User:Landon Blake

I work as a project land surveyor for KSN, a small civil engineering and land surveying company in Stockton, a city at the heart of California's Central Valley. My responsibilities as a project land surveyor includes the supervision of all the land surveying components of commerical and public infrastructure projects. This includes establishing survey control, performing topographic mapping, and resolution of property boundaries and public right-of-way. I am an active member of the California Land Surveyors Association and currently serve as the Chapter Treasurer for the Central Valley Chapter of the association.

I have been interested in GIS since my first exposure to it during the Land Surveying Program at Flathead Valley Community College, where I was privileged to learn from a great land surveyor and teacher, Dave Dorsett. I was able to learn the basic concepts of GIS with the foresters under the oversight of Bob Beall. My interest in GIS was renewed when I discoverd JUMP, an open source GIS program written in Java by a Canadian company called Vivid Solutions. I decided to teach myself Java so I could improve and customize the program. I later became one of the administrators for OpenJUMP, a fork of the original JUMP that with a more "open" and cooperative development process, and have been working with an international community on OpenJUMP for the past 5 years. I am also an active member of the OSGeo and assist with the production of the OSGeo Journal, admistration/mentoring of the Google Summer of Code Program, participate in the education committee, and serve as the treasurer for the California Chapter of the OSGeo.