Become an OSHWA member today to vote on nominees!
This year, we have 5 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 Oct. 19th-23rd. Members will be emailed a link to vote. Here are the nominees in no particular order:
Michael Weinberg
Why do you want to be on the board? I would like to be on the board to continue building out OSHWA as an organization. I am excited about how far we have come with the open source hardware certification program and believe that it can become an effective way to identify open source hardware in a wide range of fields. I also think that OSHWA as an organization can continue to act as a place for the open source hardware community to speak with itself, and as an entry point into the community for new members.
What qualifies you to be a board member? I have been on the OSHWA board for a number of years already, and served as the board chair for a number of those. I helped launch the OSHWA open source hardware certification program and continue to help oversee it. I am enthusiastic about the role that open source hardware can play in the world, and love being part of an organization that can bring such a wide ranging community together.
Oluwatobi Oyinlola
Why do you want to be on the board? Open Source Hardware Association will give me a bigger platform to contribute to the community at large with the influence of evangelizing more people through speaking, engagement, and collaborations. I want the entire hardware community to also enjoy my experience as an advisory board member of the Intel innovator program.
I also think the African region is not heavily represented in the association, with the great influence of becoming a board member I will impact the sensitization in my region to bring more people both corporate and individual members to join, give them a platform to certify their hardware designs. I am talking about thousands of hardware developers in the community.
What qualifies you to be a board member? Over the past 10 years, I have been educationally, professionally, and generally proven for my skills.
I was part of the open-source hyperloop team (rLoop), I contributed as an embedded system engineer, I was selected as intel software innovator and later became an Intel Board member for the innovator program, I have organized over 50 meetups in Nigeria. Just recently I was part of the dream team awardee at the Hackaday 2020 competition. In 2018 and 2019, I was nominated as one of the most influential young Nigeria for the technology aspect of the award.
I hope to provide more support to the community using the OSHWA platform and reach more people in the hardware community.
Michael Brodeur
Why do you want to be on the board? As a returning student who will be actively participating in research pertaining to the development of technologies relating to clean energy, information processing, and the like, it is important to find opportunities to build bridges between academia and Open Source initiatives. OSHWA is a pivotal organization in helping to direct hobbyists and other interested parties toward the Open Source ethos as well as setting up a collaborative, community-driven framework for future development.
What qualifies you to be a board member? I am an information technology professional with ten years experience under my belt. I have recently returned to school in order to pursue a second undergraduate degree with the intention of proceeding into a research-oriented career. The Open Source ecosystem must find ways to firmly establish itself within academia so that educators, students, and researchers can be uplifted by more accessible tools. I intend to utilize a position within OSHWA for the benefit of higher education in order to mitigate costs for both schools and students while also providing avenues for an improvement in the quality of education overall.
Ayan Pahwa
Why do you want to be on the board?
– Help introduce new programs to enable developers around the world adopt, promote and leverage open hardware ideologies and contribute back to the community.
– Help create programs / events / content to spread OSHWA awareness and ease of certifying your hardware project in OSHWA.
– Bring in challenges to the board in their mission from a perspective of third world country like India and help spread the overall FOSS ideology in such countries where not much exposure is available around this subject.
What qualifies you to be a board member? I am an active member of FOSS communities in India and have managed multiple events and programs as organiser, volunteer and member in big FOSS communities like India Linux User Group- Delhi. I’m also founder of Hardware Hackers Club- Delhi and KnifEDGE RC aeromodelling club which gives me first hand experience with open source communities, what motivates people contribute and what they look for when open sourcing their work which will enable me to put views forward when the board will launch a new program or modify an existing one .
I’ve also created many and certified some of my own open hardware projects and motivated others in my local community to do the same by giving talks and workshops.
Since covid I helped organise atleast one virtual meetup locally without any miss which gave me a good exposure of virtual new normal technical meetups m programs .
Apart from this I am an Automotive Embedded software engineer at Siemens PLM and use FOSS tools almost daily in my work.
I also create content around DiY, Open source on my blog https://codeNsolder.com and Youtube channel – https://youtube.com/iayanpahwa , magazines like Open Source for You, Electronics for you, and blogs on Hackaday and Instructables which has put me in position to influence the next generation of community members for good and promote open culture .
Javier Serrano
Why do you want to be on the board? I have been a member of OSHWA for many years, and I have been vocal in a number of areas, such as the use of Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) for hardware design and the need to convince public institutions of the special role they can play in OSHW. I believe I am now ready to take the next logical step, namely to offer some of my time to help with these and other endeavours. I hope I can use my experience and my energy to make OSHWA stronger and more relevant. As OSHW becomes mainstream in more and more domains, the coming years will be full of challenges and opportunities. OSHWA is ideally positioned to provide a framework, channeling all this momentum and guaranteeing that the sharing of hardware designs is done right.
What qualifies you to be a board member? I lead a team of developers in the European Laboratory for Particle Physics (CERN). We do PCBs, gateware (FPGA/HDL), firmware and software (mostly Linux device drivers and libraries) for controls and data acquisition in particle accelerators. Since 2006, I gave myself the goal to provide a working experience for HW developers in the section similar to that of their SW colleagues, in terms of their ability to share with and learn from others, work with companies without the risk of vendor lock-in and easily bring in help from outside the laboratory. This took me on a long journey which included co-authoring the CERN Open Hardware Licence [1], creating the Open Hardware Repository [2], discussing business models with companies and managing CERN’s contribution to KiCad development [3]. I have also written about various subjects, including the reasons I believe public institutions are an ideal vehicle to boost OHSW [4]. My advocacy work has taken me to present in many venues, including the last (online) OH Summit [5]. My interests in FPGA/HDL and science have also brought me in close contact with related communities such as the FOSSi Foundation [6] and GOSH [7], and I would like to establish bridges between them and OSHWA to collaborate on subjects of common interest. At work, I am the initiator and leader of the White Rabbit project [8], which has been portrayed as an example of synergistic relationship between open source and standardisation bodies [9]. I am also very interested in seeing ways in which public administration can help create a better society through the use of open source, and I am currently helping in a study on the impact of open source for the European Commission [10].
[1] https://cern-ohl.web.cern.ch/
[2] https://ohwr.org/welcome
[3] https://ohwr.org/project/cern-kicad/wikis/home
[4] https://ohwr.org/project/ohr-meta/wikis/Documents/oshw-in-public-institutions
[5] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZIbV0MySce0
[6] https://fossi-foundation.org/
[7] http://openhardware.science/
[8] https://ohwr.org/project/white-rabbit/wikis/home
[9] https://home.cern/news/news/knowledge-sharing/white-rabbit-cern-born-technology-sets-new-global-standard
[10] http://www.openforumeurope.org/open-source-impact-study/
Drew Fustini
Why do you want to be on the board? I want to continue be a visible advocate for open source hardware. It is important to reach out to communities that may be not be aware of the open source hardware philosophy and the potential benefits. I have given many presentations on the principles of open source hardware and OSHWA’s efforts at events across Europe and the US over the past 2 years, and I believe we can grow the movement by continuing to expose more people to these concepts.
In particular, I would like to grow the visibility of OSHWA in the chip design community where open source is starting to gain acceptance. My vision is to have a computer system where it is certified open source hardware all the way down to the transistor level. I believe this is possible in the next 2 years if OSHWA provides guidance to people designing open source microprocessor chips (such as with the Google+Skywater silicon fab program).
What qualifies you to be a board member? I believe I have proven to be a strong advocate for open source hardware to DIY makers, hardware hackers and professional engineers. I have led electronic badge projects for the past two Open Hardware Summits to be demonstrate open collaboration on hardware design and to encourage people to hack on electronics. As a RISC-V ambassador and FOSSi member, I have gotten heavily involved over the past year in the open source chip-level design community and I have been increasing the visibility of OSHWA and our certification process.
Shah Selbe
Why do you want to be on the board? The work that OSHWA does in moving forward the field of open source hardware is super important to so many projects out there, including the work that we do at Conservify and FieldKit. The milestones around certification and the virtual Open Hardware Summit this year are impressive feats, and I hope to continue to work on the board to help move that work forward along with new things that OSHWA would like to do in the future. I would like to bring in the connections I have made in the foundation and nonprofit funding spaces to help to increase the capacity of what OSHWA can do. There is a eagerly growing interest in open hardware within the scientific and conservation fields that I work in, and I have always been a very outspoken proponent of choosing open solutions over proprietary. I want to do all that I can to help keep that momentum in those spaces (and other fields), and I believe that a board member position at OSHWA is a great place to do that from. I really appreciated my time with OSHWA so far and would like that to continue.
What qualifies you to be a board member? I’ve served on the board for the last two years and have a good understanding of how it works. I also believe that many of the connections I have made in my work can benefit OSHWA, both in the fundraising space and the outreach side of things. Everything we work on at Conservify and FieldKit (which one the 2019 Hackaday Prize) is open source and always have been. We are starting the process to certify FieldKit with OSHWA shortly. For FieldKit, we are actively building a community of users and developers that will be contributing to an international open source project, and would like that to be closely aligned with the work happening at OSHWA. I am also working on a number of global initiatives that are adjacent to OSHWA, including one around open environmental sensing, one around open distributed manufacturing, and one around open source conservation technology.
Giulio Moro
Why do you want to be on the board? I think that the exponential diffusion of open source in the past decade is one of the best things that happened to the technology world. Making knowledge openly accessible to individuals and businesses means less time spent duplicating other people’s efforts to re-invent the wheel and more time spent on applications, which is what drives innovation forward. Individuals can learn from open source designs, and it lowers the barrier of entry to the market for new businesses, democratizing the process. The OSHWA has a prominent role in promoting the open source philosophy and supporting the community. I want to be part of the board to contribute to the effort, trying to bring more and more businesses on board with the open source philosophy, by showing them how they can benefit from sharing and using open source designs. I also want to develop a strategy to influence governments and funding bodies to ensure that designs developed thanks to publicly funded research are released as open source.
What qualifies you to be a board member? I am an audio engineer by training and I have a PhD in electronic engineering. During my PhD I contributed to the creation of Bela, an open source platform for embedded audio processing. I am the main maintainer of Bela at Augmented Instruments Ltd (AIL), and also the main source of contact for supporting our users through our forum, where I always strive to improve the users’ knowledge, instead of simply solving their problems. All the products we release at AIL are open source software and hardware, and we believe in building on and contributing to the open source community.
I would use my experience in grant writing to gather funding for OSHWA, which could play a key role as a main applicant or project partner in projects aimed at education and knowledge share.
