Chris Holmes is one of the most influential figures in the open-source and cloud-native geospatial movement, with a career spanning over two decades of building communities, standards, and software that have fundamentally shaped how geospatial data is shared and accessed worldwide. He currently serves as VP of Product, Strategy & Partnerships and "Planet Fellow" at Planet Labs, where he leads the Developer Relations & Open Initiatives team.
Chris began his career as the first lead developer of GeoServer, an open-source geospatial server that he grew from a solo project with a handful of users to a thriving development community with over a million downloads. GeoServer remains the reference implementation for multiple OGC standards including Web Feature Service (WFS) and Web Coverage Service (WCS). Recognizing that sustainable open-source ecosystems require viable business models, Chris founded OpenGeo (later Boundless), a pioneering social enterprise that demonstrated how to build commercial success around open-source geospatial software while supporting full-time developers working on projects like OpenLayers, PostGIS, and GeoWebCache.
His current work focuses on cloud-native geospatial standards that are transforming how Earth observation data is discovered, accessed, and analyzed. Chris founded the SpatioTemporal Asset Catalog (STAC) community and standard, which aims to make all geospatial data queryable—a vision he calls "A Queryable Earth." He led product management for Cloud-Optimized GeoTIFFs (COGs), working with luminaries like Frank Warmerdam (GDAL), Matt Hancher (Google Earth Engine), and Rob Emanuele (Microsoft Planetary Computer) to create a format that enables efficient streaming of raster data from cloud storage. He co-founded GeoParquet, a new vector data format built on Apache Parquet that integrates geospatial data into modern cloud data warehouse workflows.
Chris serves as a Technical Fellow at Radiant Earth Foundation and sits on the board of Baseform. He previously served on the boards of the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC)—where he was also OGC's first "visiting fellow"—the Global Spatial Data Infrastructure Association (GSDI), the Eclipse Foundation, OSGeo, and Brave New Software. He is active in the Cloud-Native Geospatial Foundation, contributing to its editorial board and championing standards like Zarr for multi-dimensional data and COPC for point clouds.
A Stanford graduate and 2005 Fulbright Scholar, Chris has given keynote addresses at geospatial and open-source conferences around the world. His Medium blog and frequent conference talks articulate the vision for how cloud-native approaches can democratize access to Earth observation data and bring geospatial insights to mainstream data science workflows. His philosophy centers on the belief that openness and collaboration lead to better technology, and that geospatial information is essential for both digital transformation and sustainability. Through his leadership, Chris has helped create an ecosystem where anyone can discover, access, and analyze planetary-scale geospatial data using open standards and tools.
