Denise McKenzie

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, defense, sustainability, insurance, Smart Cities & IoT, statistics, development and data ethics. This diversity ensures that she works where geospatial meets mainstream technology.

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 council as the Lead for Ethics. Denise is also a member of the Global Advisory Board for the Location Based Marketing Association.

With a broad range of experience in both ethical use of location data, outreach and partnership development, Denise is now the Community & Ethics Partner 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 up take and utilisation of the Locus Charter.

Previously, she has worked with the Victorian State Government in Australia on geospatial innovation projects and as the Head of Communication and Outreach 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 Masters of Science in Sustainability from the University of Southampton in the United Kingdom.