I'm involved in several open source projects: I'm a Debian Maintainer, an Ubuntu Developer, on the board of the OpenStack Foundation and the Perl Foundation, co-founder of the FLOSS Foundations group for open source leaders, and formerly a board member of the Python Software Foundation. Of historical interest to OSI members: I was the primary drafter of the Artistic License 2.0, a review committee member for GPLv3, and one of the drafters of the amicus brief (for OSI, Creative Commons, etc) that turned the tide for the Jacobsen v. Katzer case.

It has been a great privilege to participate on the OSI board for the past 3 years, serving 2 of those years as president. If I'm re-elected in 2017, I'll volunteer to serve 2 more years as president, and then one transitional year as a board member to assist the next president. Being president involves a wide variety of activities, ranging from mundane to visionary. The areas that seem to have occupied the greatest part of my time have been:

• Business management: maintaining a budget, ensuring we don't spend more than we receive in donations
• Task management: establishing procedures to track what we're working on, so we don't miss important opportunities for visibility, collaboration (with individuals, affiliates, and other organizations), and sponsorship
• Board sponsor for the FLOSS Entities working group, looking into shifts in the IRS's attitude toward FLOSS non-profits
• Board sponsor for the Beyond Licensing working group, looking into the complex array of legal and social considerations that interact with open source software licenses
• Working on healing old rifts with free software communities and organizations
• Talks and keynotes at open source events: how open source is now an essential component of successful modern business, and more recently turning an eye to the potential in humanitarian open source
• Trademark stewardship, guiding companies and projects through understanding that the Open Source Definition lays out what it means to be "open source", and helping them avoid open-washing

I believe that licensing will continue to be critical to the future of open source. I agree with the concerns over license proliferation that started in the mid-2000's (I was one of the active amplifiers of the meme), and I'm pleased that the flood of new licenses we feared has been prevented, focusing people down on a few "standard" choices. But at the same time, I fully expect the next 30 years of international law to be every bit as interesting as the past 30 years, which means that open source licensing must continue to evolve with the times. It's not something that needs radical change, just a steady, thoughtful eye to the future.

Another important aspect of the OSI's mission is education. Plenty of open source projects have achieved brand recognition even in the wilds of tech consumership (Firefox, Ubuntu, Android, etc.), so what we're aiming for isn't so much broadcasting the existence of open source, as it is broadcasting the meaning of open source. Our greatest challenge in the next decade or so is making sure the signal of software freedom isn't lost in the noise of general technical progress. It's partly an act of definition: what is and isn't open source. It's partly an act of interpretation: evaluating current events in the light of open source, and re-evaluating open source in light of current events. And it's partly an act of inspiration: highlighting successes (and failures) and pointing the way to the future. This is an area where I think the OSI can and should have a substantial impact, not as an exclusive owner, but as an influential participant in the open source community.

Feel free to ask questions here or contact me on Twitter (@allisonrandal). Thanks