Jack Dangermond to Receive Global Citizen Award

GSDI Association Honors Esri President for Worldwide Contributions in Geographic Information and Geospatial Technologies

October 4, 2010

Redlands, California—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.

He has been awarded 10 honorary doctorates and received a number of awards, including the Carl Mannerfelt Medal from the International Cartographic Association in 2008; the Public-Private Partnership Award from the National Governors Association in 2009; the Patron’s Medal from the Royal Geographical Society in June 2010; and, most recently, the National Geographic’s Alexander Graham Bell Medal.

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About the GSDI Association
The GSDI Association includes members from both public and private sectors from around the world promoting international cooperation and collaboration in support of local, national, regional, and international spatial data infrastructure developments. The goal of the GSDI Association is to allow nations to better address social, economic, and environmental issues of pressing importance through the establishment and use of SDIs and geospatial information. For more information on the organization and the conference, visit http://gsdi.org/gsdi12.

Press Information:
Karen Richardson, Esri
Tel.: 909-793-2853, extension 1-3491
E-mail (press only): press@esri.com
General Information: info@esri.com