Who Am I?

My name is Duane O'Brien. I'm the Head of Open Source at Indeed.com, and previously ran the day-to-day operations of PayPal's Open Source Program. I've been, in no particular order, a developer, a farm hand, an agile coach, a game tester, a build engineer, an automated testing specialist, and the perl guy on the java team. Now, I help enable developers who want to contribute to open source projects during their work hours. I've been raising money for charitable causes off and on for over 15 years, both as an individual and as part of my job. Sometimes that means asking people to sponsor a bike ride. Sometimes that means throwing a movie party at OSCON to drive traffic and donations to the non-profit exhibitors.

Why Do I Want To Serve On The OSI Board?

I have one goal: to raise additional funds for the OSI and the broader open source ecosystem. I intend to do that by directly engaging with more corporate donors.

There has been a lot of talk over the last couple years on the subject of Sustainability. It is vital that we help our critical open source projects solve this problem, and that involves more than simply raising funds. However, while we are having the sustainability conversation, we cannot overlook supporting organizations like the OSI. Advocacy, education, and community building are all important as well, and they are core to the mission of the OSI.We all want to see this work continue.

The OSI does quite a lot on a fairly small budget (cf. 2016 OSI Annual Report). If we are successful at growing and diversifying our corporate donor base, not only can the OSI reach a more sustainable funding model, we can grow these efforts, as well as explore other areas where the OSI would have particular impact - additional fiscal sponsorships, a travel fund scholarship, and supporting key diversity initiatives.

The whole ecosystem needs to be healthy if it is going to be sustainable. That includes the OSI. And I want to help.