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Foundation for Open Source Ecosystem Technology

About Us

Silona Bonewald

Silona Bonewald

Silona Bonewald is one of the founding directors of the Foundation for Open Source Ecosystem Technology, where she’s responsible for facilitating the creation of the community metapatterns and processes that a growing global organization requires. Silona has been involved in open source communities for over 20 years and has helped multiple companies transition from proprietary to open source. She works extensively in the non-profit space, launching both the Foundation for Public Code and InnerSource Commons and supporting both as treasurer. She is also active in several other open source efforts, including the Good Governance Initiative at OW2, the Global Blockchain Business Council, OCEAN, Open Forum Europe, and a nascent Open Source governance project at the Eclipse Foundation. She also acts as an advisor for Open @RIT. In her working life, she has led InnerSource efforts at PayPal, created community meta patterns and global organization processes that maintain engagement in Hyperledger’s projects and Created and launched a new cloud-based Open Source platform to support Open Source standards at IEEE Standards Assoc.

Stephen Jacobs

Stephen Jacobs

Stephen Jacobs is Director of Open@RIT, the university’s Principal Research Center on Open Work and Open Programs Office. Shortly after the Open Programs Office opened, Jacobs was invited to become a member of the CHAOSS community to participate in Open discussions on metrics for Academic Open Work. He and his team used the alpha version the IEEE SA Open Platform as a trial, have built an alpha version of an academic metrics platform on top of CHAOSS software, and contributed to both projects. Open@RIT was the first university Open Programs Office to join the ToDo Group, and Jacobs was the first academic to sit on the steering committee, having been invited to bring the discussion of the needs of academic OSPOs to the group. Since January 2021, Jacobs and his team have presented about Academic OSPOs in general and the work of Open@RIT specifically, at conferences or on podcasts roughly once per month in the past year.

Kaylea Champion

Kaylea Champion

Kaylea Champion is a PhD candidate in Communication at University of Washington. Her research concerns how people work together to build transformative information public goods, like open source software, shared standards, and knowledge — including what doesn’t get built or maintained, whose needs are neglected, and who is excluded from participation. The broader impact of this research is the quantification of systemic cybersecurity risk and the development of evidence-based strategies to support thriving communities. Prior to graduate school, Kaylea worked as an IT director, project manager, and systems administrator at the University of Chicago. She has an MS in Computer Science from the University of Chicago and an MA in Critical and Creative Thinking from University of Massachusetts Boston.

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