Position statement for Selena Deckelmann

I am Selena Deckelmann (selenamarie on irc.oftc.net), and I am standing for election to the SPI board.

Why am I running?

SPI has been a great fiscal sponsor for PostgreSQL. I believe that SPI is the best model for many free and open source organizations. I recommend SPI first to organizations that need its services. I would love to give back to an organization that has been very helpful to my community.

I believe that SPI should take a more active role in advocating for FOSS globally. I can help in this effort by giving talks and organizing meetings related to SPI at conferences globally, where I speak and keynote each year.

I also strongly believe that our communities need to advocate for FOSS as key part of primary and secondary education worldwide. UNESCO recently published the Paris Declaration (http://oercongress.weebly.com/paris-declaration.html) in support of government policy change to create more open educational resources. SPI is uniquely positioned to help promote the use of FOSS as a key part of open education. I plan to advocate for this as a contributor to PostgreSQL. If elected, I would like to solicit help from contributing members of SPI in advocating for FOSS tools to help spread the world's combined educational knowledge.

About me

I started working with Linux in 1994, installing Slackware from floppies on a computer my friends helped me build in college. I joined the PostgreSQL community in 2006 when I started the Portland PostgreSQL User Group. I have been named a Major Contributor to the project by my peers, and am part of press@postgresql.org and the systems team. I have been a contributing SPI member since 2008.

My work in FOSS includes contribution of code to several projects, but is primarily around conferences and encouraging greater volunteer involvement. I founded Open Source Bridge, PostgreSQL Conference, Postgres Open and PG Day OSCON. I have also helped organize and run over 30 other small and large conferences. I am passionate about the effect conferences have on volunteer motivation, connection to each other and the overall health of our many FOSS communities. I have spoken at over 50 conferences worldwide about free software, PostgreSQL, Puppet, community organizing and trolling.

I also work closely with FOSS contributors on increasing the participation of women in FOSS. In Open Source Bridge's first year, women comprised 30% of attendees and speakers. Similar sized conferences are happy to have women make up 5% of participants.

Professionally, I am a product manager, systems administrator, database administrator and occasional web developer. Primarily, I write code in Perl or Python, but regularly dabble in C for PostgreSQL.