In the past 24 years, both during law school as ever after leaving university, I practiced different fields of law. I gained experience as an educator, a registrar, a lawyer as well as in-house legal advisor. I currently hold the position of legal expert in Robert Bosch GmbH’s Open Source Expert Team. My current role allows me to bring together all knowledge, experience and soft skills I was so lucky to gain over time.
The Open Team Expert Team heads Robert Bosch’s Center of Competence for Open Source Software. Our Expert Team is responsible for drafting company internal guidelines for use, contribution and governance with regard to open source software.
We support our internal clients in dealing in open source. A technical and a legal member of the Expert Team paired up, as such providing a one stop shop ensuring competent legal and technical support without losing velocity.
We provide our colleagues tailor-made courses, depending on their level of knowledge and the field of expertise in which they are active. I am in the fortunate position, to be the sole provider of the legal part of our courses. The best compliment a developer can give a lawyer: “The legal stuff was brought lively, I never imagined that being possible with a topic as dry as legal content.”
I myself strive to actively contribute to the open source community in that I provide presentations, post shorter blogs and attend community activities. I dare to say that by doing that, I not only represent the Bosch Group and her interests, I passionately advocate the open source ideology, both inside our company as well as externally.
The joy of sharing knowledge, the joy of getting forward together, the joy of learning with and from others, that is what characterizes me.
How will you contribute to the board
I bring in my personality as one of my bigger strengths. It is characterized in that I am driven, eager, yet focused at the result. It is my great honor and pleasure to advocate for the open source ideology, easily changing presentation style or content to actually reach my audience.
As a European citizen, I can support contributing OSI’s European perspectives; support OSI’s activities in European regulatory initiatives, by being able to focus on (new) EU Regulation from within the region. Secondly, for board members to live in different time zones, enables OSI’s board to present its internally aligned statements in a bigger part of the world, without facing time zone constraints.
My professional career taught me to never judge, to see the good things in others, to look at the bright side of life. My personality brings me all the strength to carry on, to sometimes accept “no” for an answer yet to never give up searching for alternatives.
Traits that I tend to believe, are a positive contribution to a team, any team including to OSI’s board.
Why you should be elected
Advocating turned out to be in my blood. I convince others without being offensive, support others without being pedantic, believe in a team’s chances, without ever claiming sole ownership over a team effort.
As part of the OSI’s License Compliance Working Group, I am already experiencing the full benefit of working together in a multidisciplinary OSI team, a dedicated team that solely consists of people who have the passionate desire to bring things forward, to push open source (governance) to the next level. Participating in this working group, made and makes me hungry for more. I am ready for more; I am ready to digest.