Jack Dangermond, founder and president of Esri, has been named to receive the Global Citizen Award of the Global Spatial Data Infrastructure (GSDI) Association. The award will be presented on the opening day of the GSDI 12 World Conference, to be held in Singapore October 19–22, 2010. Dangermond, as the recipient, will give the lead Keynote Address on October 19, focusing on a global vision for spatially enabling society. The Global Citizen Award is an occasional award of the GSDI Association. Recipients have provided exemplary thought leadership and substantive worldwide contributions in both promoting informed and responsible use of geographic information and geospatial technologies for the benefit of society and fostering spatial data infrastructure (SDI) developments or geospatial advancements supporting sustainable social, economic, and environmental systems integrated from local to global scales. A landscape architect by training, Dangermond is one of the founding fathers of geographic information system (GIS) technology and is considered to be one of the most influential people in GIS. For more than 40 years, he has been an outspoken proponent of GIS as one of the most promising decision-making tools for urban, regional, environmental, and global problems. Esri, which he and his wife, Laura, founded in 1969, has the largest GIS software installation base in the world, with over one million users in more than 300,000 organizations representing business, government, nongovernmental organization (NGOs), and academia. Dangermond has been a leader and visionary in the field, promoting GIS technology beyond that of his own company. He has delivered keynote addresses at international conferences, published hundreds of papers, and given thousands of presentations. His passion for GIS and its application to solving problems, particularly for the causes of the environment and the less empowered in society, is well known throughout the industry. Read More
