About Me

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Chris Aniszczyk (@cra) is an engineer by trade with a passion for open source and building communities. He currently is serving as Executive Director of the Open Container Initiative (OCI) and CTO of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) which is one of the fast growing open source foundations of all time. He is also a co-founder of the TODO Group which aims to spread best practices around open source program management across the industry, see the TODO guides for more information: https://todogroup.org/guides/

At Twitter, he created their open source program (@TwitterOSS) and led their open source efforts for many years. He has served for nearly a decade on the Eclipse Foundation's Board of Directors representing the committer community and also served on the Java Community Process (JCP) organization. In a previous life, he bootstrapped a consulting company, made many mistakes, lead and hacked on many eclipse.org and Gentoo/Fedora Linux related projects. In his spare time, you'll find him doing yoga, writing, running or cycling.

Agenda

I recently gave a presentation at FOSDEM 2020 that outlined some of my thoughts on the future of OSI, encourage you to read it to learn about my thoughts. I would love to have an opportunity to represent the interests of affiliates. A big part of my campaign is to help the transition the OSI away from volunteerism to more professional staff to help protect open source and also alleviate the work the volunteer board performs. As part of this transition, I would like to fund a OSI Program Manager to help support the OSI Affiliate Organizations, by first surveying their needs and then expand programs to help affiliates.

TLDR: If I were to be elected, my main mission would be to try to grow the OSI membership, transition it away from a volunteerism focused organization to hire more professional full time staff, build bridges with other open source foundations to increase affiliate membership, and finally focus on evolving affiliate and corporate membership programs.

The whole world now depends on open source now, a marked shift since the last decade:

It's time the OSI grows to evolve with some of these changes. In terms of my platform, my focus areas will be:

• Find a full time OSI Program Manager to help support the OSI Affiliate Organizations, by first surveying their needs and then expand programs to help affiliates.
• Find a full time OSI Executive Director to help lead the organization away from volunteerism that can support the growing open source movement.
• Help the OSI invest in attracting more corporate members and creating programs for corporate members to give them a voice in OSI.
• Help the OSI formulate a program to give a voice to governments who are increasingly defining open source policies.
• Invest in showing up at more open source conferences and events (e.g., a booth) to spread awareness of the organization. I would also like to see the OSI help build out an event focused on the affiliate organizations, bring the affiliates together to see if there are some unique ways to collaborate across organizations and even industries.
• Invest in modern fundraising techniques. I would like to see OSI perform modern fundraising through social networks and other websites to meet interested potential members where they already are. It's critical that the OSI increases its funding to hire more professional staff to help protect and sustain open source.

Contact

Thank you for considering me on the board, you can reach out to me on Twitter via @cra if you have any questions.