Allison Randal Joins Conservancy Board

[Deb Nicholson]

URL: https://sfconservancy.org/news/2020/jan/03/arandal/

We're very excited to welcome Allison Randal to Conservancy's Board of
Directors. When it comes to free and open source software, there are
few people who have had so much [experience in so many different
ways.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allison_Randal) Over the last 30
years, she has taken on projects that became instrumental in welcoming
more people to the software freedom cause. She's made numerous critical
technical contributions in addition to her impressive leadership
contributions. She's also worked hard to get folks from very different
organizations to collaborate on languages, licensing and events. We're
very lucky that Randal has chosen to bring [her uniquely broad and
historical perspective](https://allisonrandal.com/) to her work as a
Conservancy Director.

Randal is a board member at the Perl Foundation, a board member at the
OpenStack Foundation, and co-founder of the FLOSS Foundations group for
free software community leaders. At various points in the past she has
served as president of the Open Source Initiative, president of the
Perl Foundation, board member of the Python Software Foundation,
chairman of the Parrot Foundation, chief architect of the Parrot
virtual machine, Open Source Evangelist at O’Reilly Media, conference
chair of OSCON, Technical Architect of Ubuntu, Open Source Advisor at
Canonical, Distinguished Technologist and Open Source Strategist at HP,
and Distinguished Engineer at SUSE. She collaborates in the Debian
project, and is currently taking a mid-career research sabbatical at
the University of Cambridge. While on sabbatical, [she has been
teaching computer science.](https://cam.lohutok.net/)

When asked for a quote, Randal's first response was,"The problem with
writing a quote [about Conservancy] is that I have so much to say that
it doesn't fit in a quote!" Randal went on to describe her longtime
appreciation of Conservancy's work. She highlighted our mulifaceted
approach, "Conservancy's work is important to the free software
ecosystem in so many ways that I have a hard time condensing it down to
a few words, but the big three for me are diversity outreach, providing
a healthy home for free software projects, and steadfast advocacy and
defense of user freedoms."

"We are so glad we can welcome someone who is as accomplished as
Allison onto our board," said Conservancy's Executive Director, Karen
Sandler. "There are few people who have Allison's commitment to
software freedom let alone who have such impressive technical expertise
and governance experience. Conservancy is at critical point in 2020. We
have exciting plans and significant challenges ahead. We are glad that
our board represents such a breadth of thoughtful and experienced
leadership to help set the course."

About Conservancy

Conservancy is a resourceful, non-profit organization dedicated to
helping people take control of their computing experience by growing
the software freedom movement, supporting community-driven alternatives
to proprietary software and defending free software builders with
practical initiatives. Conservancy believes that the future of software
should be for everyone.

-- 
Deb Nicholson <deb at sfconservancy.org>
Software Freedom Conservancy