Introducing Our Newest Board Member: David Nalley

Josh Aas, ISRG Executive Director
Mar 12, 2021

We are pleased to announce that David Nalley, Principal of Open Source Strategy and Marketing at AWS, has joined the ISRG Board of Directors.

David brings a strong community-oriented perspective to ISRG. He has been working in open source communities for a long time and understands the important role open source plays in our society today, “Certainly for tech and software, open source is the public commons. People can freely consume from that commons, which presents both opportunity and risk,” he said.

When we launched Let’s Encrypt in 2015, we expected it could take many years to move the Web to 100% encryption. We’ve been pleasantly surprised to see such phenomenal progress in just five years. The number of people and companies who financially support our work has also grown to help us maintain the high quality of service people have come to expect. As we strive to make our service invisible, we are aware of the risk of being taken for granted and are working hard to combat it through communications and ongoing improvement.

In 2020, ISRG introduced two new projects: ISRG Prio Services, which enables subscribers to have privacy-respecting metrics, and a project related to improving the memory safety of important software. For both efforts, the benefits will compound over a longer period of time. “I’m excited by a group that has long-term thinking on what we can have an impact on in five or 10 years,” David said. “For better or worse, a lot of software is focused on the next release or the imminent security bugs. But the kind of long-term thinking in which you start the project thinking you will have an impact in 10 years—it is so rare to have that kind of thinking.”

Related to both the concepts of technology as the public commons and the power of long-term thinking is that of sustainability. From the start, the ISRG Board of Directors has considered carefully how to build a sustainable organization, and I’m excited that David wants to contribute to that thinking. “I don’t profess to have all the answers, but I am excited to work to ensure that ISRG and Let’s Encrypt remain sustainable,” he said.

Please join me in welcoming David to the ISRG Board of Directors!