I lead product build-out and operationalize the teams behind open source projects and communities building geospatial knowledge infrastructure (GKI).

I've helped lead multiple projects from idea to production deployments and through long term support and enhancement life cycles. I set technical and design requirements, coordinate the team's implementation, validate product before it ships, and shape the specifications with the customers and community who use them.

At TerraFrame this has involved novel sollutions focused on GeoAI, semantic technology, systems for building and utilizing spatial knowledge graphs, UAV data workflow automation, and more.

Much of that has meant leading product for technology without a playbook

I'm as comfortable leading a sales call as reviewing a feature build, and I'm often the person customers call because I understand both their problem and the product.

Because I love supporting my community, I founded West Slope Technologists, a rural tech community in Colorado that grew to nearly 300 people and is till active today. See more about my community efforts here.

What I do at TerraFrame

TerraFrame is unique by focusing on building open source solutions for impact through close customer collaboration. My title only tells part of the story. I've worn most of the hats a small company has, from writing code to selling it. These are the ones I wear most.

Standards and community. I lead community efforts to collaborate on the standards and technology we build. This includes community meetings, roadmap development, work prioritization, transparent work streams, support systems, and more.

Product and delivery. I work with the team to establish technical and design requirements, coordinate implementation, and validate the product before it ships.

Vision and advocacy. I work with the CEO to define the company’s vision and advocate for that vision by helping to lead sales calls, giving talks, and shaping our marketing efforts.

Team operations. I set up how our team works day to day: project management, sprint planning, customer and user support, and the tools and workflows we use for internal and customer projects.

What we're building

Geoprism Registry

Authoritative geographic data, tracked over time.

An open-source platform for managing what exists, where it is, how it's organized, and how that has changed. It maintains the shared location data that other systems depend on.

Geoprism Registry website
Geoprism Registry on GitHub

Kaleidoscope

GeoAI grounded in spatial knowledge graphs.

Instead of retrieving loose text chunks, Kaleidoscope uses spatial knowledge graphs from Geoprism Registry to ground AI answers in connected, traceable data. We call this approach Geo-Graph RAG.

Kaleidoscope on GitHub

Imagery Data Manager (IDM)

One place to store, process, and share drone imagery.

An open-source, cloud-based application built for the U.S. Department of the Interior. It processes drone imagery and lidar into orthomosaics, terrain models, and point clouds, connects everything by location and time, and publishes products through open standards like STAC.

IDM on GitHub

Geoprism

A toolkit for knowledge graph based systems.

An integrated platform for data management and visualization that runs on TerraFrame's open source RunwaySDK. It's the foundational toolkit that Geoprism Registry is built on.

Geoprism on GitHub

Much of this work is part of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers' Geospatial Knowledge Infrastructure effort, which USACE funds and TerraFrame leads as developer. Earlier, I helped build TerraFrame's RunwaySDK framework, and the Common Geo-Registry work for the Digital Solutions for Malaria Elimination partnership.

My favorite talks & writing

  1. 2026 Cloud Native Efficiency | STAC-Driven Discovery: What Government Teams Are Asking For Talk, Cloud-Native Geospatial Forum, Snowbird, Utah
  2. 2023 Enabling Knowledge Sharing by Managing Dependencies and Interoperability Between Interlinked Spatial Knowledge Graphs Paper introducing the Spatial Knowledge Mesh and presented by N. McEachen. FOSS4G 2023 Academic Track, Prizren, Kosovo; published in the ISPRS Archives
  3. 2019 Aspen Ideas Festival Fellow Fellowship, Aspen Ideas Festival
  4. 2019 Give Your Software Away: Building Healthcare Tech Systems with a Global Reach & Local Impact Talk, TEDxGrandJunction
  5. 2017 Rethinking the Data Pipeline for Better Integration and Collaboration Talk, GIS in the Rockies, Denver Colorado
  6. 2015 Turning Data into Information with Geo-Ontologies Talk, Free Open Source Software for Geospatial (FOSS4G) International Conference, Seoul South Korea
  7. 2013 A Model for Open Data in Colorado Talk, GIS in the Rockies, Denver Colorado

Community

A room of people seated in chairs and around a long table at an Aspen Entrepreneurs gathering, listening to a speaker
Talking about the future of the Roaring Fork Valley's entrepreneurial community. Photo by Aspen Entrepreneurs.

When I moved to Marble in 2017, I started a small group to find the other technologists in the mountains. It grew into West Slope Technologists, a community of nearly 300 people across rural western and southern Colorado, and into a broader effort to build a tech ecosystem outside the Front Range alongside the region's startup organizers, rural-focused investors, and coworking spaces.

Along the way I organized the Rural Tech Retreat, a semi-off-grid conference in Marble. Starting in 2021, I captained the Technology Track at West Slope Startup Week, and I serve as a strategic advisor to CoVenture in Carbondale.

Read the community story

Off the clock

A two-lane road running toward Mt. Sopris under a partly cloudy sky
Mt. Sopris over Carbondale.

Outside of work I'm usually climbing, in the mountains, on a beach, or sailing.