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Member Profile: Joseph Potvin

Why is open source software important to you?

My very first experience structuring and sharing an application the free/libre/open way was in 1999. I was working as a project
manager at the International Development Research Centre (IDRC), where we planned and developed from scratch a richly-featured
distributed decision workflow management application. Within months of posting the full version 1.0 online under the GPL we received an
offer from The World Bank to send IDRC some funds to advance it with new functionality, enough that we called it version 2.0. Well,
I’ve pursued my career in this way ever since, in both commercial and public sector roles. For a decade and a half as an economist and
project manager, all of my professional work has been free/libre/open in motivation, substance and form. Shaped by that first experience,
it’s never been a mystery to me how to make a living the free/libre/open way. So I try to help others understand this too.

Amongst the many insights I’ve gained from free/libre/open source software communities, perhaps the more critical is how to design for
project resilience. That’s to say: how to ensure that projects can outlast organizations, withstand austerity budgets, and bring
coopetition into a highly competitive playing field. I’m busy applying this way of working within other domains besides software. But
these always include one or two subprojects to extend or refine various free/libre/open source software applications.

Why did you join the OSI as an Individual Member?

Well, like many people, I wear different hats, being involved with diverse organizations. Joining as an individual member enabled me
to interact with the OSI community wearing any of my various hats.

In addition to being an OSI Individual Member, are you involved in any other open source projects or communities?

My current doctoral disseration at U Québec involves extending the multi-region variant (regiO) of an economic model (Lagom) on the
MASON platform (Multi-Agent Simulation Of Networks).
All four layers are fully free/libre/open. I’m planning to contribute new capabilities to accommodate multiple currencies, to
represent projects as supply-chain segments, and to include an additional type of agent in the model, the “project manager”, who
can control costs by, in part, exercising choice over all attributes of payment. Such granularity of control over payments could become
possible through the W3C’s current efforts through the Web Payments
Interest Group. That W3C-convened community is negotiating towards a
specification to standardize how browsers handle web payments. In my modeling extensions, the project manager agent will be provided
with the ability to chose from amongst various benchmarks to calibrate algorithmic pricing in trade. Operationalizing this involves a
number of somewhat separate free/libre/open sub-projects, in which I’m collaborating with some economists from different schools of
thought in order to create simplified versions of each of their preferred value benchmarks, in addition to my own Earth Reserve
benchmark. Each of these indices will rely only on real-world open data sources, which should facilitate independent validation,
wider use and further experimentation. I also collaborate in the (newly formed) OpenChain industry alliance for source code license
compliance management at the supply-chain scale.

How do you hope the OSI can further promote open source use?

Let me preface my answer here by outlining my particular way of perceiving the OSI’s role. In my view the OSI and FSF have mutually
complementary roles which, being an economist, I distinguish as supply-side and demand-side perspectives on the flow of knowledge. By my
interpretation, the Open Source Definition seems to emphasize how suppliers may organize so that their interests are served when the
flow of knowledge can out-perform the restriction of knowledge. On the other hand, the Free Software Definition seems to emphasize how
users may organize so that their interests are served when they can be empowered by learning from the flow of knowledge at the
individual and community scale.

This supply-side / demand-side duality is relevant in many domains of knowledge, not just software. Once the Free/Libre/Open Way
(FLOW) emerged a clear success through a quarter century of effort by many people working in the software domain, the core ideas started
proliferating rapidly elsewhere: free/libre/open source statistics, graphics, audio, hardware, money and so on. I and some others are
attempting to bring some of these ideas into metropolitan-scale transit, and into the capital infrastructure sector. In any of these
domains, I propose that both the supply-side and demand-side perspectives are indispensible.

So now back to your specific question: I hope the OSI can further promote understanding and experimentation with the principles of
open source supply anywhere that user empowerment coincides with suppliers achieving better performance though the easier flow of
knowledge.

Find out more →

Our Newest Members… and why they joined.

Ricardo Bánffy, Brazil	Free and open source software are are the most important shared goods of mankind. They make our new hyperconnected society possible and capable of evolving without the guidance of corporate entities.
Marcelo Bartsch, Chile	Just want to help the OSI community, if I can, because I belive it is time to gave back all the support they had given.
Martin Callinan, United Kingdom
Gledston de Oliveira reis, Brazil
Andrew DeMarsh, Canada	Open source software allows me to learn and improve myself without worrying about extremely restrictive licenses.
Mike Finch
Ryan Gates, United States	I support Open Source Software.
Jeremy Graham-Cumming, United Kingdom	I believe that open source is a viable model for software companies. It promises our society equal access to systems and software that have become an integral part of our lives. Common standards allow us as a whole to drive, expand and improve our technological scope.
Sandeep Khuperkar, India
Jie Liang, China	I love open source and want to help it’s development!
Diana Matonis, United States	I began programming in 1986 where most software was in-house and platform specific. Any updates were labor intensive and took too much time for the functionality gained. I wanted a standard so we could easily move the code to another platform to be compiled and work without the headaches we would encounter. I worked to this end. I saw the emergence of standard software packages which made life easier but then adding features specific to an organization became virtually impossible or cost ineffective. Today I am seeing the divergence of software code wars. The only way to continue to progress software code to be platform independent and have the capability to improve specific functionality is to have base codes as open source. It’s cost and productivity effective in the end for all.
Konstantin Pastbin, New Zealand	I support free & open source movement.
Andersen Pecorone, Belgium
Daniel Pimentel, Brazil	Because I believe in open source and I’m an open source developer too.
Dawid Roets, South Africa	The knowledge of everyday users is limited to their own environments and they are not aware of all the development changes, alternative methods and specific solutions. Open Source Initiative provides a powerful community from across the globe to improve in the understanding and necessity of information.
Neil Sawbridge, United Kingdom	I believe this is one of the best ideas in computing today and I’m really excited about joining!
Andreas Schreiber, Germany	I would like to support OSI because I’m involved in Open Source strategy development. I give talks and trainings about Open Source licensing where I already promote using OSI approved licenses.
John Smith, New Zealand	Of a long association with and empathy for the Open Source Development concept.
Rievoluzione.it System Integrator, Italy	Firstname Lastname, Country
Randy Thorton, United States	Open is the better way.
Plus another 6 anonymous members from Greece, Germany and the United States

Find out more →

Visit/Join OSI Affiliates

ADMB Foundation AFUL Apereo BigBlueButton Foundation Cenatic Creative Commons Debian DemocracyLab The Document Foundation Drupal Association Eclipse Foundation Free BSD Friends of OpenDocument

Joomla KDE eV The Linux Foundation The Linux Fund LinuxFest Northwest MariaDB Foundation Mozilla Foundation OSEHRA The New Zealand Open Source Society OpenHatch Open Source Software Institute Open Source Sweden

Outercurve Foundation OW2 Plone Foundation prPIG Python Software Foundation Sahana Software Foundation SOUJava Tiki Software Community Association TYPO3 Wikimedia Foundation Wikiotics WordPress Foundation

Affiliate Profile: Sahana Software Foundation

The Sahana Software Foundation is dedicated to the mission
of saving lives by providing information management solutions that enable
organizations and communities to better prepare for and respond to disasters. We develop free and open source software and provide
services that help solve concrete problems and bring efficiencies to disaster response coordination between governments, aid
organizations, civil society and the survivors themselves, such as:

• Reuniting separated families through registering missing and found persons
• Tracking and managing requests for help from individuals and organizations
• Tracking organizations and programs responding to the disaster, including the coverage and balance in the distribution of aid,
  providing transparency in the response effort
• Enabling relevant sharing of information across organizations, connecting donors, volunteers, NGOs, and government organizations,
  enabling them to operate as one

Sahana software was originally developed by members of the Sri Lankan IT community who wanted to find a way to apply their talents
towards helping their country recover in the immediate aftermath of the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami. The word “Sahana” means
“relief” in Sinhalese, one of the national languages of Sri Lanka. Our community has since grown to include experts in emergency and
disaster management as full partners in the software development process. This is extremely unique in the governance of software projects,
and a unique strength of the Sahana Software Foundation.

The Lanka Software Foundation (LSF) was the first owner of the intellectual property making up Sahana software, and under its
stewardship, Sahana software grew into a global free and open source software project supported by hundreds of volunteer contributors
from dozens of countries and it supported national and local authorities and relief agencies in their response to numerous
arge-scale, sudden-onset disasters. In early 2009, the directors of the Lanka Software Foundation decided to allow Sahana to spin off
into its own organization. The Sahana Software Foundation was established in 2009 by an initial board of directors as a non-profit
organization registered in the State of California to serve the needs and requirements of a diverse group of customers.

Today SSF supports three main products:

• Eden: Eden is a flexible humanitarian platform with a rich feature set which can be rapidly customized to adapt to existing
  processes and integrate with existing systems to provide effective solutions for critical humanitarian needs management either prior
  to or during a crisis.
• Vesuvius: Vesuvius is focused on the disaster preparedness and response needs of the medical community, contributing to family
  reunification and assisting with hospital triage. It also provides client and staff registration capabilities for temporary sheltering
  and other emergency operations.
• Legacy Products: There are several other versions of Sahana software that are no longer under active development, but remain a rich
  part of our project’s history. These systems were used in the response to many disasters and adopted by government agencies and
  humanitarian organizations for disaster preparedness programs – many of which are still in use today. The most notable of our legacy
  products is Krakatoa, the direct descendant of the original Sahana code base developed following the 2004 Indian Ocean Tsunami.

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