Program Committee

Kathy Giori has spent her career of more than 30 years working in technology companies in the SF Bay Area. Her current focus to pay that career success forward is to spend much of her time supporting MicroBlocks, as head of Global Partnerships and Outreach. MicroBlocks is a non-profit STEM organization that has developed the first truly “live” open source physical computing tool for programming microcontrollers.

As part of her industry career she was most recently Director of Product Engineering at ZEDEDA, and held numerous executive and product roles at Mozilla, Arduino, Qualcomm, Etak/Sony, SRI, and four startups, two of which she co-founded and led as CEO. Kathy volunteered as a TechWomen professional mentor for the last 4 years and continues to collaborate with fellows. She has given numerous talks at Linux Foundation and other industry events, has organized technology workshops, and is often promoting the benefits of open hardware and software to industry, since bridging open communities with industry drives faster innovation. She received her bachelor’s degree in Electrical Engineering from the University of Minnesota, and her master’s degree in Electrical Engineering from Stanford.

Greg is among a distinguished group of software developers who maintain Linux at the kernel level. In his role as Linux Foundation Fellow, he continues his work as the maintainer for the Linux stable kernel branch and a variety of subsystems while working in a fully neutral environment.

Nithya A. Ruff recently joined Amazon as the Head of Amazon’s Open Source Program Office. Open Source has proven to be one of the world’s most prolific enablers of innovation and collaboration and Amazon’s customers increasingly value open source innovation and the and cloud’s role in helping them adopt and run important open source services. She drives open source culture and coordination inside of Amazon and engagement with external communities. Prior to Amazon, she started and grew Comcast and Western Digital’s Open Source Program Offices. Open Source Program Offices are a critical part of a company’s digital transformation and innovation journey.  

Nithya has been director-at-large on the Linux Foundation Board for the last 5 years and in 2019 was elected to be Chair of the influential Linux Foundation Board. She works actively to advance the mission of the Linux Foundation around building sustainable ecosystems that are built on open collaboration. She is a passionate advocate and a speaker for opening doors to new and diverse people in technology and can often be seen speaking and writing on this topic. Nithya graduated with an M.S. in Computer Science from NDSU and an MBA from the University of Rochester, Simon Business School and is an aspiring corporate board director and governance enthusiast. You can follow her on twitter @nithyaruff and you can find her on https://www.linkedin.com/in/nithyaruff/ 

As a Lead Developer Advocate at Dell Technologies, Laura Santamaria loves to learn and explain how things work to bridge the gaps in engineering disciplines. She is the curator for A Minute on the Mic, a cohost for The Hallway Track podcast, and the ex-host of Quick Bites of Cloud Engineering on YouTube. As a community member, she co-hosts Austin DevOps and Cloud Austin, taught Python for Women Who Code Austin for many years, organizes DevOpsDays Austin, is a member of the PyTexas Foundation, and has been a returning program committee member for Open Source Summit’s Cloud Open track. Outside of tech, Laura runs, plays with her dogs, throws discs, and watches clouds—the real kind.

Kate Stewart is a Senior Director of Strategic Programs, responsible for the Open Compliance programs encompassing the SPDX, FOSSology, OpenChain, and other compliance-related projects. Kate was one of the founders of SPDX, and is currently the specification lead. Since joining The Linux Foundation, she has also launched Real-Time Linux and Zephyr Project.

With almost 30 years of experience in the software industry, she has held a variety of roles and worked as a developer in Canada, Australia, and the US and for the last 20 years has managed software development teams in the US, Canada, UK, India, and China. She received her Master’s in computer science from the University of Waterloo and her Bachelor’s of computer science (co-op program) from the University of Manitoba.