Chris Holmes Email & Phone Number

Amsterdam, Nh, Nl

San Francisco, California, Us

Named the first 'Planet Fellow' after serving on the executive team, to make progress on key problems and opportunities as an individual contributor while serving on the extended leadership team. This has included a number of roles and tasks, reporting up through product, strategy and software engineering: - Revitalized Planet Explorer as Product Manager, building and shipped a number of key features. - Lead the creation of the 5-year 'platform strategy', guiding 3 key exec team members (strategy, tech & product) through weekly meetings and extensive foundational documents. Established shared understanding of the industry landscape & potential paths to success, then drove alignment towards one shared high-level vision. - Worked on Corp Dev, establishing the acquisition strategy to drive Planet's next phase as a platform company. Did research, sourcing and diligence on a variety of companies, playing key roles in all three of Planet's recent acquisitions, and articulated the framework for execs to understand the acquisition strategy. - Served as Product Manager to the Developer Relations team, owning Planet's documentation & Python SDK, and re-orienting the team strategy towards more direct developer feedback. - Incubated a new approach to partnerships in the Strategy team, moved over to the Partner team in the commercial organization to bring it to reality. Wrote the new partnership strategy and related business proposals, and continue to lead deep technical and product engagement with key partners who enhance Planet's products and strategy.Planet believes in a more open, collaborative, cloud-native geospatial ecosystem, and so the other consistent focus of the role has been on building that ecosystem (COG, STAC & GeoParquet) and aligning it with Planet's strategic objectives (& vice versa). Planet sponsors the ecosystem through direct funding to key projects, as well as time to write, speak, build specs and lead communities.

San Francisco, California, Us

Elevated to the executive team to bring the product perspective and to align the company around a long-term product vision. Lead the product strategy and took responsibility for the product roadmap, while participating in weekly exec team meetings to work together on company priorities. This was a preset term of one year, to build up more product capability at Planet while working to hire a Chief Product Officer to lead the team in the long term.

San Francisco, California, Us

Built out the first Product Management capability at Planet. Took on a variety of tasks, shifting between leadership, architecture & strategy, and sprinting with engineering teams. This was done sitting at the intersection of business and engineering, participating deeply in both groups to fully understand our customers and our technology. Worked to ship product as early as possible, cutting scope to the core and letting our users shape the future. The core product is earth imagery with higher cadence and coverage than anything the world has seen. Around that the team built an API-first delivery capability with a Software as a Service layer on top to ease access. Worked to articulate product visions and roadmaps, driven by continual feedback from potential and current users.

San Francisco, California, Us

Worked to guide and frame the product strategy of going from a raw imagery to a full web api-enabled developer and partner ecosystem. Also started to sort out the open source / open data strategy and to explore structures for maximizing the social impact of Planet Labs.

Providing expert industry guidance to help Taylor Geospatial Engine achieve paths to commercialization. Helped to create TGE's 'Innovation Bridge' program and to select the first initiative on Field Boundaries. Leveraged industry connections and networked to key stakeholders to bring together the right group for the initial workshop in St. Louis. Articulated the workshop goals, set the agenda and lead numerous sessions, which lead to the fiboa data schema. Currently building the open ecosystem around fiboa through setting the vision and goals, blogging progress and bringing in contributors. Working to convert key datasets to fiboa, including coding converters, and helping out on the AI/ML part of the TGE Field Boundaries initiative. Aligning common approaches to other data/standard/code projects like Overture Maps.

Conceived of the idea of Cloud-Native Geospatial as a common approach among a number of new formats after working on Cloud-Optimized GeoTIFF (COG) and SpatioTemporal Asset Catalog (STAC), and seeing philosophically aligned efforts like Zarr. Organized the first two 'Cloud-Native Geo Outreach Events' to bring together people working on it, and bought the cloudnativegeo.org domain. The movement has since expanded to include the GeoParquet and COPC formats.In May 2023 Radiant Earth fully embraced their leadership role in this space (they funded much of my original work on STAC), and established the Cloud Native Geospatial Foundation as one of their key initiatives. Current work on the foundation includes building the ecosystem, working on strategy and promoting the concepts.

Lisbon, Portugal, Pt

Assist on strategic direction, technology trends, business development and product roadmap. Worked for 2 days a week in 2013 and early 2014 - handled the partner program, assisted on account management for larger clients, and fed customer priorities in to product development.

Brave New Software is the non-profit behind Lantern, an open source internet censorship circumvention tool that operates in some of the most extreme censorship environments, such as China, Iran, and Russia. https://getlantern.orgHelped Brave New Software's overall organizational strategy, including funding and product direction. In 2013 did contract work for 2 days a week on product management and open source community building for Lantern.

Arlington, Va, Us

Helped the OGC understand the new world of open source collaboration, working to bring the best of breed tools and techniques from other worlds while retaining the unique culture of the consortium to build better standards. Participated as a core member of the GeoPackage Standard Working Group to learn OGC's specification development process, as it had high potential to be one of the more impactful standards. Pushed GeoPackage to be the first OGC standard to be published on github, and it got a number of great pull requests. Continually pushed OGC to be more open in its standard development process, with decent success. Advocated for REST/JSON and what became the OGC API initiative, and worked to promote Web Feature Service 3.0 (later renamed to OGC API - Features), adopting it as part of STAC and co-organizing 2 joint sprints.

Arlington, Va, Us

Funded by OGC to be their first 'Visiting Fellow', focused on combining their OGC API approach with the 'cloud-native geospatial' approach. Explored static versions of the OGC API specifications, and did a deep dive into the 'vector data' (points, lines, polygons) landscape for the potential of a 'cloud-native vector' data format, which lead to GeoParquet.

Washington Dc, Dc, Us

Built/Lead/Collaborated on open geospatial standards including Cloud Optimized GeoTIFF (COG), SpatioTemporal Asset Catalogs (STAC), and GeoParquet. The general pattern was to coin the name, create the website, recruit contributors, encourage early implementations, and promote through blogging, speaking & social media. STAC and GeoParquet involved more active specification development - convening the initial group and then drafting the majority of the specification in the early releases. Raised ~$200k for STAC and ~$35k for GeoParquet from diverse funders, and organized 6 sprints to build STAC and its ecosystem. Brought the three specifications together under one banner, which evolved to be the Cloud Native Geo Foundation - a key initiative of Radiant Earth.

Brussels, Be

Elected Sustaining Member Representative, out of the LocationTech community.

St. Louis, Mo, Us

Founded OpenGeo as a market-driven initiative under the umbrella of the non-profit OpenPlans to provide a sustainability model to create a more robust geospatial infrastructure for the world. Grew it to ~$3m in revenue and ushered it through its spin out as a VC-backed company called Boundless Geospatial. Lead the company, taking on the most important priorities by learning each area sufficiently to build out the function and then hiring more experienced leaders, growing from 4 people to 30. Over the years this included software development, product management, customer support, business development, recruiting, sales &marketing. Represented OpenGeo at numerous conferences, including a number of keynote talks.OpenGeo built on the success of GeoServer, providing enterprise support and professional services for a variety of customers. It hired leading developers of other key open source projects (OpenLayers & PostGIS) and started GeoWebCache, GeoExt and GeoNode to provide a complete stack of geospatial software called the OpenGeo Suite. OpenGeo served as a 'RedHat for Geospatial', and its customers included FCC, NGA, NOAA, Ordnance Survey, IGN France, SFMTA, Portland TriMet, NYC DoITT, Ericsson, World Bank and more.

New York City, Us

Served as the first lead developer of GeoServer, taking it from an alpha project with no users or contributors to a robust open source community with many large production users. GeoServer continues to flourish more than 20 years later, with over 7 million downloads, 4 books written, 3.6k stars on github, and thousands of production installations, powering the core geospatial infrastructure of many governments, companies and non-profits.Wrote the majority of the code for the 1.0.0 release, and contributed extensively to the underlying GeoTools open source project, which remains the leading Java geospatial library. Built the community of contributors and users, attracting a number of great developers and orienting everyone to build something far bigger than anyone working alone could.

Washington, Dc, Us

Completed a Fulbright fellowship focused on the potential for open source software to help build spatial data infrastructures in developing countries. Continued building the GeoServer, and explored its applicability to African SDI's. Presented a paper at the Global Spatial Data Infrastructure (GSDI) conference, and gave a talk at CSIR in South Africa. Conceived of the original ideas behind GeoNode, which was eventually funded by the World Bank and a number of other institutions.