Hello Chris, you mention you would help the OSI take advantage of modern fundraising techniques. What sort of techniques and platforms do you have in mind? 

I'd like to see the OSI to do a few things things:
1) invest in modern marketing automation tools, whether it's SFDC, Pardot or whatever, I feel the OSI can automate more of its fundraising which I find fairly manual these days imho
2) Outside of marketing automation, there are platforms like OpenCollective that could be interesting for the OSI for fundraising
3) I'd also like to see the OSI find better ways to raise money from corporate members, whether it's having a tiered membership structure or something else to ensure that companies who depend on the OSI have the ability to give back fiscally + their time to OSI initiatives

Hope that answers some of your questions.

Hi Chris,

You wrote:

 sharing and opening data is becoming more important in a multitude of industries. I would like to see the OSI be at the forefront of this movement as sharing data is a natural extension of sharing source code.

We run into some basic legal issues with protecting data using a license. In general, the law does not support copyright of simple statements of facts, and this has been very important to the Open Source community so far.

For example, Astrolabe, a producer of astrology software, sued Open Source programmers Arthur David Olson and Paul Eggert, who created and maintained the time zone library and database (tzlib and tzdata). This library and database are used on Linux and are incorporated into most of our programming language libraries, and are part of many commercial operating systems. Astrolabe owned the rights to the ACS International Atlas, which Olson and Eggert used as a reference. Astrolabe sued for infringement, and EFF defended Olson and Eggert and won.  Olson and Eggert depended on the time zone information being in the public domain. Similarly, you depend in many ways on basic facts remaining in the public domain.

That said, you can get a copyright on the arrangement of the data, rather than the data itself. And you can license that. But in general you don't own the facts, even if you put a lot of effort and expense into collecting them.

And in general, it is better that this stuff not be protected than it would be if it was and we were able to enforce our licenses effectively, because more people would be enforcing their licenses against us, and all of the ways we use data.