Simon Poole, 63, from Melbourne Australia, co-founded and managed as CEO two successful Internet startups in the 90s and 00s in Switzerland. After studying physics at Zürich University, he worked for a short period of time for the Swiss university computer network SWITCH and then moved on to co-found in 1991 what was to become the first commercial ISP in Switzerland and one of the first in Europe.

Simon created his OSM account in January 2009, but didn’t start mapping till one year later. He is now a moderately active mapper. He was a member of the OpenStreetMap Foundation licence working group from 2011 to 2021, the chairperson of the OSMF in the years 2013 and 2014, and has been the president of the Swiss OpenStreetMap Association since its founding in 2012.

Trivia: Simon wrote the most popular VT100 terminal emulator for the Atari ST in the 80s and contributed a number of patches to the minix operating system in 1989 before coming to the conclusion that it should really be rewritten from scratch (which somebody else did later on).

Simon’s OSM account