Introduction

Hello everyone, my name is Sriram Ramkrishna, you can call me "sri"! I'm writing to declare my candidacy for the OSI Board 2021. I'm an old hat FOSS person with many diverse interests. Have a cup of tea or some other beverage of your choice and read on. :-)

Why am I Running?

I've been a member of the OSI and have a monthly contribution going for about two years because I believe in the organization and its place in our community. I want to support its mission and be a more formal voice than I have in the past. I am a longtime contribute to GNOME and have worked professionally on open source for most of my career. There are some existing OSI  initiatives like FLOSS Desktops for Kid - I helped negotiate a $1000 funding from the GNOME Foundation towards this effort as an example of supporting the mission.

Passing on the values of our community to the next generation of FOSS enthusiasts is something of high value for me.

There is something else that leads me to running for the board that I feel is important to me. For over a year now I've been working for a company that is in the Circular Economy/Datacenter space and came to an epiphany - that there is an opportunity in exploring within Open Source credo in the intersection between urban planning, open hardware and green economy and not only help the open source community but our community and our cities.

What I bring to the OSI

I think one of the most important things I bring to the table is the ability to connect people and organizations. I am actively engaged wtih many different communities that range from corporate open source and open hardware to die hard free software outfits. I really enjoy engaging with people. That translates to knowing what other people are doing and connecting them together. I enjoy a relative amount of trust between these communities of which I am quite aware of.

Solving thorny issues is a passion of mine and that in turn leads to initiatives to solve them! Three examples are the Extensions Rebooted initiative that looks to build a community to solve a vexing technical problem on the desktop. People love to jest about the "Year of the Desktop" - but that's something I actually take seriously and in that effort have built a coalition between the two major desktop projects focused on an application ecosystem for Linux and a collaboration with the CHAOSS project towards building a more data driven organization.

If I care about a project or initiative I am motivated to make it successful.

My background

It's an absolute privilege to be able to take all that background above and turn it into a job description. I work for my employer as a Principal Ecosystems Engineer - and while I've so far I've mentioned only my community work - for my day job I work with the Open Compute Project, the CNCF, and others to engage and collaborate and help make successful the upstream projects that my employer as a hardware company depends on. Employing the same skill sets - I honestly don't know where one ends and the other begins.

I'm asking for your vote and have the time and the willingness to be active in the role of Director of the OSI.

I would like to also give a shout out to my fellow candidates - who are themselves top notch - and happy to endorse any of them.