PALO ALTO, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--The OSET Institute announces today that veteran technologist John Gage has joined its Board of Directors. Mr. Gage brings decades of technology thought leadership to OSET. His focus will be extending the Institute’s work on innovating election technology to democracies worldwide.
John was a member of the founding team of Sun Microsystems, and Chief Researcher and Director of its Science Office until 2008. From 2008-2010 he was a partner at the venture capital firm of Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers focused on green technologies.
Gage has served on national and international advisories and boards including the Markle Task Force on National Security, whose reports helped in reorganizing US intelligence agencies. John currently serves on the United Nations Task Force on Digital Health, and the Human Needs Project, where in 2012 he helped build a networked water source and treatment plant in Nairobi, Kenya. For 12-years Mr. Gage hosted the JavaOne conference, convening 20,000 Java developers, and establishing the Java language in over 95% of mobile devices as the basis of the open source Android operating system.
Of particular value to OSET, John participates in international election observation in several countries, including the most recent Kenyan national election.
“The OSET Institute’s voting technology project is one of the most important public initiatives I’ve encountered,” said Mr. Gage. “After careful assessment of the design and the way they’ve engaged multiple elections stakeholders to confirm requirements, I’ve concluded this is a comprehensive engineering effort with global implication.” OSET CTO John Sebes observed, “Mr. Gage’s guidance will be instrumental to making more verifiable, accurate, secure and transparent voting technology available worldwide.” Board Chairman Gregory Miller noted, “Mr. Gage and we share a vision of tech-sector ingenuity delivering imperative social benefit—public technology to increase confidence in elections and their outcomes.”
The Institute’s technology, ElectOS™ is an open source project, meaning the results will be publicly available. Gage added, “The voting technology industry needs innovation that it has no commercial incentive to develop. Since Sun made the Java programming language open source in 2006, I’ve understood how open source technology can invigorate an industry. Its important to get election security policy right, but code causes change, and I’ve joined to help drive that change. Democracy depends on it.”
About the OSET Institute
The OSET Institute is a tax-exempt 501.c.3 non-profit election technology research, development and education organization based in the Silicon Valley. The Institute is led by a team of social entrepreneurs comprised of seasoned technologists with extensive hardware, software, and systems design experience from well-known Tech Sector companies including Apple, Netscape, Facebook, and Sun Microsystems. The Institute is focused on how to make election technology more verifiable, accurate, secure, and transparent. Work is based on open source principles to treat this critical government technology as an imperative publicly available asset.
