Dr. Jon Corbett recently moved from the University of Victoria to a faculty position in the Community, Culture and Global Studies Unit at University of British Columbia Okanagan. Jon’s community-based research investigates processes and tools that can be used by local and Indigenous communities to help express their relationship to, and knowledge of, their traditional territories and resources. Jon has worked with communities in Australia, Indonesia, the Philippines and over the past three years with First Nations communities in British Columbia. In particular Jon's research interests explore how digital multimedia technologies can be effectively combined with maps to be used by remote and marginal communities to document, store, manage and communicate their culture, language, history and traditional ecological knowledge. His research also examines how geographic representation of community information using these technologies can strengthen the community internally through the revitalization of culture and traditional environmental management practices, as well as externally through increasing their influence over regional decision-making processes.

Steve deRoy is an Anishinabe member from the Ebb & Flow First Nation in Manitoba. He has over 6 years experience providing training, mapping and geographic information system (GIS) support with First Nation communities and resource companies in Western Canada. Previous to joining the Treaty 8 Tribal Association as GIS Advisor, Steve worked with non-profit organizations including the Red Road HIV/AIDS Network and the Aboriginal Mapping Network supported by Ecotrust Canada. His experience as a GIS Specialist range from managing the implementation of a traditional use study; using GIS technology to incorporate scientific and cultural values into community planning processes; creating maps for resource-based projects such as watershed assessments, forest development plans, fish & fish habitat inventory projects; working with public utilities; and more recently, applying GIS technology to the field of health, in particular to HIV/AIDS within the BC Aboriginal community. Steve has been responsible for developing maps and GIS products for several First Nation community land use plans and atlases, as well as providing hands-on technical training support. Aside from taking care of his newborn daughter Isabel, you can find Steve playing disc golf with his dog Mac, strumming his guitars, learning to play violin, camping, hiking, snowboarding, canoeing and kayaking.

Dr. Jefferson M. Fox is Coordinator of Environmental Studies, Senior Fellow at the East-West Center, Hawaii. He holds a PhD in development studies from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Research Interests: land-use and land-cover change in Asia and the possible cumulative impact of these changes on the region and the global environment.  Dr. Fox has co-edited several books, most recently, People and the environment: Approaches for Linking Household and Community Surveys to Remote Sensing and GIS (Kluwer Academic Press, 2003). His ongoing research includes spatial information technology and society: ethics, values, and practice, funded by the National Science Foundation; the role of land-cover change in Montane Mainland Southeast Asia in altering regional hydrological processes under a changing climate, funded by NASA; and building regional, national, and local capacities for community-based management of natural resources in Asia, funded by The Ford Foundation. Formerly with watershed management projects in Nepal, and lectured in Geography Department, Gadjah Mada University, Yogyakarta, Indonesia.

Giacomo Rambaldi is senior programme coordinator at the Technical Center for Agricultural and Rural Cooperation (CTA) in Wageningen, Netherlands. He has 28 years of professional experience in Africa, Latin America, South Asia, South-East Asia, South Pacific and the Caribbean where he worked for a number of international organizations including FAO, Italian Aid to Development, the European Commission (ASEAN Regional Center for Biodiversity Conservation, ARCBC) and the Asian Development Bank (ADB). He holds a degree in agricultural sciences from the State University of Milan, Italy,holds Fellow status in the US-based Society for Applied Anthropology (SfAA), and is currently conducting a PhD research with the Communication and Innovation Studies Group, Communication Science, Wageningen University, the Netherlands. Giacomo’s first involvement in community mapping dates back to the late 80’s. Giacomo has been developing and promoting Participatory 3D Modelling (P3DM), a community-based mapping method fully integrated with GPS and GIS applications, now widely used in South-east Asia and other parts of the world. In August 2000 he launched Participatory Avenues www.iapad.org, a web site dedicated to sharing knowledge on community mapping and collaborative spatial information management. Areas of professional interest include visualizing indigenous spatial knowledge for improving communication, facilitating peer-to-peer dialogue and managing conflicts on issues related to the territory; collaborative natural resource/protected area management; participatory spatial planning; networking and web publishing. Giacomo is the author of a number of publications on these subjects, and the developer of this web site www.ppgis.net and lead administrator of the [ppgis] DGroup.

Dr. Daniel Weiner is Professor of Geography and Executive Director of the Center for International Studies at Ohio University. His research areas include: political ecology, with a regional focus on Appalachia and Africa; discourses of development; GIS and Society; and, participatory GIS. In the early 1990s, Dr. Weiner was a principal investigator on a participatory land reform project in South Africa. The project used conventional PRA methods to develop village-based community land reform proposals for a post-apartheid era. Towards the end of this project, the team experimented with geo-spatial technologies and integrated local knowledge into a GIS. This successful experiment stimulated further research into participatory GIS. Dr. Weiner has written extensively on the theory and practices associated with participatory GIS applications, including a co-edited publication entitled Community Participation and Geographical Information Systems (T&F STM publishers, 2003).