Candidate name: Pen-Yuan Hsing (“Pen”, @hpy)
Please provide a short biography, and describe some of your participation and contributions in the GOSH community (3-5 sentences):
I have a PhD in biology, am originally from Taiwan but have also lived in the US and UK, and I am honoured to have been nominated! 
My 10+ years of ecological research began with field studies from tree frogs in the rainforests of Costa Rica to visiting oil-spill-impacted corals on the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico in a submarine, and during this time I developed a passion for open science (e.g. publishing a Guide to Reproducible Code in science), open source hardware/software (as a researcher in the Open!Next project), and community/citizen science. This led me to becoming a co-founder of the MammalWeb citizen science project (@MammalWeb) where we partner with communities in taking ownership of monitoring local wildlife, growing from one town in England to an international network across 5 countries. While I eagerly await the next time we meet in person at GOSH 202x, I’ve contributed to the GOSH Roadmap, helped organise related events in 2020, and my first contribution in the GOSH forum dates back to 2017. For this election, I researched and advocated for a more inclusive voting system and helped set up the 100% open source solution that we will be using to cast our ballots.
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:
The GOSH Governance Plan developed by the current Governance Working Group defines a list of issues to be handled by the new Community Council and it will be my focus. My participation in the current governance model, developing an inclusive and 100% open source voting process for this election, and passion for creating a more diverse and inclusive community will inform my priorities as a Community Council Member. I am also acutely aware that there are varying opinions on the organisation of GOSH and its governance both now and in the future, and I commit to humbly listening to you and making sure your views are well-represented.
I have a rare set of experiences within the intersection between the community/citizen science, open science, and open source hardware/software communities. Notably, I am involved in global and regional citizen science networks such as Citizen Science Asia or the g0v civic tech network representing civic engagement groups across east Asia “hacking” democracy for good (being bilingual helps! 
), all of which are invaluable for not just Asian perspectives but also insights into better governance.
I strongly believe that building on what came before is core to how we do science, practitioners of science have the responsibility to facilitate this iterative process, and the hardware with which we do science is an integral part of that process. More broadly, the freedoms that come with open science and open science hardware are very much a part of social justice and inclusion, and I hope as a GOSH Community Council member I can help expand the circle of liberty for knowledge and discovery.