Are you a representative of a Member Organization in good standing contemplating whom to nominate for the available Apereo board of directors seats?
Here are some ideas. Until 1700 Eastern on April 20th 2018, it’s not too late to widen the pool.
(I haven’t checked with most people listed here to see if they’d actually be willing to serve - the point of this post is to provoke thought on who you would like to see serving on this board and why, thoughts on what characteristics would make for excellent board leadership and round out the perspectives available in Apereo.)
(As often I speak here only wearing my individual contributor hat.)
Vicky Brasseur
With experience serving on the Open Source Initiative board, as an author and moderator on opensource.com, and as a professional software engineer, Vicky would be a valuable voice on the Apereo Board.
Vicky has literally written the book on contributing to open source software.
If Apereo can’t draw in Vicky’s attentions gratis through board service, I advocate Apereo hiring Vicky’s significant expertise through her consulting services.
Audrey Watters
Audrey is a very important voice of EdTech skepticism. It would be helpful to have her at the table.
Karen Sandler
Karen is executive director of the Software Freedom Conservancy.
Karen would bring
- legal experience, including with the Conservancy’s perspective on the necessity of ICLAs
- experience directing a non-profit foundation with an annual budget on the same order of magnitude as Apereo
- experience in diversity and inclusion especially through her Outreachy work
Apereo might learn much from Conservancy perspective.
Tim Vertein
My colleague Tim is a thoughtful, productive, effective professional with a proven commitment to the university and to serving university participants well. He’d make a great Apereo Board director for many of the same reasons he’d make a great Apereo fellow.
Misagh Moayyed
Misagh is the Apereo CAS project PMC chair.
I think Apereo at the Board level has unrealized opportunity to better consider the perspective and experiences of the people working in Apereo projects. The disconnect between (relatively closed) Board governance and “100% open” projects might be alleviated through bringing those perspectives closer to the governance.
Misagh has distinguished himself through thoughtful stewardship of the Apereo CAS project, one of the more successful Apereo projects in breadth of adoption, quantity of contributors, and in engineering attention to enabling divergent local configuration of a shared open source software product.
Shane Curcuru
Apereo sometimes tries to take Apache’s lead and presumably could do so even better informed by a board director who has experience and achievement in the Apache Software Foundation context, evident from Apache committership, Apache PMC membership, Apache Board Director experience, and Apache Foundation Membership.
(Membership in the Apache Software Foundation is a big deal. You can’t buy it.)
Membership in The Apache Software Foundation is a privilege and is by invitation only.
Shane specifically has experience with Apache incubation and community development, both especially relevant to Apereo’s challenges.
If Apereo can’t draw in Shane’s attentions gratis through Board service, I advocate Apereo hiring Shane’s significant expertise under the auspices of his open source community engagement consultancy, Punderthings Consulting.
Pat Masson
Pat is General Manager of the Open Source Initiative.
Pat has experience with higher education and particularly with Apereo.
The OSI’s experience is also relevant in that it has a successful individual membership program. As Apereo bootstraps its own individual membership program OSI’s experience might help catapault this to sustainability.
Ben Balter
Ben is a lawyer with an important perspective on tradeoffs in contributor license agreement rigor. Also, Ben’s experience in federal government service might be a helpful public service perspective on the board.
Tim Carroll
Tim is a current Apereo board member whose term is ending and who is available for re-nomination.
It might be a fine thing to re-nominate Tim. He seems a voice of pragmatism on the board.
On the public record, Tim
- shared an article on the open@ list
- engaged regarding the failed 2016 attempt to unburden Apereo ICLA policy. (I wish that had succeeded, but engagement was still better than not engaging with the issue).
- engaged
regarding a proposal to create an open parallel to the closed
projects@email list (advocating using existingopen@for this purpose) - voiced a way to un-stick a potential incubation
Of the 8 Apereo board meetings in the past year for which minutes are available, 6 show Tim as attending (75%).
Charles Severance
Dr. Chuck is the Apereo Sakai project PMC chair. He also has experience serving as an Executive Director of an open source foundation and as a board member. This combination of executive, governance, and working-in-the-open-source-project perspectives could be highly valuable on the board.
Bryan Ollendyke
Bryan is tremendously passionate about Apereo-incubating ELMS:LN, about openness and about improving higher education and about the quality of community interactions. Bryan’s work is well-regarded.
The energy, passion, sense of urgency, and bias for action he brings might in itself make his board term very worthwhile.
A registrar
Apereo ought to be adding tremendous value to the work of university registrars. What are the not-yet-realized opportunities in this space and would bringing a registrar’s perspective closer to the governance help?
Another CIO
Apereo ought to be adding tremendous value and leverage to the work of university CIOs, broadening the viable tactical and strategic options and having the side effect of pressuring proprietary and SaaS vendors to better serve education (out of a healthy concern about the alternatives available to universities). What are the not-yet-realized opportunities in this space and would bringing another CIO’s perspective closer to the governance help to realize those opportunties?
Apereo Fellows
I’d expect any of the Apereo Fellows would bring an informed perspective to the board.
Others
What experiences and perspectives would you like to see more of on the Apereo board? Who might bring those to bear? Is there an opportunity for that to happen?
/Andrew Petro
as individual contributor