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Ceil Silver Ambassador Fund

Geek Gatherings is pleased to announce that the 2013 Ceil Silver Ambassador is Luis Maria Guayan.

Luis Maria GuayanLuis Maria Guayan is IT Manager of FGF Trapani (http://www.fgftrapani.com.ar), a citrus company in Tucuman, Argentina. He has developed with FoxPro and Visual FoxPro for over 20 years. He has participated continuously since 1997 in the Spanish Visual FoxPro Community Forum (formerly in the Microsoft Newsgroups, and currently in Google Groups). He also participates to a lesser extent on Foxite and the Universal Thread. In 2000, together with Paul Roca of Spain, he created PortalFox (http://www.portalfox.com), the largest portal for Hispanic Visual FoxPro developers, where he has more than 300 published articles and translations. He was awarded the Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP) in Visual FoxPro eight consecutive times (from 2001-2008). In 2010 with Guillermo Carrero (RIP) of Spain, he created FoxBarcode, a class for creating bar codes with VFP, shared with the whole community as a VFPX project (http://vfpx.codeplex.com).

About the Ceil Silver Ambassador Fund

Many VFP developers around the world provide incredible contributions to the VFP community, such as working on VFPX projects, blogging about techniques and code to do cool things in VFP, or providing exemplary support in various VFP forums. However, for most of them, attending a conference such as Southwest Fox isn't feasible.

The Ceil Silver Ambassador Fund brings a Visual FoxPro developer to the Southwest Fox conference as an ambassador for the developers in his or her country. This gives the recipient the opportunity to meet and share experiences with developers attending Southwest Fox and gives other attendees the opportunity to learn about VFP development in the recipient's country. The trip is paid for by the VFP community's donations to the Fund.

The Fund is named in memory of Ceil Silver, a long-time member of the Visual FoxPro community, who passed away in January, 2009. Ceil served as Editor of FoxPro Advisor's Tips and Tricks column for many years and was the founder of the Westchester County FoxPro chapter of PADD, the Professional Association of Database Developers. She was also a contributing author to Special Edition Using Visual FoxPro 6. Ceil understood the value of attending professional conferences, and continued to attend them until her failing health prevented it.

Nominations for 2013 Ceil Silver Ambassador

The Ambassador selection committee consists of Southwest Fox organizers Rick Schummer, Tamar Granor, and Doug Hennig, former Ambassadors Emerson Santon Reed, Cesar Chalom, Bernard Bout, Borislav Borissov, and Jun Tangunan, and VFP community members Christof Wollenhaupt and Rick Bean.

We are looking for nominations from the VFP community for the 2013 recipient. To nominate someone you think is deserving to be selected, please email their name and a brief list of their contributions to the VFP community to ambassadorfund@swfox.net. Names must be submitted no later than May 31, 2013.

Contributing to the Fund

We urge you to consider donating any amount you see fit, small or large, to this fund. Contributions can be sent, by check to:

Geek Gatherings, LLC
Ceil Silver Ambassador Fund
42759 Flis Drive
Sterling Heights, MI 48314

We can also accept donations via PayPal, but make sure to mark it as a "gift" so there is no business transaction fee. PayPal

100% of donated money goes to the travel costs for the ambassador. Not a single penny is used to cover administrative costs. All time managing the fund and working through the selection process is donated. No one is paid for their time.