James Vasile

Partner at Open Tech Strategies, Board Member

James Vasile's work centers on improving access to technology and reducing centralized control over the infrastructure of our daily lives.

He is a partner at Open Tech Strategies, a company that offers advice and services to organizations that make strategic use of free and open source software. Vasile has 20 years’ experience as an open source user, developer, advocate, and advisor.  He is dedicated to using the dynamics of open source communities to challenge existing structures into sharing access, control, and resources.

Vasile was the founding director of the Open Internet Tools Project, which was the launching pad for community-based projects such as the Circumvention Tech Festival, which later became the influential Internet Freedom Festival, and Techno-Activism Third Mondays, a meetup that gathered people in over 20 cities around the world every month. He serves on the boards of Brave New Software, which makes the Lantern censorship circumvention tool downloaded 100 million times around the world, and Horizons Media, which supports the study of the artistic and scientific uses of psychedelics. Previously, Vasile was a Senior Fellow at the Software Freedom Law Center and a director of the FreedomBox Foundation.  He helped create Open Source Matters, the non-profit behind Joomla, where he was an early board member.