wwp@yahoogroups.com:
New Leadership at the WWP
G. Donald Bain 2008-Dec-19 00:24:00
I am very pleased to be able to announce a major step in building the
new World Wide Panorama Foundation. Landis and I met last week to nail
down many of the legal and administrative details. Most importantly we
appointed three additional directors.
Please welcome Markus Altendorff, Bostjan Burger, and Keith Martin to
the board of directors!
Their names and work will doubtless be familiar to most of you. The
five of us will be directing the new course of the WWP.
Markus Altendorff first participated in the event Bridges in 2004.
Shortly thereafter he volunteered to produce a map of all the
locations represented, followed by an improved map, then he built in
more and more features. The result was the wonderful "prep server"
that we all use to prepare our entries to each event. If it wasn't for
his work on the site and the database behind it the WWP would have
foundered long ago, overwhelmed by the flood of submissions coming
every three months.
We are also beholden to Markus for most of the site design including
all the custom icons. He prefers to work behind-the-scenes for the
most part, but sometimes answers questions on the lists. His most
recent effort has been to move the entire WWP site and prep server
from the old server at the university to the new WWP Foundation
server. I think of him as the "wizard of the Black Forest" for the way
he always produces, magically, something better than requested.
Bostjan Burger has participated in the WWP since the beginning, but we
had met (on-line) even before that. We both had personal sites
featuring waterfalls and I encouraged him to try VR technology. He has
since then produced an incredible body of work, including
comprehensive documentation of the cultural and physical landscapes of
his native country of Slovenia. I believe it to be the only country so
thoroughly documented, and it is all his own work.
Bostjan has developed a specialty in the photography of caves, for
which Slovenia is famous, and seems to have also climbed every hill
and mountain there. His site of 7500 VR panoramas is published by the
prestigious Academic Research Network Server (ARNES) of Slovenia. It
covers not only Slovenia but several adjacent countries and a few as
far afield as South America. Truly an impressive body of work, and a
testament to his dedication to the educational use of VR.
Keith Martin is a well-known member of the PanoTools and other lists
and has helped many of us out with advice and technical assistance. He
also teaches at the London College of Communication where he is a
Senior Lecturer in Publishing, teaching design, typography, production
and editorial issues across a number of different degree and
postgraduate courses. He has also been working on introducing panorama
photography to some of those courses. His personal work in VR
photography often features challenging subjects, with a lot of night
shots and many people in view.
Keith has written a number of books on design and technology subjects,
including Creative Suite 3 Integration and the Haynes Mac Manual, and
he is also the technical editor of MacUser magazine in the UK. His
communication skills and broad familiarity with technology will be
very valuable to us as we develop educational aspects of the WWP's
mission.
The WWP Foundation Bylaws provide for up to seven board members, so
after the present rush of work subsides we may be adding two more to
the team. There are also plans for special committees and regional
coordinators - so we may be contacting a number of you in the near
future.