I agree that org is currently well managed by its board and staff and I don’t think the OSI needs any kind of revolution. Part of my interest in joining the OSI board is to work with the other board members and with the staff.
Instead of “doing better than the incumbents”, I want to “contribute to” the effort.
I see my contribution as bringing my perspectives as a European who has spent the last 18 years engaging with the European community in Europe and who is looking for ways of growing the understanding of open source to new people and organizations (globally) that are just getting through their digital transformation and don’t have the background to understand the ins and outs of open source.

Your time: You have 24 hours in the day and could do many different things. Why do you want to give some of those hours to OSI? What do you expect your focus to be during those hours?

GB: Good point! I am very lucky that my personal interests are fully aligned with my responsibilities at work in my position at the Eclipse Foundation. My candidacy comes not only from my strong wish to join the OSI board, but also from the commitment of the Eclipse Foundation to support OSI.

My focus will be the three topics described above and more specifically:
1- Educating, advocating and protecting the importance of the OSD and of the OSI as the trusted organization behind the OSD.
2- Grow the OSI in a role that coordinates organizations in the different geographies to make sure new regulations don’t put open source collaboration at risk.

Licensing process: The organization has proposed improvements to the license-review process. What do you think of them?

GB: The effort of clarifying the license approval process is great to help. And the decision to accept licenses that only fill a gap that currently existing licenses do not fill is very important as I think that we all suffer from the existence of too many licenses. Categorizing licenses between rejected, approved, and preferred will hopefully help limit the dispersion of license and limit compatibility issues.

Broader knowledge: What should OSI do about the tens of millions of people who regularly collaborate to build software online (often calling that activity, colloquially, open source) but don’t know what OSI is or what it does?

GB: As mentioned earlier, I’ll focus on this topic: in my opinion, we pay a high price for having so many people using the term open source without knowing about the OSI. Of course, everybody can use open source and should be able to contribute to open source without understanding the ins and outs of it. But there have been several stories where organizations call open source something that does not comply with the OSD, to the detriment of the users.

Some time ago, I started to float the idea that we should make sure that every graduate in software has contributed to an open source project. The idea comes from the fact that in France, master students have to get a minimum score at TOEIC to prove understanding of English before they graduate (sounds like a joke, I know ;)). Without pushing so far, I hope we could design a program that scales enough so that students can prove that they have a basic understanding of what is open source, and they have made a contribution to an open source project.

Regulation: New industry regulation in both the EU and US suggests government will be more involved in open source in the future. What role do you think OSI should play in these discussions? How would you, as a board member, impact that?

GB: This is one of the pillars of my candidacy. A few years ago, open source was rarely impacted by regulations. But since software ate the world, and since open source has won too, every regulation can have an impact on open source. I think that role of the OSI should be to coordinate, with the local organizations like OpenForum Europe, to ensure our ecosystem understands what’s going on in terms of regulation, and is able to contribute when relevant or respond when necessary.

Solo maintainers: The median number of developers on open source projects is one, and regulation and industry standards are increasing their burden. How (if at all) should OSI address that? Is there tension between that and industry needs?

GB: There is so much to do, and I am afraid that addressing this burden at the OSI should be coming later. I think that some collaboration platforms like GitHub and Gitlab will help developers support a part of the burden, and established foundations are also upping their game in several domains to help their respective communities. At some point, the OSI may want to share a role

OSI initiative on AI: What did you think of the recent OSI initiative on AI? If you liked it, what topics would you suggest for similar treatment in the future? If you didn’t like it, what would you improve, or do instead?

GB: The positioning of open source and AI is very important, and the content created by the OSI on the topic, like the podcasts and the report was great. Beyond AI, software and data are more and more intertwined. In Europe, we talk a lot about data spaces and this covers software topics, data topics, and AI topics. In the future, it may be interesting to address other related topics like open source and open hardware, especially when some parts of the open hardware ecosystem seem so close to open source software by using specific languages like VSDL.

Responsible licensing: There are now multiple initiatives around “responsible” or “ethical” licensing, particularly (but not limited to) around machine learning. What should OSI’s relationship to these movements and organizations be?

GB: From my perspective, clause 5 and 6, respectively “No Discrimination Against Persons or Groups” and “No Discrimination Against Fields of Endeavor” are two important pillars of the OSD. Other groups may be more comfortable with other kinds of licenses, and as long as they don’t try to confuse users and adopters, that’s fine.

That said, I think that OSI should try to engage with those new initiatives, as we may want to join forces on some topics. Ideally, we could collectively try to document our convergences and our disagreements so that the larger ecosystem can better understand it.

Your time: You have 24 hours in the day and could do many different things. Why do you want to give some of those hours to OSI? What do you expect your focus to be during those hours?

Licensing process: The organization has proposed improvements to the license-review process. What do you think of them?

Broader knowledge: What should OSI do about the tens of millions of people who regularly collaborate to build software online (often calling that activity, colloquially, open source) but don’t know what OSI is or what it does?

Regulation: New industry regulation in both the EU and US suggests government will be more involved in open source in the future. What role do you think OSI should play in these discussions? How would you, as a board member, impact that?

Solo maintainers: The median number of developers on open source projects is one, and regulation and industry standards are increasing their burden. How (if at all) should OSI address that? Is there tension between that and industry needs?

OSI initiative on AI: What did you think of the recent OSI initiative on AI? If you liked it, what topics would you suggest for similar treatment in the future? If you didn’t like it, what would you improve, or do instead?

Responsible licensing: There are now multiple initiatives around “responsible” or “ethical” licensing, particularly (but not limited to) around machine learning. What should OSI’s relationship to these movements and organizations be?