The directors are:
- Anshul Makkar, engineer and open source activist, anshulmakkar at gmail dot com — 16 Years of Experience in Low level kernel, Hypervisor and FPGA development. Anshul’s areas of expertise include information coding theory, Debris Mitigation/ Orbital Mechanics, scheduler for real-time and server-based systems. low level kernel/driver development and debugging, FPGA development, full system development right from conception to release, Open-Source culture and remote working, and technical leadership and designing.
- Matthew Wishek NB0X, 30+ year industry veteran specializing in ASIC and FPGA development for high-speed modem, cellular handsets, and avionics. Extensive experience in system architecture, requirements gathering, hardware/software partitioning, process development among others. Working collaboratively with diverse teams to achieve the best possible outcome. BSECE from UC Santa Barbara.
- Michelle Thompson W5NYV, co-founder and CEO, mountain.michelle at gmail dot com — Michelle enjoys thinking and doing. Not necessary in that order. MSEE Information Theory from USC. Long-time DEFCON, Burning Man, and ham conference participant. Coordinates Open Research Institute’s Phase 4 Program. Lead for Organ Donor, an artificially intelligent touring pipe organ. Chair for IEEE San Diego Information Theory Chapter. IEEE San Diego Section Chair. VP Traceroad Incorporated. FCC TAC member for 2022. Lives in San Diego, CA and can be found as @abraxas3d on social media.
- Frank Brickle, PhD AB2KT (Silent Key)
Frank Brickle is a professional musician, but has been intimately involved in technology for his entire life. For more than two decades he pursued both musical and technical careers at the same time. He was first licensed as a radio amateur in 1963, wrote his first computer program in 1965, and was an early adopter (1970) of the computer as a musical instrument. He has worked extensively in digital signal processing, both acoustic and RF. He co-wrote the Open Source DttSP software defined radio engine, and is the author of the vrk distributed virtual radio kernel for Erlang/OTP. Much of his other technical work has been oriented around secure communications and signals analysis, especially cryptology, including probability modelling of natural language and automatic signal classification. The voice signal detection facility (both plain and ciphony) in the Agilent E3238S RF surveillance system is his work, as are a number of
applications for surveillance and exploitation of encrypted tactical and trunked radio systems. He successfully returned to a primary focus on musical composition in 2000. His music can be found in all the usual places online, including Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon, YouTube, and Soundcloud. - Position Open please send a letter of introduction to hello at openresearch dot institute, along with any credentials you believe might be relevant, if you would like to serve ORI as a member of the Board of Directors.
- Steve Conklin AI4QR, CFO, steve at conklinhouse dot com — Steve Conklin AI4QR has decades of experience in high-availability distributed safety-critical systems engineering and open source. He also brings experience as a former board member of a nonprofit which achieved rapid growth while retiring all debt during his 10 year tenure. BSECE from University of Alabama in Huntsville. Steve is a designer and fabricator working across electronic, mechanical, and software domains. Currently living in The Rocket City and employed as a Service Reliability Engineer at Salesforce.
- Keith Wheeler KI7PEM — Keith is a Principal Engineer at Infineon with extensive corporate and engineering experience. His skills include trade-off studies, making quality decisions under uncertainty, formal training in business administration, and entrepreneurship.
Directors Emeritus are:
- Ben Hilburn KJ4DDR, ben at hilburn dot dev — Ben loves open-source software, science, and communities. Extensive community organizing experience as GNU Radio Project lead.
- Karen Rucker KG5GAK, Secretary, — An RF Engineer at Ball Aerospace, Karen will begin a master’s degree program at the University of Colorado at Boulder in the fall of 2020 in Aerospace Engineering. She will continue a specialization in remote sensing and RF engineering. Her open source community contributions include career mentorship, open source DSP frameworks, RF metadata standards, and antenna design.
The Board of Directors is self-electing through a process of consensus and volunteerism. It constitutes the entire voting membership for the purposes of elections. The Board as a body can be contacted at board at lists dot openresearch dot institute.
All other participants are granted Associate Membership for the purpose of being protected by ORI’s corporate shield, and do not have voting privileges for the purposes of elections.