[Osia-members] AGM and Stepping Away

[Aimee Aficionado]

Sorry to have left this for so long, sometimes life is what happens to us when we are busy making other plans, as someone once said. 

Due to unforeseen events this year I had to step away from my duties within OSIA around midyear, which has sadly seen me unable to participate in this years work. This has meant that my ability to be able to add to OSIA this year has been frankly diminished and left me in a position where I am unsure about my time commitments over the coming year. It pains me very much to have stepped away from OSIA after having built up so much work in the previous years with the team, I felt that we where in a good place this year to grow on the great success of recent government submissions and I also feel that the sentiment is still there and can still be built upon by the next board. 

In regard to the future of OSIA, well I think that is in the hands of the membership, I feel that we had made great success in certain areas and I also feel that we have be stagnant. There is a need for new energy to be injected so to speak and also for a strategic overhaul. I had attempted to lay some ground work and foundations for that this year, in regard to restructuring infrastructure and documentation collection etc. OSIA has failed I feel in the past to effectively communicate with its members, I feel there are some key items needed there:

1: all board minutes to be public (as consistent with other FLOSS, Open Source boards)
2: online infrastructure that will allow members to facilitate in government paper and policy submissions 
3: an updated web presence which is more focused on sharing work with the greater community rather then just a brochureware style website 
4: opening up membership to individual developers (something that was started this year)


I will continue to support OSIA and I hope to see it continue into the future. The main thing that OSIA has suffered from in all my years of involvement with policy submissions as a member and a board member is allowing a way to facilitate membership involvement. Policy work is not a simple task and is a vast commitment of time, as a Volunteer Board it is hard to sustain the effort needed for this work by one or two people on a board. The TPP committee was an attempt at casting the net wider into the membership for input and interaction on policy work. In order to have an affective representation for OpenSource Industry in Australia I feel we must have greater interaction within our membership and input into policy submissions, otherwise we face what we have seen in OSIA which is overload. There needs to be a way for greater participation in order for it not to fall onto one or two individuals to carry the load.

I wish everyone the best for the AGM tomorrow evening, I will not be able to attend in person however I will be participating remotely. I offer any new board members my assistance and support and help now and into the future. I feel that the most important thing is to focus on the achievements and to acknowledge the failings, in this scenario I do not seek to place or discuss individual blame because if I look around the world right now there is so much angst and hatred pointed at individuals when it should be pointed at the system and all that energy being used into how we can build a better one. I think OSIA through the membership together we can seek to restructure and refocus OSIA, I would hate to be in a position where Australia did not have a body that was representing Open Source in policy work I believe that it is highly important as we rush into the automation and AI future and with the problems we have seen with the likes of robodebt recently. Whether or not OSIA will continue or be reborn in a new form or even maybe multiple new forms, I know that we as a community will continue the policy work and to ensure that there is a voice for Open Source in Australian Government Policy.


“In the midst of chaos, there is also opportunity” 





Regards,

Aimee Maree Forsstrom
-Great results, can be achieved with small forces
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