Paolo Cavallini has been named to the QGIS Project Steering Committee and will assume the role of Financial/Marketing Advisor.

Paolo comes from a strong scientific background in zoology (a PhD, and more than 30 publication in international journals, plus conference proceedings and popular papers). Paolo currently heads a small and active group of professionals (biologists and agronomists) under the name Faunalia.

He started approaching Free and Open Source software in 2000, and soon migrated all Faunalia's computer infrastructure to the exclusive use of it. He participates actively (as a power user, tester, and sponsor) to the development of several projects, particularly in the GIS sector, and is among the initiators of the very successful DebianGIS project. He writes about free GIS in Italian and international magazines. His main interests are on environmental modelling, especially aimed at nature conservation and animal ecology. He is now Chair of the Italian Geographic Free and Open Source Software association (http://GFOSS.it).

The QGIS PSC is now fully staffed and we look forward to a productive 2008.