Hello, my name is Ken. I am a bit new to the OSI community, so will provide a brief introduction.  

Some Background

I currently serve the University of Southern Queensland (USQ) in Australia. My experiences with OSS have been less with production; while having more to do with the relationships between OSS, open methods & governance, and education. I have spent much of the past 30 years or so with universities and related organizations, and along the way have supported the development of open organizational culture as a critical factor in sustained open education practice. Some examples of work that I felt has been meaningful includes:

• while serving at the Open Polytechnic of New Zealand, Richard Wiles and I launch the New Zealand Open Source Virtual Learning Environment.
• promoting the use of open educational technologies and openly licensed educational content in Central Asia while forming the distance learning network.
• actively supporting the Open Educational Resources Foundation and OERu through supporting USQ’s technical contributions to the open learning technologies, open educational design, co-sponsorship of a community Open Source Technologist, and delivering open courses to the OERu community.
• developing open licensing policy at USQ for educational, course, and corporate content.
• leading the USQ effort to become the first member of the OSI higher education institution affiliate program.
• leading the effort for the University of Southern Queensland to become the first international partner of the Open TextBook Network and organizing a Southern Hemisphere membership consortium.

Universities are big old conservative organizations and openness efforts require a lot of patience, care, and feeding. Like everybody else, I have contributed to a lot of efforts that run their course, have only local impact, simply do not work, or that leave a mark, perhaps to be revisited at a later date. These too are meaningful and have included an open blog that focused on the impact of OSS and OER on Higher Education titled Terra Incognita, co-founding the Education Openness Constituent Group, the Jasig 2-3-98 Group, and recently the OSI Free/Libre/Open Works (FLOW) Management Education working group, among others. From each effort we learn a bit about how to contribute to a movement.

I am currently advocating for and supporting an open education project in collaboration with members of the OER Foundation/OERu, OSI, the NZ Open Source Society, and a number of colleagues at universities to build an open (licensed, standards, distribution, and offering) course on OSS Production. There has been a recognized need among organizations that universities are not providing appropriate exposure to OSS production and culture to their graduates. Our hope is to provide well-designed and produced educational materials to support OSS education for all sorts of organizations and individuals to use and modify.

Interest in Serving on the Board

My interest in serving on the OSI Board is wrapped into the decades-long commit I have shown to openness. The OSI has extended to the higher education community through its affiliation program, and it is essential that the community extend back meaningfully through service, open exchange, commitment, and through engagement to learn how to best contribute back to the community. In addition to community service, membership on the OSI Board is another way to actively promote open culture through working groups, attract additional members to the OSI and its mission, enhance the profile of open licensing in universities, and (somewhat selfishly) drawing USQ further into open technology, education, and organizational practice. In some small way, I hope too that my service on the Board, will influence the thinking of the Board and inform the progress of OSI.

Contact

If for any reason, you want to contact me please feel free to email me at [email protected] or simply through commenting in this wiki page. Cheers!! -Ken