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 helping throw 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, 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, creating and curating resources to help grow new open source contributors, 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.

So, What's Your Plan?

You may notice I've used the phrase "corporate donors" and not "corporate sponsors." That is an intentional choice. Sponsorship generally comes with an expectation of some mutual benefit. If your company sponsors a conference, they likely expect logo placement, a booth, or access to attendees. Donation does not generally come with the same set of expectations. In order to grow our corporate donor base, we need to do three things: tell our story, make it easy, and ask.

We have to tell our story. We

We have to make it easy. The purchase order process used by most corporations is optimized for an exchange of goods and services. We need to make it easy for the people involved in these processes to donate to the OSI without understanding our core mission or what we do

We have to ask. That means talking to people - at conferences, on the phone, in email. We have to reach out members of open source programs across the industry