Hello Olawale, you have a very interesting background! You state that one of your goals as a board member would be to "Push Open Source adoption, Implementation and use in Academia". What sort of work would you do to accomplish this? 

Hello Frank, thank you very much for reaching out and for the words. As regards "Pushing Open Source adoption, Implementation and use in Academia", I will speak based on my first hand experience working full time in 3 universities and several others in adhoc capacity in South East Asia and West Africa over the last 11 years. I have realized that there is little adoption and use of open source applications in a lot of Academic environment. Educators and decision makers alike are either not aware of open source technologies as an alternative to proprietary technologies both in hardware and software or are aware but do not know the HOWS since they are not exposed fully to how to implement open source technologies. This also is due to the fact that we have less people who are already pushing or interested in pushing the open source narrative, particularly the Open Source Definition. From experience, most places in academia are exposed to off the shelf proprietary products, on one occasion, one of the institutions I worked with was already using proprietary email which as we already know had vendor lock-in,it was too expensive for them and they had to abandon and then lost several GBs in email, that was in Malaysia, another in Nigeria had a custom school portal built using proprietary technologies and because of licensing cost for the OS servers and the IDE licensing cost, they had to off load the costs to the students, this sparked a bit of uproar since it was too expensive for some students . These and many more are issues with going the proprietary way, hence the need to move to open source implementations.
Advocacy is the way to push this narrative and this will be achieved with a lot of work and since I am already in Academia, I will make it a point of duty to reach out to other players in the industry via its consortium. I currently work on an initiative called HackWeakEnd(www.hacktheweakend.com), which is a social-impact initiative to solve issues affecting our society. Next year's focus is on Academia and we will be having a conference where we will use it as a tool to drive the open source narrative, in attendance will be policy makers and academicians from all around Africa. Focus of the advocacy will be based on

1. Cost Reduction: Cost is everything in academia and it is also a driving force for expensive tuition fees and student loans increasing. By pushing the Open Source narrative for implementation of open source software, it will lead to cost reduction in Academia in several ways, licensing costs will be off on both operating system software and applications to be used and not tied to long-term contracts.  
   2. Reduction/Elimination of Total Cost of Ownership: The essence of moving to open source technologies is that they will effectively eliminate the vendor lock-in associated with proprietary software. They will be saved from long-term contracts, limited feature sets, unpredictable release schedules, multiple licensing costs for server software and application software. This can save thousands and millions in cash every year.
   3. Enhanced Innovation: Innovation drives change, so adopting open source technologies will allow players in Academia to rapidly scale, evolve, and extend their existing technology stacks and systems, as opposed to starting from scratch with each new wave of innovation or even waiting for commercial systems to come up with updates and new features. 

Thus, my stand on the need to push open source adoption in Academia  is clear, from a cost perspective because cost is everything in Academia and that also drives the cost of education up, if we want to lower costs and I believe this can also lead to total cost of tuition for students.
So pushing the Open Source narrative and Open Source definition in implementation of Open Source Technologies will get decision makers in Academia to be more informed to make meaningful decisions with the intent to lower costs and ensure strategic control of these software system and in all their business processes. The major aim will be to ensure efficiency, transparency and reliability of activities at affordable costs, this will drive operating costs down while also help reduce student loans and fees altogether.