Landon Blake works as a licensed land surveyor for a small civil engineering and land surveying company in California's Central Valley. He has been interested in GIS since his first exposure to it during the Land Surveying Program at Flathead Valley Community College. He was able to learn the basic concepts of GIS as part of the classes shared between the Land Surveying and Forestry programs at Flathead Valley Community College. His interest in GIS was renewed when he discovered JUMP, an open source GIS program written in Java by a Canadian company called Vivid Solutions. He decided to teach himself Java so he could improve and customize the program. He later became one of the administrators for OpenJUMP, a fork of the original JUMP that with a more "open" and cooperative development process, and has been working with OpenJUMP ever since. Landon's participation in the OSGeo includes editing and contributing articles to the OSGeo Journal, assisting the OSGeo Education Committee, and work with the deegree Project and GeoTools, which are both OSGeo projects.
