Position statement for R. Tyler Croy

I am R. Tyler Croy, rtyler on various IRC networks and GitHub. I am running for election to the SPI Board of Directors.

I have been a contributor to an SPI-affiliated project, Jenkins, since before we (Jenkins) became affiliated with SPI (roughly 8 years). I have also participated in a number source projects and initiatives affiliated with other organizations including:

• Participating as a student in the inaugural Google Summer of Code (2005) with the FreeBSD project
• Packaging/advocacy for openSUSE
• Creation/maintenance of a number of open source Python, Ruby and Puppet packages.
• Jenkins project board member
• Participating as a mentor/organizer for Google Summer of Code (2016) with the Jenkins project

My personal and professional "project portfolio" overlaps quite heavily with SPI affiliated projects. As a Debian laptop user, I benefit greatly from the work done by the folks responsible for Debian, LibreOffice, freedesktop.org, and of course X.org. As the primary infrastructure contact for the Jenkins contact, I also manage a number of PostgreSQL, Jenkins and (of course) Debian-based (Ubuntu) servers.

My primary experience with SPI however, has been via the Jenkins project, which "became" Jenkins after the Sun acquisition by Oracle and subsequent strangling of the Hudson project. At the time we found SPI to be just the right amount of support and freedom to allow us to continue running the project but also help us grow into what we are today.

I believe SPI welcomes and serves a community of projects which clearly do not fit into more restrictive foundation structures and as part of the board I wish to continue to help providing support as-needed to help affiliated projects grow and succeed.

As a current Jenkins project board member, I also have experience running an open source project under SPI which, I believe, can help improve SPI and project interactions.