2024 Board of Directors Candidates

Wilma Hodges, Ed.D.
Sakai Community Manager and Longsight

First Election

Wilma is the Director of Training and eLearning Initiatives at Longsight and is the Sakai Community Manager. She has more than 20 years of experience in faculty training, LMS administration, instructional design, online course and program development, technical writing, and user experience design. Wilma has been involved with the Sakai project since 2009 and plays a leadership role in a number of Sakai community groups, including the Sakai Teaching & Learning and UX Group, the Documentation Working Group, and the Sakai Virtual Conference Planning Group. 

Wilma holds a master's degree in Technical Writing from the University of Central Florida and an Ed.D. in Instructional Technology and Distance Education from Nova Southeastern University. She was selected as an Apereo Fellow in 2016.

Stephanie Lieggi
Executive Director, Center for Research in Open Source Software (CROSS) & Open Source Program Office (OSPO), UC Santa Cruz

First Election

Stephanie Lieggi has worked as Assistant, and now Executive Director, of the Center for Research in Open Source Software (CROSS) at University of California, Santa Cruz since 2016. At CROSS, Stephanie supports academic-based open source projects and aims to create a sustainable contributor base through the establishment of hands-on mentorship programs, including the Open Source Research Experience (OSRE) Programs. Since 2022 her role has also helped lead the UCSC newly formed Open Source Program Office (OSPO), supported by a grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. Most recently, Stephanie led the effort to build a system-wide network of OSPOs at the University of California, securing financial support for building the network from the Sloan Foundation in Spring 2024. 

Stephanie has been involved with numerous efforts to promote open source and the OSPO approach more broadly in academia; this includes co-chairing the metrics focused CHAOSS University Working Group, and speaking about university OSPOs at open source events such as the Linux Foundation Open Source Summit North America, Free and Open Source Software Yearly (FOSSY) conference, and the Southern California Linux Expo (SCaLE).  Stephanie was also a co-PI on UCSC’s first US National Science Foundation's Pathways to Enable Open Source Ecosystem (POSE) grant, which has enabled exploration into successful models for building sustainable open source projects at universities.

Prior to starting at CROSS, Stephanie was a senior researcher and adjunct professor at the Center for Nonproliferation Studies, part of the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey, where she researched the intersection of national security and global trade. In that role, Stephanie taught numerous nonproliferation related courses including ones focused on illicit trafficking and nonproliferation-related strategic trade controls. She was also the managing editor for two trade control related publications - the East Asian Export Control Observer and the International Export Control Observer. Stephanie received her MA in International Policy Studies from MIIS, and her bachelors in political science from the University of California, San Diego. 

Angela Newell
The University of Texas at Austin

First Election

Angela Newell is the Director of Communication, Governance, and Innovation in the Office of the Vice President and Chief Information Officer and the Director of the Open Source Program Office at The University of Texas at Austin. As part of the CIO’s leadership team, Dr. Newell helps wrangle people and projects and tells the complex story of technology in a large, federated organization. She enjoys running an Innovation Lab that allows students to test and explore new technology and connects students with technology careers. She previously oversaw the Longhorn Innovation Fund for Technology, which supported community designed information and technology innovations. With generous support from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, she helps researchers produce open source code and manages the open source ecosystem at the University. She is particularly curious about the roles open source software and artificial intelligence will play together as the future unfolds. During the Covid-19 Pandemic, Dr. Newell served on a research and action team responsible for deploying Covid testing and treatment sites across several states. The states to whom she and her team provided service are ranked #1, #4, #6, and #11 in Covid response by the National Bureau of Economic Research.

When time permits and she has the good fortune of being asked, Dr. Newell serves as a Lecturer of Information Policy, Information Systems Management, and Statistics at the McCombs School of Business and the LBJ School of Public Affairs. Her research focuses on understanding the innovation potential and outcomes of open source software and open data and the strategic implementation of technology and data in federated organizations. Dr. Newell is co-author of a successful National Science Foundation Science of Science and Innovation Policy grant and is an author in the book, The Internet in Everyday Life, edited by William Aspray and Barbara Hayes. She conducted her doctoral research on the innovation outcomes of open data with the Obama White House Office of Science and Technology Policy and was awarded a Graduate Student Fellowship and her doctorate from The University of Texas at Austin.

Prior to her university life, Dr. Newell was a scientific researcher contracted to the Department of Energy, where she estimated the future effects of nuclear waste on biota and reimagined post-nuclear communities. She received her Master of Science in Public Policy and Information Systems Management from Heinz College at Carnegie Mellon University. During her time at CMU, she was a co-founder and builder of the graciously Intel-funded Pittsburgh Computer Clubhouse, a space for training for those transitioning into or repositioning in the workforce during the day and a robotics lab after school for alternative youth. Dr. Newell has directed economic and community development initiatives and served as an AmeriCorps member, a Promise Fellow, and as a National Service Fellow. She received two national awards, including the Josten's Our Town Award, for her work in strategy and development.

In her heart-time, Angela loves nothing more than chasing her small human alongside the love of her life and hanging with their larger family. If that chasing or hang time involves snorkeling, hiking, immersive art, or fireworks…all the better!

Josh Wilson
Vice-Chair of Apereo Foundation's Board of Directors
Flywheel Strategies and B. Cognition Labs

First elected, June 2021
Current term, July 1, 2021 – June 30, 2024
Eligible for re-election in 2024

Josh is the principal at Flywheel Strategies, co-founder at B.Cognition Labs, and Vice Chair of the Apereo Foundation’s Board of Directors, where he leads strategic planning and leadership development. He serves on the Foundation's Finance Committee. In 2023, he represented Apereo at the FOSSY and All Things Open conferences.

Josh served most recently as Chief Operating Officer at education technology firm Longsight, where he led corporate strategy while overseeing planning, client engagement, new product development, business operations, marketing, and sales. At the same time, he served as a key leader in the Sakai LMS open source community.

Previously, Josh led academic technology at Brandeis University, serving as Associate CIO. He established the Brandeis MakerLab, a winner of multiple awards at World MakerFaire. Josh served from 2007 until 2023 on the management team for the nationwide MISO Survey, which measures the effectiveness of IT and libraries at nearly 200 higher education institutions.

Josh builds cohesive and effective teams through empathetic and strategic leadership, emphasizing active coaching, ongoing mentoring, and a commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion. He quickly becomes a creative, trusted partner to a wide variety of stakeholders, including university faculty, learners of all ages, and technical staff. He is a leadership development consultant, an expert facilitator, an effective instructor, and a skilled coach.

Daniel Izquierdo Cortázar
Chief Executive Officer, Bitergia

First Election

Promoting open source in education internationally.

My background bridges academia and industry. During my PhD, involvement in R&D EU-funded projects, allowed me to study open source from different angles. And this helped me understand its impact at all levels, from an individual perspective to its value to society, specifically including the advantages for the education system.

The company I co-founded is a clear example of this impact. We analyzed open source in the research group, but it was thanks to its very existence that we were able to run a business for the last 12 years.

As anecdotal data to my specific interest, I would like to bring an example from the last conference I attended, FOSSASIA. This took place in Hanoi, Vietnam, and the number of business participants was of few hundred. But main universities in the city increased that number to thousands of attendees. FOSSASIA co-located at the same time some events in key universities in Hanoi where speakers were offered to give a talk on different open source topics. I was part of this, and I had probably 150 students and a couple of dozens of faculty members in front of me discussing software development analytics (my field of expertise), but the discussion moved into the benefits of using and producing open source at the university and government level. This was the University of Mining and Geology, at the Computer Science Department.

I would say this is the beauty and benefits of open source for society and specifically for the higher-education. We were all speaking the same language in terms of technologies, and programming languages. And of course students were concerned about their immediate future and how to get a job, and we discussed the importance of learning the basics and how the university is the right place for this. They have the tools (open source) and the knowledge they need to make this happen. And by participating in open source, either using, producing, or participating in the communities, they would have a public profile that would make their job opportunities to improve a lot.