Bio & Profile Pics – Denise McKenzie

Denise McKenzie

Managing Partner, PLACE Trust & Partner, Community & Ethics PLACE | Co-author, Locus Charter | Chair Emeritus of Board, AGI | Advisory Board, LBMA | Steering Committee – Partnerships Women+ in Geospatial |

Short 150 word Bio
Denise is a strategic advisor, partnership builder, and presenter with over 20 years of experience across the geospatial profession. Driven by a passion for more equitable access and use of location data she takes pride in her work across data ethics, diversity and inclusion, and the geospatial profession. As the Managing Partner for the new PLACE Trust, she is keen to expand the work of PLACE to ensure that high-resolution imagery is made accessible to governments and a broad range of trusted and responsible organisations throughout the world. In addition, she is responsible for the development of the PLACE Community Membership, ethics and is a co-author of the Locus Charter – 10 principles for the ethical and responsible use of location data.

Longer Biography
Denise is a strategic advisor, partnership builder, and presenter with over 20 years of experience with the global geospatial community. She works internationally to evangelize the benefits, value, and application of location data across government, the private sector, and academia and her experience covers a broad range of domains including agriculture, defence, sustainability, insurance, Smart Cities & IoT, statistics, development, and data ethics. This diversity ensures that she works where geospatial meets mainstream technology.

With a broad range of experience in the ethical use of location data, outreach, and partnership development, Denise is now the Managing Partner of the PLACE Trust and the Partner, Community & Ethics at PLACE – a non-profit mapping organization founded on the belief that high-quality mapping is essential data infrastructure for the digital age. She leads the development of the global membership and partner program that will utilise the data collected in the PLACE Trust and will continue to promote the uptake and utilisation of the Locus Charter.

She co-directed the Benchmark Initiative operating through Ordnance Survey’s Geovation accelerator, exploring the ethical use of location data and it is through this role she became a co-author of the Locus Charter. In the broader geospatial community, she is the Chair-Emeritus of the board of directors for the Association for Geographic Information (AGI) in the UK and remains on the council as the Lead for Ethics. Denise is also a member of the Global Advisory Board for the Location Based Marketing Association and a steering committee member for Women+ in Geospatial as part of the Partnership program.

Previously she has worked with the Victorian State Government in Australia on geospatial innovation projects and as the Head of Outreach and Communication at the Open Geospatial Consortium where she led work such as the UN-GGIM Geospatial Standards Guides and strategic partnership engagement.

Denise holds a Bachelor of Arts in Public Policy and Politics from Monash University in Australia and a Master of Science in Sustainability from the University of Southampton in the United Kingdom.