KevinShockey
Imagine what it would be like if open source technologies, licenses, and models of development become a regular part of our communities and businesses. Little by little we’ve seen this happening all around us. The changes we all have only dreamed about are becoming more and more common. The promise of open source has grown significantly over the last 15 years, but there is still much work to be done.
As you are thinking about the long road open source has taken, it’s important to reflect on how we’ve gotten here. It has taken the collective efforts of rare-thinking people, all working closely to build collaborative open source communities. I, for one, have been following a think globally and act locally strategy.
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About Me
I live in Puerto Rico with my wife and three daughters. After a long career in corporate IT, I have spent the last ten years advocating for the advancement of open source in Puerto Rico. At the same time, I have also pushed myself to be as active as possible within the global open source community. I have worked on the organizing committee of the O’Reilly Open Source Convention since 2005. I have spoken on open source internationally at Linux World, OSCON, and IEEE sponsored events. I worked as editor-in-chief of Tux Magazine, I blogged for Linux Journal, and I blogged on open source for various incarnations of the O’Reilly Broadcast and O’Reilly Network.
Locally, I received a grant from the Puerto Rico government to found the SNAP Development Platform. The platform was a live Linux CD with a comprehensive Java software development stack. Recently, I received a community grant from the Internet Society to found a Python user group. Our user group is the only active technology user group in Puerto Rico. Recently, in collaboration with the Free Software Foundation, I started the Libre Planet Puerto Rico team.
My Vision
Looking forward, I would like to help you envision the future I see for the Open Source Initiative. I believe the future of the OSI relies on continuing to build three pillars to support their on-going growth. The first of these pillars is community building. I want to help the OSI diversify their community building activities to include more connectivity with different constituencies in the free software and open source software world. By using better story telling techniques, there are plenty of new opportunities to educate and promote awareness of non-proprietary software.
The second pillar is using social media and related online communication platforms to more widely distribute our stories. As with many software development methodologies, one can not merely tack on social media to a project, it has to be baked in from the beginning. I believe that in order to engage a distributed online community, the OSI needs to meet its’ community where-ever they work and play. The OSI can more easily pursue its mission and vision by effectively and creatively using popular communication channels to communicate, educate, and engage with different constituencies in the open source community.
The final pillar requires pursuing more foundation and corporate grants. Did you know that the top 1,000 foundations gave away more than $24 Billion in grants during 2011 alone? In the most recent data from the Foundation Center, nearly 150,000 grants were made in 2011. This represents a major opportunity for any non-profit company. Nearly all of the leading free and open source software related foundations are innovative fund raisers. Just as I have advocated for more open source projects to more aggressively pursue fund raising, I believe the OSI can more effectively pursue its’ vision by having access to more funds. It is my desire to offer my research and experience to make these pillars capable of supporting the future of the Open Source Initiative. An example of my research on grant funding is this video interview from OSCON 2012:
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More information about me and my professional career can be found on LinkedIn.
Feel free to ask questions here or contact me on Twitter (@shockeyk). Thanks for this opportunity!
Bonus Section
And now let's take a look at the tag cloud for the Open Source Initiative Wiki: