About the Author:  Sean Gorman founded FortiusOne in 2005 to bring location based analytics to the mass market. Sean brings over 10 years of experience at the forefront of the geospatial revolution as a researcher, practitioner, and entrepreneur at FortiusOne. Through both academic and entreprenurial efforts he has been working to make geographic data more accessible to the public since 1997 culminating in the creation of GeoCommons – a crowd-sourced repository of statistical data and social feeds that can be easily mapped, remixed and reused by non-technical users. Sean has been featured in media such as, Wired, Der Spiegel, ABC, Washington Post, Business 2.0, MSNBC, CBS and CNN. He also holds a PhD. From George Mason University in Public Policy where he was the Provost’s High Potential Scholar and was the recipient of the Fischer Prize. He has published dozens of articles on geographic data sharing and analysis, and authored the book Networks, Complexity and Security: The Role of Public Policy in Critical Infrastructure Protection. Read more from this author

Wanted to take this opportunity to let folks know that Chris Marentis has joined up with FortiusOne (check the new website) as our President and Chief Operations Officer. Chris was most recently CEO at Clearspring Technologies – the leading provider of cross-platform widget services. We are very excited and flattered that Chris has decided to come on board and he will be a great accelerator for the launch of the next generation GeoCommons. He has already had a huge impact helping us run things in a more smooth and targeted manner. We really look forward to the many good things he’ll have in store for the company as he helps us drive the next generation of GeoCommons.

We’ve gotten some great feedback on the GeoCommons beta and learned some valuable lessons on what works and what does not in fusing the GeoWeb and GIS. On the GeoWeb side we’ve been working hard on building the right work flow and user experience to make GIS data useful and exciting for non-technical users. On the GIS side of things we’ve putting lots of effort into providing tools to make GeoCommons an acceptable part of the GIS workflow – ranging from metadata to OGC standards support. Then using web services to bridge the two together with some semantic fun to intelligently serve and syndicate the best content, data and analysis.

For the current GeoCommons we’ll be in steady state mode till the next generation is ready to push out. In the mean time please keep all the great feedback and suggestions coming. We are working hard to make them a reality in the next release.

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