 14 years, he became more and more involved with open source software, also integrating it with proprietary software. He loves the open source approach, and really trusts in collaboration and sharing of knowledge. He strongly believes in the open source idea and constantly manages to spread it out, not only in the GIS sector. He has been using GeoServer since release 1.5, configuring, deploying, and hacking it in several projects. Other GFOSS projects he uses and likes are GDAL/OGR, PostGIS, QGIS, and OpenLayers.

He authored two books on GeoServer with Packt Publishing, GeoServer Cookbook, a practical set of recipes to get the most out of the software, and GeoServer Beginner's Guide, a first approach to GeoServer features.

When not playing with maps and geometric shapes, he loves reading about Science, mainly Physics and Maths, riding his bike, and having fun with his wife and his two daughters, Alice and Luisa.

You can contact him at <[email protected]> or follow him on his Twitter handle @iacovellas.

Roy A. Justo is a geospatial application developer. He was born and raised in Havana, Cuba, and obtained a Bachelor of Science degree in Geography with Honors from the University of Havana. He also earned a Master's degree in Geographic Information Technologies from the Autonomous University of Barcelona. Roy has worked in this field as a teacher and researcher. He also worked in the private sector, creating geospatial solutions for diverse markets. His work has taken him to Munich, Barcelona, Boston, and most recently, New York City. He is currently working at one of the world's largest privately held software firms, where he integrates geospatial functionalities into BI development environments.

Roy is the coauthor and coeditor on Environmental system research and sustainability in urbanized watersheds, José Mateo Rodriguez, Editorial Felix Varela, the original title of which is Estructura geográfico-ambiental y sostenibilidad de cuencas hidrográficas urbanizadas.

Antonio Santiago Pérez is a Computer Science graduate with more than 10 years of experience in designing and implementing systems. Since the beginning of his professional life, his experience has always been related to the world of meteorology, working for different companies as an employee and freelancer. He's experienced in the development of systems to collect, store, transform, analyze, and visualize data, and is actively interested in any GIS-related technology, with preference for data visualization.

As a restless mind, which is mainly experienced in the Java ecosystem, Antonio has worked actively with many related web technologies, always looking to improve the client side of web applications.

A firm believer of software engineering practices, he is an enthusiast of Agile methodologies, involving customers as the main key for a project's success.

Richard Zijlstra is educated as a civil engineer. He has used his engineering degree in the Netherlands on water management, infrastructure planning, and geographical information management, in combination with earthquakes in Greece (Patras), on all environmental and social human aspects. He collaborates on system architecture, requirement management, and development of geographical information technology. Richard has worked on a lot of projects on geo architecture in the Netherlands. He has collaborated on www.pdok.nl across several organizations and companies.

At the moment (2014), Richard is developing Enterprise Geo Data Architecture to store data about earthquakes in the Groningen province in the northern part of the Netherlands. Gas extraction in this area produces earthquakes that damage buildings and infrastructure. The application will be a geo data storage to collaborate with all kinds of data about the problems in this area. Also, interactivity in social media will be possible. His future vision is based on Geographical Intelligence in all contexts of life and earth.

Richard is the founder and owner of the company Geoneer, which is a pioneer in geography and information technology. From this vision and point of view, Geoneer helps and collaborates on all aspects of geographical information technology worldwide. You can find Geoneer on Twitter and http://www.linkedin.com/in/geoneer/ on LinkedIn.

He has written a lot of documents on the system architecture and usage of geographical information technology. The book OpenLayers Cookbook, Packt Publishing, was reviewed by him for text and JavaScript code accuracy.

My vision and mission:

Everybody uses and shares their own geographical information to share and update each other's knowledge about the physical and social environment.

What, where, when, and why... that's the question!