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Mike Linksvayer
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Mike Linksvayer is the Vice President of Developer Policy at GitHub, a position he has held since October 2015. In this role, he focuses on advocating for developers and addressing public policy issues that impact the developer community globally.134
Background and Career
Linksvayer is recognized as a technology entrepreneur and activist, notably co-founding Bitzi, a company known for its development of magnet links, and serving as Chief Technical Officer and later Vice President at Creative Commons. His tenure at Creative Commons began in 2003, where he contributed significantly to promoting open access to knowledge and culture.12
He holds a B.A. in economics from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and has extensive experience in various roles including software development, management, and policy advocacy. Linksvayer's work has included encouraging public institutions like NASA to utilize public APIs for data sharing and promoting the use of Creative Commons licenses among scientists.13
Contributions and Publications
Linksvayer is also an active writer and speaker on topics related to open source software, intellectual freedom, and commons advocacy. He has contributed to several publications and whitepapers addressing these themes, including works on data sharing and community building.15
Overall, Mike Linksvayer's career is marked by his commitment to fostering a collaborative environment for developers while navigating the complexities of technology policy.
Highlights
Enjoyed Kevin Xu's interview with Alexander Quispe of The World Bank and Rodrigo Grijalba about their paper Impact of the Availability of ChatGPT on Software Development: A Synthetic Difference in Differences Estimation using GitHub Data. They used GitHub activity data aggregated at the economy level (GitHub Innovation Graph) and legal availability of ChatGPT as a treatment (the interview has a nice ELI5 of what that means). Just the kind of policy-relevant research we'd hoped to enable by building the Innovation Graph—credit to Kevin for the building! https://lnkd.in/gbF4SY8n
Added visualization with new quarterly GitHub Innovation Graph data release gets to one of the core reasons for the project: showing off (and ultimately encourgaging protection of) international developer collaboration. The existing cord chart will looks like (and is, in a way) a trade flows chart, but it's hard to see change in flows over time. So Kevin Xu had the great idea to add per-economy inbound and outbound collaboration over time charts, and implemented it. This allows one to easily see, for example, expanded international collaboration with the Ukrainian developer community in the last two years, as highlighted in the blog post.
There's also some open source license trivia in the post...
