Open Source Summit Europe

Gabriele is an open source executive and technologist at heart. He spent over 15 years building developer ecosystems to deliver value through open source across Europe and the US. He thrives on driving innovation both contributing to open source communities and joining commercial open source ventures, whether it’s for an early-stage tech startup, a Fortune 500 firm, or a non-profit foundation. Previously Director of Product Management at Alfresco, as Executive Director Gabriele grew the Fintech Open Source Foundation FINOS from the ground up, with the vision of creating a trusted arena for the global financial services industry to innovate faster, leveraging open source as a model of collaboration. Gabriele holds a Master in Computer Engineering, is a Committer for the Apache Software Foundation, and advises open source startups. He’s a passionate soccer fan, reggae music connoisseur, and special needs dad and advocate wannabe.

Jonathan Katz is a Principal Product Manager – Technical on the Amazon RDS team and is based in New York. He is a Core Team member of the open source PostgreSQL project and an active open source contributor.

Fatima is a Developer Evangelist at GitLab and the voice of the community. She loves coding challenges and storytelling. Before GitLab, she was a backend developer, Drupal core contributor, and mentoring lead. In 2018, she received the Women in Communications & Technology (WCT) Rising Star leadership award for her efforts in teaching and advocacy. When she’s not playing board games, beating escape rooms, or playing co-op adventures with friends, you can find Fatima reading by the ocean.

Dave Lago is a seasoned engineering manager at Amazon Web Services (AWS), where he leads a team focused on enhancing the security of OpenSearch. With strong background in software engineering and a passion for open source, Dave has dedicated his career to creating and maintaining secure, scalable, and accessible technology.

Marie Austenaa leads Digital Identity for Visa. She has worked in digital identity since 2014, when she led GSMA’s global programme on Digital Identity for mobile operators around the world and later at Signicat – one of the leading digital identity service providers in Europe. Prior to this, Marie has held leadership roles at Telenor and Vodafone to develop new digital services. Her expertise and leadership have been instrumental in shaping the digital landscape and driving innovation in the industry. Marie currently serves as the Board Chair for the Open Wallet Foundation (Linux Foundation).

Vivek Mahajan is a global business leader as well as an innovation and technology executive with extensive experience working for leading global tech companies, mist recently Fujitsu.After graduating with a Master’s in electrical engineering and an MBA in Finance/Accounting, he started his career in Silicon Valley as an information technology specialist. Vivek has lived and worked globally including United States, Australia, Singapore, Japan and India.

Ed Parsons is Google’s Geospatial Technologist, with responsibility for evangelising Google’s mission to organise the world’s information using geography. In this role he maintains links with Governments, Universities, Research and Standards Organisations which are involved in the development of Geospatial Technology.
He is a member of the Board of Directors of the Open Geospatial Consortium and was co-chair of the W3C/OGC Spatial Data on the Web Working Group. He also represents Google at the EMTEL committee of ETSI developing geospatial solutions for emergency telecommunications.

He is a Visiting Professor at University College London and has been an industry advisor to a number of international universities.

Ed is based in Google’s London office, and anywhere else he can plug in his laptop.

Ed was the first Chief Technology Officer in the 200-year-old history of Ordnance Survey, and was instrumental in moving the focus of the organisation from mapping to Geographical Information. He came to the Ordnance Survey from Autodesk, where he was EMEA Applications Manager for the Geographical Information Systems (GIS) Division.

He earned a Masters degree in Applied Remote Sensing from Cranfield Institute of Technology, holds a Honorary Doctorate in Science from Kingston University, London. and is a fellow of both the Royal Geographical Society, and the Royal Institute of Navigation .

Ed is married with two children and lives in South West London.

Patrick von Platen is a team lead at Hugging Face, the creator of the Diffusers library and a core maintainer of the Transformers library. 

He specializes in generative AI for image, text, and audio.

Before joining Hugging Face, Patrick conducted research in speech recognition at Uber AI, Cambridge University, and RWTH Aachen University.

Nithya A. Ruff is 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/

Jonathan Vila is Developer Advocate at Sonar. He is a Java Champion and cofounder of JBCNConf & DevBcn, an organizer at BarcelonaJUG, and a member of BarcelonaJUG. He had been a sought-after speaker at several conferences including DevNexus, OracleCodeOne, DevoxxUK, JNation, DevConf.IN , DevConf.US, JFokus.

Bryan Che is Chief Strategy Officer at Huawei. There, he leads Huawei’s vision and strategy across its overall businesses and portfolio, which spans mobile and consumer electronics, telecommunications, and cloud and AI.

Bryan has tremendous experience building new enterprise businesses and open source technologies. In the open source community, Bryan serves as a board director across various key organizations, including Cloud Native Computing
Foundation (CNCF), Open 3D Foundation (O3DE), and Eclipse Foundation. As an American expat employed in China who has traveled more than 3 million miles to over 40 countries, Bryan has worked extensively with many customers and partners around the world.

Bryan graduated with his Bachelor and Masters degrees in computer science from MIT.

Joined Huawei in 2011 and is now a senior expert in ICT operating systems. Since 2020, he has served as the Chairman of the openEuler Technical Committee and is responsible for the overall technical direction management of the openEuler Community.

Ola Ben Har is the global Developer Relations Lead for Payments at Google, covering a broad set of products such as Google Wallet, Google Pay and Chrome Autofill for Payments. She brings over a decade of experience in managing developer engagement programs across multiple product areas and has been instrumental in setting the vision, developer strategy and go-to-market efforts for these products. Ola Ben Har owns all open source efforts for Payments and Wallet at Google. The open source tools built by the team are used by hundreds of thousands of developers today. 

Ola Ben Har is a member of the Governing Board at the OpenWallet Foundation (Linux Foundation) representing Google as a relying party, Google Wallet as well as Android and Chrome. 

Jim’s career spans three of the largest technology trends to rise over the last decade: mobile computing, cloud computing and open source software. Today, as executive director of The Linux Foundation, he uses this experience to accelerate innovation in technology through the use of open source and Linux.

At The Linux Foundation, Jim works with the world’s largest technology companies, including IBM, Intel, Google, Samsung, Qualcomm, and others to help define the future of computing on the server, in the cloud, and on a variety of new mobile computing devices. His work at the vendor-neutral Linux Foundation gives him a unique and aggregate perspective on the global technology industry.

Jim has been recognized for his insights on the changing economics of the technology industry. His writing has appeared in Businessweek, Wired, and other top technology journals, and he is a regular keynote speaker at industry events. He advises a variety of startups, including Splashtop, and sits on the boards of the Global Economic Symposium, Open Source For America, and Chinese Open Source Promotion Union.