Become an OSHWA member today to vote on nominees!
This year, we have 6 open seats on the OSHWA board. Board members will hold a 2-year position. Once board members have been chosen by the community, the board will appoint a President, VP, and Secretary. As every nominee answered “Yes” to having 5-10 hours a month to give to the board, we did not include that question in each nominee’s data. Board responsibilities include fundraising, advising on goals and direction, and carrying out compliance of the organization’s purposes and bylaws. The vote will be open on Nov. 8th-12th. Members will be emailed a link to vote.
Here are the nominees in alphabetical order:
Tom Callaway
Why do you want to be on the board?
To continue to support the open source hardware community, and to bring my expertise in open source community management to the OSH community.
What qualifies you to be a board member?
I have been at Red Hat since 2001, and was responsible for Red Hat’s adoption of open source hardware in its 3d printing labs. I feel that the experiences that I have had working with the Open Source software community over the last 15 years will transfer well to the challenges faced by the Open Source Hardware Community. I’ve worked to ensure that Red Hat remains a visible contributor to the Open Source Hardware community (despite producing no hardware of its own), as well as incorporating Open Source Hardware opportunities in my education outreach efforts (e.g. funding work with CU Boulder’s BTU lab)
Drew Fustini
Why do you want to be on the board?
I want to help grow the Open Source Hardware movement through outreach and advocacy to communities that are as familiar with the open source hardware philosophy and the potential benefits.
What qualifies you to be a board member?
The OSHW philosophy and community is very important and special to me.
I am a founding member of OSHWA and have attended the Open Hardware Summit since the first year. I want to take a more active role and help grow this community and increase it’s usefulness.
Harris Kenny
Why do you want to be on the board?
I have had the privilege of being on the OSHWA Board for a single two-year term. During this time, I served as Treasurer for two years and contributed to or advised the certification of 26 projects (most recently, a desktop computer line and associated IO boards.) I’ve also helped with OH Summit. If re-elected for a second term, my goal would be to build on this work.
I want to hand off my knowledge of being treasurer to a new successor and improve how we grow OSHWA financially. I also want to identify ways to improve the certification process and documentation to support new categories of products and projects becoming open source hardware. I see certification as instrumental to growing the social and technical impact of open source hardware in art, research, education, and industry.
What qualifies you to be a board member?
I have served on the OSHWA Board for the last two years as Treasurer and spoke at OH Summit 2016 in Portland. During the day, I am the Director of Business Development for System76, maker of Linux laptops, desktops, and servers. I coordinated the certification of the company’s new flagship desktop: Thelio. I previously served as President of Aleph Objects (maker of LulzBot 3D printers) and worked there for five years. I also earned an MBA from the University of Denver.
I believe deeply in the importance of freely licensing art and technology and ensuring that doing so is sustainable for creators. In my personal time, I contribute to public data projects like Wikipedia and Open Street Map and run Linux at home. Overall, I bring my business background to OSHWA along with with my passion for the values of the free software and open source hardware communities.
Jason Kridner
Why do you want to be on the board?
Open hardware matters as a means to improve technology accessibility, aide education, and foster general freedoms, including the right-to-repair and the right-to-know. OSHWA has assembled an amazing community and I feel obligated to help achieve our common goals, especially the one saying we desire to “Educate the general public about open source hardware and its socially beneficial uses.” Who doesn’t want to make the world a better place? This is an area where I feel I can help.
What qualifies you to be a board member?
My focus has been on open hardware since 2008 and I’ve built a successful open hardware brand in BeagleBoard.org, which continues to grow in terms of volume and participation. I’m acquainted with the leaders in the community having begun my foray into open hardware in 2008 and having been a speaker at several of the previous Open Hardware Summit events. I’ve demonstrated to leaders in the open hardware movement that my intentions go beyond any one sub-community to the goals of the community at large. My skills in interacting with these other leaders, gathering output from volunteers and driving consensus in diverse settings should be valuable to the board, organization and community.
Akshai M
Why do you want to be on the board?
I shall convince the team to promote Freedom in Open Source Hardware Projects. We need the concept of freedom embedded into the very fabric of Open Source Hardware. I will work with the team to bring a long term ( 3 Year) roadmap to promote Open Source Hardware and its adoption in devoloping nations and shall strive to align my goals with UN Sustainable Development Goals for the greater benefit of the world.
What qualifies you to be a board member?
Currently working with the Government of Kerala, India, to enable Open Source Hardware Manufacturing in the state and bring about an ecosystem for the development of Open Source Projects on LoRaWAN based IoT Projects. Worked extensively on ExpEYES project and MicroHOPE project. Worked with the Kerala State Government to bring 22 Open Source IoT Labs in the state.
Eric Pan
Why do you want to be on the board?
Help expand the influence of OSHWA to more industries and regions.
What qualifies you to be a board member?
As founder of Seeed Studio, working on open hardware since 2008, participated since the first OHS, well experienced most pains and gains of open hardware. Have solid faith over open hardware and proactively exploring possibilities to support it to the next level.
Rolly Seth
Why do you want to be on the board?
I owe most of the credit of what I have learned in life and where I am today to the open web of knowledge and maker community supporters. I feel it is time for me to share my learnings and give back. As a board member, along with contributing to the OSHW (Open Source Hardware) certification and summit, I would like to promote OSHWA’s mission especially in Pacific Northwest region and explore how global organizations, such as Microsoft can contribute and support. Coming from a technology industry where with each passing day, AI (artificial intelligence) and IoT (Internet of Things) seem to play a more important role to impact society, consumers and communities are looking for more creative hardware solutions, which are easy to connect and secured. As a maker/hardware enthusiast myself, I believe the community will play a critical role in achieving the target of 20+ billion connected devices by 2020 and OSHWA can provide a great platform to activate and engage that community.
Hardware and Software must go hand in hand to develop next generation of devices and services. An active discussion and engagement with community can help understand consumer needs, set the right interoperable, secured standards and frameworks; and support the next wave of DIY manufacturing and personal fabrication.
OSHWA has come a long way since its inception in 2012. Several people across the world now understand and appreciates the value of producing open source hardware (OSH) and know the steps to produce OSH with recent OSH 2.0 certification guidelines. With DIY manufacturing becoming more within reach and edge computing becoming the need of the hour, OSHWA can play a critical role in driving the required next level change.
I believe in the vision and values of Open Source Hardware and want to play an active role in contributing to the next generation of hardware revolution.
What qualifies you to be a board member?
I believe my background, my passion and future pursuits qualify me to be a board member of OSHWA.
a). Background-
An electronics and communication engineer by background coupled with a liberal arts fellowship, I have been fascinated with exploring how technology can be integrated with multi-disciplinary fields to create more seamless and unique experiences.
My team has won several local and international accolades for some of the hardware projects we worked on in the past decade such as viSparsh, a haptic belt for visually impaired -http://visparsh.blogspot.com/ , which was accredited among top 12 Asian Innovation of 2012 by The Wall Street Journal. Other past awards, including Accenture Innovation Jockeys and Singularity University’s Global Impact Competition can be found here- http://rollyseth.com/awards
Inspired by Maker Movement, my friend and I activated the maker community at Microsoft India and opened Microsoft India’s first makerspace in 2015. I contributed to several creative hardware prototypes from humanoid to cloud connected t-shirt to an open source hardware and software solution such as https://github.com/Microsoft/kinect-ripple (Dual projection interactive framework).
I started my career as a Scientist Fellow in Council of Scientific and Industrial Research, India and have worked in the government, research and non-profit sectors. My background gives me an understanding and needs of various sectors and have a strong connection with hardware, making and DIY.
b). Current & Future –
I currently lead the Microsoft Garage space, programming and communities in Microsoft HQ – Redmond. Microsoft Garage is Microsoft’s experimentation outlet for employees where we have thousands of makers in the Redmond campus and at major development centers worldwide. My role here involves staying updated with the recent technology and multi-disciplinary trends and explore how we can enable Microsoft makers and hackers to learn by doing and contribute in those areas.
Personally, I am about to finish ‘52 weekends of Making’ challenge https://www.youtube.com/c/RollySeth , which I undertook to expand my thinking of how traditional creative making mediums can integrate with emerging technologies to create more ambient scenarios of the future.
I believe in the power of the collective and my industry & personal experiences provide me with a unique space to contribute to the Open Source Hardware & DIY manufacturing culture.
I look forward to exploring how I can bring my diverse skills to the table as part of OSHWA.
Shah Selbe
Why do you want to be on the board?
I had such a great experience with the people that I met at the Open Hardware Summit and it made me want to be part of the community. I’d like to contribute to bring open hardware into areas that it hasn’t been used before and give back.
What qualifies you to be a board member?
I’ve been a leader in many professional organizations in the past (Engineers Without Borders, Systems Engineering Professional Society, National Geographic Explorers, etc) that I could help with many different tasks. I would love to help fulfill the vision of open hardware and bring the organization to the next level.
Jeffrey Yoo Warren
Why do you want to be on the board?
I’ve involved in many discussions at OSHWA about the open hardware community and open hardware intellectual property and legal matters — most recently in the discussions around an Open Hardware Certification model. I feel that my perspective on open source hardware strikes a balance between the functional argument that open hardware is a better way to create hardware, and the ethical position that we should have the right to examine/copy/modify/distribute designs — that open collaboration is a better model for our society. I believe deeply in community-driven processes, while also believing that for-profit organizations can — and stand to benefit greatly from — being “good open hardware citizens.”
I really believe that if an individual or organization thinks of open sourcing their work as a kind of charity, as opposed to as a way to improve it through rigorous community testing and input, they are missing the point. Working in an open source model is an acknowledgment that we don’t have all the answers, and that, whether we just ‘put it out there’ for people to build on, or actively seek input and collaboration from a broader and more diverse public, we are seeking to incorporate new and better ideas into the work, and are aware of our own limitations as engineers, designers, technologists, and more.
Most of all, I believe strongly that the key to a healthy open source hardware movement is culture. We must continue and improve upon our open, discursive approach to open hardware, and to build strong norms to guide our work, so that we can continue to invent, collaborate, and benefit from one anothers’ work. This spans from good documentation to standards of design file publication, to refining the pace and practices of the actual collaboration in online forums, publication platforms, and even in-person meetings.
Finally, I believe in the power of the perspectives, ideas, and active participation of people who have been excluded (structurally or otherwise) from the growing open hardware community, and feel that we have a responsibility to work towards a more equitable and inclusive community.
What qualifies you to be a board member?
I’ve served on the OSHWA board for 2 years, and have been deeply interested in open hardware both through my work at Public Lab, and as part of the broader free/libre/open source movement. Public Lab, a community of thousands of people engaged in collaboratively developing affordable and accessible environmental testing techniques and equipment, has been using the CERN Open Hardware License for several years, and I participated in the discussions and comment period which led to version 1.2 of that license. I am a producer and consumer of open source hardware and free/libre/open source software, notably as a lead developer of Public Lab’s DIY Spectrometer and associated SpectralWorkbench.org software suite (http://publiclab.org/lego), as well as the Infragram multispectral camera (http://publiclab.org/infragram) and associated Infragram.org image compositing system. Since 2011, using our published designs and kits, over six thousand people have constructed their own spectrometers, and many have contributed back their refinements and additions. The size and scope of this project gives me key insight into how a diverse community of contributors can collaboratively tackle complex hardware design, and into the challenges of scaling such a model.
I’ve also served as the secretary of OSHWA, taking minutes on board meetings, and have missed almost none of the meetings over the years I served — an attendance record I’m proud of. I would be excited to once again represent the interests of community-based open hardware contributors everywhere during an additional two years of service.
Michael Weinberg
Why do you want to be on the board?
While not as important as actual design and creation of OSHW, legal and licensing issues have the potential to have a huge impact on its development and growth. OSS serves as a guide, but not a perfect analogy, for hardware. I want to be on the board of OSHWA to try and help make sure that legal and policy structures are in place to foster OSHW. I also want to make sure that the OSHWA does everything it can to encourage the development of easy to understand best practices that allow non-lawyers to easily navigate some of these thorny issues.
What qualifies you to be a board member?
I’ve been the point person for the OSHWA certification process since 2015 and would like to continue doing so.