Hello everyone,
In the spirit of free software and free cultural works (i.e. free as in freedom), I’m going to reuse and adapt my GOSH Community Council candidate statement.
I am Pen-Yuan Hsing (“Pen”, @hpy, English pronouns he/they) with a PhD in biology, am originally from Taiwan but have also lived in the US and UK, and currently based at the University of Bath in the UK like @julianstirling, @jarancio, and @rafaella.antoniou.
The many hats I’ve worn include 10+ years of ecological research 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.
Being one of the first to receive official certification from the Creative Commons organisation, I like to use my 15+ years of science outreach experience to organise public engagement events from a beginner Arduino workshop to a seminar discussing problems with the current copyright system. In the future, I hope to work with others (you!) to creatively expand the circle of liberty for knowledge and innovation.
While I eagerly await the next time we meet in person at GOSH 2022 
, 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. Some may also remember me as the person who advocated for a more inclusive voting system and helped set up the 100% open source solution we used for the Community Council election.
While I have a little bit of experience building hardware, my primary interests as Community Council member are:
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Help improve our governance process such as by learning from the g0v civic tech network representing civic engagement groups across east Asia “hacking” democracy for good; and
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Explore how our collective knowledge can be best organised and passed on.
Ultimately, I am always eager to work with you to explore how we can expand the circle of liberty for knowledge and creativity.
The others have set the bar pretty high for photos! Here’s the best one I can come up with for myself, setting fire to a GBP 20 banknote:
