In BAA’s early years, Michael Tiemann was a member of the Action Team and the Forest Action Team, helped with fundraising and forest issues, and served on the BAA Council starting in 1992 (through at least 1995).

To support the theme of 1992’s “Voter’s Earth Day,” Michael arranged to have a voter registration message precede every movie at the Century 10 Theaters in Mountain View. Tens of thousands of moviegoers saw the slides, making the connection between environmental protection and the responsibility to vote.

Beth Delson remembered Michael as a “supporter of innovation, of people taking initiative — as he did — and I think this drew him to BAA.” He was also a very hard worker and avid cyclist, she said.

Later in 1992 Michael founded the Letter Writing Project (LWP), making it easy for BAA members, volunteers, and members of the public to turn the power of the pen to their advantage, for a variety of causes. Members of the LWP tracked the BAA calen­dar and provided a topic-relevant letter-writing kit for many events such as the BAA Café, which often hosted speakers on topics such as forests, indigenous people’s rights, etc.

In 1993 Michael was one of ten “Battery Club” donors to BAA’s EV Project, each earning their name on a battery in the electric MG.

Elsewhere

Michael wrote the first native-code C++ compiler and debugger, and co-founded Cygnus Support (later Cygnus Solutions) in 1989, widely regarded as the first company to commercialize open source software, before the term “open source” had even been coined.

He went on to numerous leadership roles at Red Hat software and later served as President of the Open Source Initiative (2005–2012) and contributed to organizations like the GNOME Foundation and Creative Commons.

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