Dr. William Craig

Dr. Craig is currently the Associate Director Emeritus of the University of Minnesota’s Center for Urban and Regional Affairs (CURA) where he previously served as the principal investigator on numerous CURA projects.  He is also an adjunct faculty member of the Master’s Urban and Regional Planning program.  He holds a Ph.D. in Geography from the University of Minnesota.

Dr. Craig is a well-known leader in Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and continues to serve on many local, state, and national GIS organizations. His outstanding contributions to GIS have been recognized with numerous awards and honors.

He has been inducted into the URISA GIS Hall of Fame (2009) where he was said to be “one of the pioneers of urban and regional information systems and GIS” and as a Fellow of the University Consortium for Geographic Information Science (2011).  He is also the recipient of the Minnesota GIS/LIS Lifetime Achievement Award (1995), MetroGIS Certificate of Appreciation, and the University of Minnesota Academic Staff Award (1998).

Dr. Craig’s impressive list of appointments and contributions includes: President of URISA (1986-87); President of the University Consortium for Geographic Information Science (1997); President of the National States Geographic Information Council (2009-10); Chair the inaugural national GIS/LIS Conference (1988); Chair of the Minnesota Governor’s Council on Geographic Information (1992-93); Chair of the MetroGIS Coordinating Committee (2000-02); member of the Mapping Science Committee of the National Research Council (NRC) of the National Academies (2000-2005); and member of the NRC Committee on Land Parcel Databases (2006-07).

Brian Huberty

Brian Huberty started his career in the northern forests of Minnesota as an inventory forester, which turned into a career as a remote sensing scientist. Over the last four decades, he has applied remote sensing and geospatial assessment technologies for the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources, Department of the Interior – U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service and Geological Survey, U.S. Department of Agriculture – Forest Service and Natural Resources Conservation Service, and Aerial Image Technology. Prior to retirement from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in September 2019, Mr. Huberty was one of the U.S. government’s most senior environmental remote sensing scientists.

Mr. Huberty has B.S. and M.S. degrees from the University of Minnesota, College of Natural Resources; specializing in geospatial resource inventory systems. He is an American Society for Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing (ASPRS) certified Mapping Scientist – RS130, and previously served as Director of ASPRS’s National Primary Data Acquisition Division, and President of its Western Great Lakes Region. He also has served as Chair of the International Society for Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing’s Technical Commission I, Working Group VI – Airborne Optical Sensor Systems.

Randall (Randy) Johnson

Prior to his retirement from government service in 2012, Mr. Johnson was founder and visionary leader of MetroGIS, an award-winning, regional geographic information systems initiative serving the seven-county Minneapolis-St. Paul metropolitan area.  As one of the nation’s first efforts to coordinate exchange and use of geospatial information across numerous government and administrative boundaries,  Mr. Johnson managed an extremely diverse range of responsibilities including: managing strategic and on-going business planning and performance measure activities; providing support to the MetroGIS Policy Board, Coordinating Committee, and special workgroups; coordinating efforts to secure and sustain political support and financing; securing and maintaining key stakeholder participation; securing and administering data and cost sharing agreements; overseeing support for outreach and communications activities; and serving as liaison between MetroGIS and state and national initiatives with similar objectives.  Based on his MetroGIS experience, and experiences of other geospatial collaboratives, in 2001 Mr. Johnson published the benchmark report “Lessons from Practice – A Guidebook to Organizing and Sustaining Geodata Collaboratives.”

Mr. Johnson has been recognized by local, national and international GIS communities for his significant contributions.  He is recipient of both major awards bestowed by the MN GIS/LIS Consortium; the Polaris Award (2007), and Lifetime Achievement Award (2012).  He was also key to MetroGIS being awarded the URISA Exemplary Systems in Government Award (2002).  In 2008, Department of the Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne appointed Mr. Johnson as a charter member of the National Geospatial Advisory Council, where he served until 2010.

Mr. Johnson holds a Masters in Urban Geography – City Planning Methods, from Southern Illinois University, Edwardsville, and has attended the Seminar for Executive Leadership, Innovations in Governance, at the Harvard John F. Kennedy School of Government.

Stephen Swazee Sr., CAPT USNR (Ret.),  Executive Director

Steve is a retired Navy Captain and Delta Air Lines pilot who chairs the Emergency Preparedness Committee of the Minnesota Geospatial Advisory Council (MGAC). He also serves on the Public X Y Mapping Project Board of Directors and was previously a member of the Minnesota Statewide Geospatial Advisory Council, the Geospatial Information and Technology Association (GITA) Board of Directors, and the GITA Federal Liaison Advisory Group (FLAG) to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). During Hurricanes Katrina, Ophelia, Rita and Wilma in 2005, he served as the senior Department of Defense (DoD) Emergency Preparedness Liaison Officer at the Pentagon. He was subsequently a by-name appointment to the DHS-DoD post-Katrina data work group charged with developing a national Common Operating Picture (COP) which can be used by all levels of responders and decision makers. In September 2010, Steve was awarded a Commendation from Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty for his service to the state. Steve previously published a widely read blog on GIS and Emergency Preparedness.

Bob Basques, Technical Director

From work at the City of St. Paul, Minnesota, Bob has extensive experience with GIS web services and enterprise geospatial publishing projects. His efforts to date have focused on design and management of the data catalog for the City’s Compass mapping interface, which feeds the enterprise master spatial data set to desktop applications such as AutoCAD and ESRI based products as well as web based mapping applications such as GISmo. The GISmo application is built on the GeoMOOSE open source project software, of which Bob is a founding member. Bob has been involved in GIS related community projects for the last fifteen years. Prior to SharedGeo, he has served in a similar capacity commercially providing geospatial services to the U.S. Census Bureau for their LEHD web services and OnTheMap product. From this diverse “front line” experience, Bob has gained extensive knowledge in data publishing and distributed data maintenance issues and techniques – a point of view that results in functional and effective solutions to real world geospatial problems. In 2013, Bob was recognized with the Minnesota Governor’s Commendation Award for his part in creating GeoMoose, free geospatial software used by hundreds of units of government around the world to enable their data online.

Nancy Read, Ph.D., Administrative Director

Nancy has extensive experience in project management and evaluation, with a focus on developing collaborations and meeting customer needs. She has provided leadership in many intergovernmental workgroups developing solutions to shared geographic information needs, including serving as Project Manager on the Twin Cities MetroGIS Geocoder Project, and was recognized with a Polaris Leadership Award by the Minnesota GIS/LIS Consortium in 2009. Through work as Technical Coordinator with the Metropolitan Mosquito Control District, she has supported data and mapping systems for field operations including 200+ mobile users and 7 helicopters, and a public web map site providing daily access to treatment records.

Phil Berg – Phil is a financial and business systems expert with over 30 years of diverse national level experience. He is also an expert on Sarbanes – Oxley compliance in both the financial and IT arenas.  His project management and business analyst experience includes Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems integration issues, functional business requirements, and business process improvements. A retired CPA, Phil holds an MBA from the University of Dallas and an accounting degree from the University of Wisconsin – Madison.  His previous nonprofit clients include Kaiser Permanente, National Association of the Self Employed (NASE), Rocky Mountain Institute, and the Denver Zoo.  As SharedGeo’s financial and operations expert, Phil guides development of SharedGeo’s core business functions and operational controls.

Technology Services

Nicole Helgeson – Nicole is a GIS Developer for Public Works at the City of Saint Paul in the Technical Services division. She has her Masters in Geographic Information Science and Cartography from the University of Minnesota, and has also completed substantial post graduate work at Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, in Santiago, Chile.  With over three years developing in front and back end languages, frameworks, and databases, Nicole contributes to SharedGeo as an Open Source solutions developer.

James Klassen – Jim works as SharedGeo’s chief programmer where he specializes in Open Source solutions. Jim completed his Masters degree in the Natural Resources Science and Management program at the University of Minnesota (U of M) in spring 2013, where his thesis explored automated extraction of stereo anaglyphs and 3D point clouds from aerial imagery. Jim worked at City of St. Paul for several years and was one of the creators of the Open Source web map tool GeoMOOSE.

Stephen Woodbridge – Stephen has over 30 years in software development, marketing and customer relations around the world. For the last 11 years, Stephen has been focused on building geospatial tools and is actively involved with Open Source Geospatial Foundation (OSGeo) and Open Source projects. Stephen is on the project steering committees for Mapserver, PAGC, and pgRouting. Stephen strengths are developing server side tools like mapping, geocoding, reverse geocoding, driving directions and database applications and helping to glue these services into web-based applications.

Training Services

BJ Kohlstedt – BJ became involved with SharedGeo’s Emergency Location Marker (ELM) development in 2010 through her role as the Emergency Management Director for Lake County, MN. Serving for 18 years on the Sheriff’s Rescue Squad, she understood the need for accurate geolocation when responding to those lost or injured in Lake County’s 3000 square miles of woods and waters. With degrees in Education and Biology, and practice in Incident Management, she is not a GIS professional, but a user and promoter of U.S. National Grid. BJ likes playing in the woods and knowing where she is.

Zack Rethlake – Since starting his firefighting career as a member of the U.S. Forest Service Heber, Arizona “Hotshot” crew in 1995, Zack’s diverse career has given him the opportunity to gain extensive experience in all facets of firefighting and related education and instruction. Currently rated as a National Response Framework (NRF) Incident Commander, he has fought fires or responded to natural disasters in 19 states. In addition, he has completed a wide variety of courses offered by the U.S. Fire Administration’s National Fire Academy, National Wildfire Coordinating Group (NWCG) and Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). During recent tenure as the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources lead firefighter for the Twin Cities metro, Zack served as the subject matter expert on the Wildland Urban Interface (WUI) for the largest metro region in the state. In this capacity, he worked closely with numerous local fire departments on wildfire suppression activities, and provided instruction on structural and wildland fires.

Minnesota Geospatial Community – Through a close working relationship with the renowned Minnesota geospatial community, SharedGeo is able to add expertise as needed to meet project demands.