Position statement for Tim Potter

Hello. I'm Tim Potter (tpot) and I've been part of the open source and free software community for nearly 20 years. I would like to run for a position on the SPI Board of Directors. I've written a lot of code during my career and have a good understanding of technical and political issues around the FOSS community and industry. I would like to apply that knowledge to help the various projects that are members of the SPI.

My position is that as a long-time free software contributor I feel that I can provide value to the community and the SPI in particular in ways other than coding. My days of caffeine-fueled all-night hackathons are pretty much over but there is still a lot of vital non-technical administrative work that need to be done for the management of FOSS projects. This is the job of the SPI for its member projects.

As one of only a few umbrella organisations available to free software projects, the financial and legal services provided by SPI significantly reduce overhead incurred by member projects. This allows them to focus on writing code and developing the project and not on things which are essentially distractions to them.

I believe that there are still tasks related to running a free software project that can be outsourced to the SPI by member projects. If elected as a member of the SPI board, I would endeavour to continue the excellent work of the SPI under previous directors over the years, as well as investigating what other services can be offered to member projects to ease non-development and other administrative burdens.