I’m not a software engineer. I don’t write Go. My coding skills top out at some ERP scripts, bash one-liners that probably violate several best practices. I describe myself, accurately and intentionally, as a script kid.
What I do is translate.
Between engineering teams and procurement officers.
Between legal departments and community contributors.
Between C-level strategy and the person running oCIS on a Raspberry Pi.
Between German public-sector bureaucracy and English-language open source governance.
I’ve been doing this in the ownCloud ecosystem since 2014, when I joined as a community contributor and worked my way through to Chief eXperience Officer before moving into my current role.
I also volunteer with Germany’s Federal Agency for Technical Relief (THW). What THW teaches you is that the most valuable person in a crisis isn’t the one with the most technical skill. It’s the one who can coordinate between specialists who don’t speak each other’s language. I am the technical skilled person at THW – not the coordinator.
Running an OSPO is surprisingly similar to these most valuable persons.
The OSPO sits between product management, engineering, legal, security, customer success, marketing, and the community. None of those groups necessarily speak the same language. The OSPO translates.
That’s why I think the script kid background is an advantage.
I don’t have the engineer’s bias toward technical elegance over community legibility.
I don’t have the lawyer’s instinct to hedge every statement into meaninglessness.
I don’t have the marketer’s habit of turning everything into a value proposition.
What I have is the ability to write a governance charter that a community member can read, a procurement officer can reference in a tender, and an engineer can actually implement.
Whether I’ve succeeded is for you to judge. The charter will be public soon. The manifesto will be public soon. All documents will be public soon.
Tomorrow: your PR was written by an AI. We don’t care.
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This is part 6 of this blog post series.
See the earlier posts:
