This thread is for the candidate statement of 2021 GOSH Community Council Election candidate Andrew Quitmeyer (@hikinghack). Andrew, you can reply to this post with your candidate statement. I have included the candidate statement template below for your reference:
2021 GOSH Community Council Election Candidate Statement Template
Candidate Name:
Please provide a short biography, and describe some of your participation and contributions in the GOSH community (3-5 sentences):
Please provide a position statement (5-7 sentences), indicating why you are running for Community Council, your priorities for the community, and what you hope to achieve:
Candidate statements do not have to be in English. For more information on the Candidate Statement’s category, please read the about post pinned to this category.
Candidate Name: Andrew Quitmeyer
Bio:
Dr. Andrew Quitmeyer (@hikinghack) studies interactions between wild animals and computational devices. He left his job as a tenure-track professor at the National University of Singapore to start his own field-station makerspace in Gamboa, Panama.
Digital Naturalism Laboratories (the Institute for Interactive Jungle Crafts) blends biological fieldwork and technological crafting with a community of local and international scientists, artists, engineers, and animal rehabilitators. The Digital Naturalism Conference is his research’s largest event, bringing together over 100 participants annually from all fields to collaborate on finding new ways of interacting with nature. All of our work is published openly for sharing and remixing.
Please provide a position statement (5-7 sentences), indicating why you are running for Community Council, your priorities for the community, and what you hope to achieve:
GOSH has done such an incredible job building a magnificent global community around openly sharing research and ideas. It’s such an absolute delight to be around people with whom the basic concept that information should be shared is the default, and that conversations about research don’t have to start by stepping back and defending why this research should be made public.
My loftiest goal would be for us to make that the default mindset for anyone working in science or technology. Tinier and practical goals I hope to achieve are to help host more events that spread and solidify this mindset. I specialize in doing things outdoors, and would love to help channel resources to developing open hardware to tackle all the low hanging fruit in field biology and conservation.
Finally I want to say that the GOSH community has always seemed trans-disciplinary and welcoming to seemless movements between the arts, science, and cultural activism, and I hope I can use the resources available to us in our little jungle laboratory to help maintain this positive and welcoming culture 
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