Roundtable: Economic and Workforce Impact of Open Source AI

Alex Swartsel is managing director of Jobs for the Future (JFF) Labs’s Insights practice, a growing team that helps decision-makers across the education-to-career landscape understand and prepare for the emerging trends, technologies, and innovations shaping the future of work and learning. JFFLabs’s rapid insights process and transformative trends research agenda focus on core areas impacting the future of work and learning—including AI, the metaverse, climate resilience, lifelong learning, aerospace, robotics, and other emerging fields. Alex is also leading the launch of JFF’s new Center for Artificial Intelligence & the Future of Work.  

Before joining JFFLabs, Alex served as chief of development, finance, and external affairs for Teach for America’s Washington, DC, region and as a senior advisor to U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren, co-designed global strategic planning at the Motion Picture Association, and built and led the communications team for then-first-term U.S. Senator Sheldon Whitehouse. 

Alex chairs the board of directors of Capital City Symphony and is also a longtime member and former chorus president of the Choral Arts Society of Washington. She holds a BA summa cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa from Wellesley College and an MBA from the Yale School of Management. 

Frank Nagle is an assistant professor in the Strategy Unit at Harvard Business School and the Advising Chief Economist at the Linux Foundation. Professor Nagle studies how competitors can collaborate on the creation of core technologies, while still competing on the products and services built on top of them – especially in the context of artificial intelligence. His research falls into the broader categories of the future of work, the economics of IT, and digital transformation and considers how technology is weakening firm boundaries. His work utilizes large datasets derived from online social networks, open source software repositories, financial market information, and surveys of enterprise IT usage.

Professor Nagle’s work has been published in top academic journals as well as in practitioner-oriented publications like Harvard Business Review, MIT Sloan Management Review, and Brookings Institution TechStream. He has won awards and grants from AOM, NBER, SMS, INFORMS, EURAM, GitHub, the Sloan Foundation, and the Linux Foundation. He is a faculty affiliate of the Digital, Data and Design (D^3) Institute at Harvard, the Managing the Future of Work Project, and the Laboratory for Innovation Science at Harvard (LISH).

Hilary Carter oversees the development of decision-useful research projects and content programs that support open source as a paradigm for mass collaboration at scale. Together, the Research and Communications department broadens the understanding of the impact of open source software, open hardware, open standards, and open data for people, enterprises, governments, and society at large.

Hilary’s career began in financial services with experiences in corporate finance, research and analysis, and global private banking. Her career pivoted to digital technology, where she focused on mobile communications and digital media consulting. Before joining the Linux Foundation, Hilary led a global, syndicated research institute focused on blockchain technology.

She earned an MSc in Management from the London School of Economics.

Anna is a Researcher and the Ecosystem Manager for Linux Foundation Research where she supports end-to-end management of the Linux Foundation’s research projects. She has conducted qualitative and systematic review research in health data infrastructure and the integration of new technologies to better support data sharing in healthcare, and has presented on this research work at conferences and working groups. Her interests lie at the intersection of health informatics, precision medicine, and data sharing. She is a generalist with experience in client services, program delivery, project management, and writing for academic, corporate, and web user audiences. Prior to the Linux Foundation, she worked for two different research programs, the Blockchain Research Institute and BC Cancer’s Research Institute. She received her Master of Science in Public Health and a Bachelor of Arts in International Relations, both from the University of British Columbia.

Over the last 20 years, Diana has led teams, initiatives, and campaigns in the public and private sectors. She currently heads Economic Opportunity & Advocacy for US Public Policy at Meta. In this role Diana sits at the intersection of Meta’s policy priorities and how Meta and its family of apps can empower small businesses to create, build, and grow their business. Diana previously served as the Senior Vice President of Social Responsibility and Government Affairs for the Libra Group, where she managed Libra’s nine philanthropic platforms. Prior to Libra, Diana served as Director of the White House Business Council for President Obama where she worked closely with business leaders from Fortune 500 companies as well as small and medium enterprises to identify opportunities for collaboration on the Administration’s policy priorities, including international trade, pay equity, and workforce development. Diana also served as the White House Liaison at the U.S. Small Business Administration.