The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) is the world's largest association of technical professionals with more than 420,000 members in over 160 countries around the world. The IEEE Standards Association (IEEE-SA) develops global standards in a broad range of industries, including: power and energy, biomedical and health care, information technology and robotics, telecommunication and home automation, transportation, nanotechnology, information assurance, and many more.

Over the past several months the IEEE-SA has been conducting and rapidly growing an open source pilot program. This talk will discuss the legal, technical, and political challenges of developing our open source program (and in particular, from the POV of us being a large standards organization that has not traditionally published works under free and open source licenses); the opportunities of having such a large and global charity entering into the open source space; and an overview of some of our existing pilot projects.

Josh Gay is the Open Source Community Manager at the IEEE-SA. He previously worked at the Free Software Foundation for the better part of the last decade.