I had been a long-time and silent consumer of Open Source, having been an early Linux adopter about 20 years ago.  You know; building my own Linux boxes out of leftover Pentium system scraps and being utterly delighted when it worked and was way faster than other OS's that I was using in the office.

I got into software engineering over 30 years ago after having been a ballet dancer, choreographer and then theatrical lighting designer. I wanted a better income than what the theatre could provide and I had been doing office automation as an office temp to subsidize my theatre habit.  I had the good fortune of starting near the rise of the C++ language, back in the days when Bjarne Stroustrup would comment on comp.lang.c++ and we used the cfront pre-compiler.  We learned that it required rigour to created Object Oriented Programs using C++ and had many lengthy discussions about the pros and cons of different techniques. I taught languages to my colleagues, C, C++ and Java, taught OOA, OOD, and OOP, but wanted to have a larger role in setting up software engineering projects to succeed.

I worked with a number of small consulting companies, then changed gears to invent my own product that had nothing to do with software, the Hold-it! Game Card Organizer, and then came back into tech. By this time, my entrepreneurial endeavor had taught me some important missing pieces about why software projects fail. I worked for some more small companies and startups, and repeatedly built high-performing teams that consistently delivered successful projects, but doing little more than consistently consuming OSS.  I wanted to give back. 

Joining Black Duck gave me the opportunity to finally give back to the OSS community.  As a member, and then leader of the team that maintains and grows the Black Duck Open Hub (which used to be Ohloh.net), we run the world's largest repository of freely available analytics on Open Source Software. We charge nothing for the data, don't show any advertising, never use our user's data for marketing or sales contacts, never distribute, sell, or share their information either. We generate analytics for over 270,000 OSS projects with analyzable source, which comes from over 688,000 code locations. We count about 36 billion lines of code contributed by some 3.7 million contributors and strive to update those data every 24 to 72 hours (admittedly falling short recently, but we're working on it!). I am very proud of what we give back to the OSS community. Some additional contribution now comes in presentations on building high performing teams. The candidacy to join the OSI Board is another opportunity to contribute to the OSS community.

I appreciate your time and consideration for my candidacy as an OSI Board Member. I am pragmatic, optimistic and delight in working toward building understanding and consensus and commit myself to serving the Open Source community.