Few weeks ago, Brian Monheiser has issued a call on LinkedIn:
Who are the top 10 living geospatial thought leaders whose insights you prioritize, whose talks you never miss, and whose writings you always read?
And the results are in.
But first: Personally, I strongly dislike the term “thought leaders.” For one, I don’t like my thoughts to be led all that much. Second, it rings a bit hollow to me and evokes the bad aspects of LinkedIn as well as hard- or soft-paywalled Medium and Substack posts1. That said, I like how the rest of the question is phrased: … whose insights you prioritize, whose talks you never miss, and whose writings you always read?
Of course, the afore-mentioned call suffers from network / bubble effects (who has seen / shared / heeded the LinkedIn call?). As such, many names are from the English-speaking world2 and also traditionally male.
With that out of the way: I find the list nevertheless interesting. It definitely features some very inspiring people and I am considering to connect with, or at least follow, some of them (I follow3 some of them already).
Below, I researched (hopefully correctly4, it wasn’t always trivial with some of the more common names) the LinkedIn profiles and current job titles and affiliations of those geospatial experts that were submitted at least twice:
| Name | Role |
|---|---|
| Paul Ramsey | Executive Geospatial Engineer at Crunchy Data |
| Chris Tucker | Chairman of the American Geographical Society |
| Nicholas Brown | Head of Office at the United Nations Global Geodetic Centre of Excellence |
| Tee Barr | Director of Product – Geospatial at Verisk |
| Steven Pousty | Principal Developer Advocate at Voxel51 |
| Will Cadell | Founder and CEO of Sparkgeo |
| Chris Holmes | Fellow and VP Product/Strategy/Partnerships at Planet |
| Keith Masback | Principal Consultant at PLUM RUN |
| Dee Jordan | ? |
| Lee Schwartz | Geographer at United States Department of State |
| Patrick Cozzi | Chief Platform Officer at Bentley Systems, Founder and CEO of Cesium |
| Peter Rabley | CEO of The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) |
| Anthony Calamito | Co-Founder and Vice President of GEO261 |
| Linda Foster | Global Manager Land Records/Cadastre at Esri |
| Cath[e]rine Nakalembe | Assistant Professor at the Department of Geographical Sciences at the University of Maryland |
| Dawn Wright | Chief Scientist at Esri |
| Narelle Underwood | Surveyor-General and Executive Director Spatial Services at the New South Wales Department of Customer Service |
| Kevin Pomfret | Attorney at Williams Mullen, Member of the UNGGIM Policy and Legal Working Group |
| Josh[ua] Campbell | Founder and CEO of Sand Hill Geographic |
| Nadine Alameh | Executive Director of the Taylor Geospatial Institute |
| Ben[jamin] Tuttle | CTO of EOI Space |
| Greg Scott | Executive Director, SDG Data Alliance of the PVBLIC Foundation |
Spontaneously, I would add Brian Timoney, among others.
* for lack of a better word