Louis Griffith
About Me
For the last two decades, I had the honor of helping individuals and groups as both a leader and an innovative change-maker. Whether guiding public or private organizations or pursuing my own business endeavors, my focus and energy is ensuring the work I provide positively transforms lives.
Over the course of my career, I have been and continue to be a solutions developer for a multitude of organizations in the industries of healthcare, varying types of financing, technology, and more. When I’m not spending my time on these professional ventures, I am using my abundance of technical knowledge and unique skillset to improve for-profit and non-profit associations and with memberships with the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Chartered Management Institute, ISACA and most recently joined the OWASP Compliance committee. Having served on diverse boards and committees including various IT committees, diversity & inclusion committee, change advisory boards, and commercial and residential development boards to name a few, helping others to understand situations from other positions, to consider other beliefs, experiences and viewpoints and improve quality of work environments.
Holding multiple professional certifications & certificates, bachelor’s, and a master’s degrees, I put a strong emphasis on the value of education. Continuing education is key, not only personal development, workplace effectiveness and the contributions I will make to this organization and its volunteers and membership. Therefore, I am so thrilled at the prospect of serving an organization with the same mission of openly sharing knowledge and providing educational benefits to its membership to aid in this pursuit. It is an exciting opportunity to bring together my passion for philanthropy, community outreach, and technical expertise and strategy. I am deeply humbled by the opportunity to serve you if elected to Global OWASP Board and looking forward to working together toward a brighter future.
Link to My Video
How do you intend to extend outreach to developers and developer communities outside of the security ecosystem?
Social media is an extremely effective platform for engaging the developer community. There is untapped potential for leveraging the membership for promoting membership/campaigning projects/encouraging sponsorship allowing OWASP to extend its reach to more developers and developer communities. The ripple effect at a minimum is potentially more awareness of the OWASP brand, increased audience/discovery of more than the OWASP Top Ten project, and increased visibility to perspective sponsors. The goodwill would dramatically improve if OWASP were to partner with social media influencers who immediately bring brand recognition to countless amounts of followers quicker than traditional campaigns. Social media and word-of-mouth are extremely effective for any non-profit’s organization’s growth and sustainability.
I would like to see a consistent outreach to the membership can serve as the key to improving communication and lead to higher member satisfaction. I purpose a quarterly board and member-wide meetup to gather feedback from the diverse range of members and hopefully inspire continued engagement.
What practical experience can you bring to the specific challenges a nonprofit organization like OWASP faces such as fundraising, staff support, operating model/by-laws, etc?
With over two decades of application development knowledge and experience spanning multiple industries, I am a veteran in this fast-paced industry to say the least. In my current role, I Lead development teams and provide IT guidance and strategy to executives executing an innovation roadmap for the overall IT enterprise application landscape while ensuring integration capabilities are implemented and maintained for all business lines. My experience as an entrepreneur allows me to pull from my experience of yielding new and innovative ideas while creatively working from a meager budget.
Leveraging my experiences on both public and private boards and committees over the last decade offers a unique blend of experience diversity and knowledge. A diverse board of global directors provides a range of perspectives from different cultures, genders, ages, skills, and ethnicities. Board diversity is important when facing new challenges and complexities, critical for overcoming challenges.
How do you plan to become less dependent on the primary revenue stream of “Offline Conferences”?
Diversification is the key ingredient to both effective nonprofit boards and financial stability. Identifying and securing funding through sponsorship, membership fees and donations is important for any non-profit but can quickly deteriorate with recessions or other events like pandemics which negatively affected the world’s economies.
Where do you see the biggest challenges for OWASP as a volunteer-driven organization in 2023+ and how do you intend to address them?
In my opinion, the greatest challenge for any non-profit is growing and retaining its membership. The greatest asset OWASP is its membership and leveraging OWASP has the unique opportunity to encourage ideas from members for addressing these challenges.
Secondly, my own idea of growing OWASP membership is by increasing affiliations, with the target of doubling this number. The increased offering should provide value for dollar goodwill towards retaining current members and provide adequate attraction for perspective members.
What do you think will help to increase the adoption of the OWASP Projects?
The are many projects maintained by OWASP and these projects could be promoted on websites like CodeTriage, which seeks to help developers discover and get started contributing to open-source projects. Participation in the development of these projects should provide the development community a place to convene, gain community support, and accelerate project progress forward.