Program Committee

Aeva Black is a queer and non-binary hacker. After nearly twenty five years of contributing to and leading open source projects while working in the private sector, Aeva now leads open source security for the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency.

Executive Architect at IBM. AI and Data Thought Leader. Lead/Chair of LF AI & Data Generative AI Frameworks and Architecture Workstream.

Akihiro Suda is a software engineer at NTT Corporation. He has been a maintainer of Moby (dockerd), BuildKit, containerd, runc, etc. He is also a founder of nerdctl and Lima (CNCF project).

Alexander is currently employed by Intel as Principal Engineer, Cloud Software, focusing on various aspects in Kubernetes: Resource Management, Device plugins for hardware accelerators, Cluster Lifecycle and Cluster APIs. Alexander has over 25+ years of experience in areas of Linux distributions, SCM, Networking, Infrastructure, Release Engineering, Cloud Orchestration, Continuous Integration & Delivery. Alexander is an active member of Kubernetes SIG-Node and CNCF TAG-Runtimes.

Alolita Sharma is a OpenTelemetry GC member and CNCF Observability TAG co-chair. She also serves on the CNCF Governing Board and is a CNCF End User Technical Advisory Board member from Apple. She leads Apple’s AIML observability teams. She contributes to OpenTelemetry, CNCF, Unicode, W3C. Previously, Alolita led observability, search engineering and open source strategy at AWS and has managed engineering teams at IBM, PayPal, Twitter, Wikipedia. She has also served on the OSI, SFLC.in, Unicode Consortium boards.

Ana is the OSPO Program Manager at the Linux Foundation project TODO Group, formed by an open community of practitioners who aim to create, share knowledge, and develop best practices practices on open source management in organizations and ¡ run successful Open Source Program Offices. Formerly she worked at Bitergia, where she finished her MSc in Data Science, whose final thesis focused on measuring DevRel’s success within Open Source development communities.

Annania Melaku is a Technical Program Manager at NGINX, part of F5, where her focus is on NGINX and F5 open source and community. Her previous role as OSS Compliance Lead in the Comcast Open Source Program Office, was focused on automating solutions for open source license compliance and delivery. She has experience in the defense & aerospace industry as well as in the telecommunications industry. Annania has worked various roles spanning software engineering, systems engineering, cybersecurity, and program management. She is passionate about open source, collaboration, innovation, diversity, and inclusion. Annania serves on the TODO Group Steering Committee and was on the 2023 Open Source Summit North America Program Committee. Her educational background includes a M.S. in Engineering Management and Information Systems from Johns Hopkins University and a B.S. in Computer Science from Columbia University. She enjoys art, spending time with family, plants, good food, speakeasies, and all things real-estate (architecture, home remodeling, interior design, & real estate).

Anni Lai is passionate about Open Source and emerging technologies. Her current focus is Generative AI innovation and governance and holds positions of LF AI & Data board director representing the General Class members, Generative AI Commons Chair, and LF Europe Advisory board member. Prior to LF AI & Data, Anni also served on CNCF, OCI, LF Edge, Open Metaverse Foundation, OpenStack Foundation boards and committees and lead many community initiatives. 

Ariel Jolo is an Open Source community expert, known for his contributions to tech events and employer branding. He is the founder of Sysarmy and Nerdearla, the largest technology event in Latin America that began in Argentina in 2014 and has since expanded to other countries, including Mexico and Chile.

In addition to his professional endeavors, Ariel has participated in various tech-related events and discussions, contributing to the broader conversation on technology and community engagement.

Atanas has previous experience in the HPC Field as a Solution Architect at Intel. Before Intel he was senior software engineer responsible for the implementation of a distributed rendering engine at Dassault-Systems 3DExcite and a Research Scientist at the Technical University of Munich dealing with parallelization of numerical simulations.  In the last year Atanas joined the Cloud-Native Software Engineering team at Intel and contributes in the field of CPU and Power Management. 

Senior Software Engineer at Red Hat and a Node.js Technical Steering Committee Member. Beth has been involved with the Node.js project since 2016, when she joined IBM in their Node.js Runtime Team. Now at Red Hat, she’s continuing her work around Node.js. Beth is an active member of the Node.js Release Working Group, who audit the content for and produce the Node.js releases. Her other focuses include the creation of resources and tooling to support Node.js deployments to cloud.

Bob is the tech lead & manager of the supply chain integrity group in Google’s Open Source Security Team. He and his team directly contribute to critical OSS secure software supply chain projects (including sigstore that he co-founded), as well as help drive adoption of best practices throughout the broader open source ecosystem.

Brittany Istenes is the OSPO strategist at Fannie Mae. Brittany focuses on building out the strategy and sustainability of not only the OSPO, but InnerSource and Open Source best practices across the enterprise and beyond. 

Chris Aniszczyk is an open source executive and engineer with a passion for building a better world through open collaboration. He’s currently a CTO at the Linux Foundation focused on developer relations and running the Open Container Initiative (OCI) / Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF). Furthermore, he’s a partner at Capital Factory where he focuses on mentoring, advising and investing in open source and infrastructure focused startups.

At Twitter, he created their open source program and led their open source efforts. For many years he served on the Eclipse Foundation’s Board of Directors representing the committer community and the Java Community Process (JCP) Executive Committee. In a previous life, he bootstrapped a consulting company, made many mistakes, lead and hacked on many eclipse.org and Linux related projects

Versatile and results-driven technical professional with over 18 years of engineering, engineering management, product management and marketing experience. Ability to understand customer’s business opportunities and recommend solutions in a convincing and professional manner. Experienced leader and manager with a history of significantly increasing revenue. Skilled in analyzing and neutralizing competitors’ strengths and initiating mutually advantageous vendor partnerships; leverages strong communication and presentation skills to cultivate solid long term relationships with strategic partners. Strong leadership style built on years of technical selling experience and proven customer interactions.

Chris Xie is a global open source strategist and advocate for sustainable technology and responsible AI. As Head of Open Source Strategy at Futurewei, he brings extensive expertise from Fortune 500 companies and startups, blending technical vision with strategic leadership.

Chris holds key roles in open source organizations, including:
• Chair, ORES Working Group at LF Energy (open renewable energy systems)
• Chair, SCER Working Group at Green Software Foundation (sustainable computing)
• Chair, Marketing Advisory Committee at LF Energy
• Board Advisor, LF Research

His work spans open source policy, governance, and global collaboration, focusing on Responsible AI, Renewable Energy, and the Decentralized Internet. Through initiatives like the Open Source Congress, he helps shape policy, research, and innovation to drive an inclusive and sustainable digital future.

Founding Engineer at Stateful measuring and improving developer happiness every day a bit more. Open Source and Open Standards Advocate. Cross Project Council member at the OpenJS Foundation representing WebdriverIO.

CRob is a 42nd level Dungeon Master
25th level Securityologist. He is a leader within several Open Source Security Foundation (OpenSSF) efforts and is a frequent speaker on cyber, application, and open source security. He enjoys hats, herding cats, and moonlit walks on the beach.

Clare Dillon is an open source and InnerSource advocate and currently works with CURIOSS, a community for university and research institution OSPOs. Clare is also a researcher with Lero, the Science Foundation Ireland Research Centre for Software and a member of Lero’s OSPO team. From 2021-2023, Clare served as the inaugural Executive Director of InnerSource Commons, a global non-profit foundation supporting open collaboration methods in corporate software development. In 2021, Clare co-founded Open Ireland Network, a community for those interested in advancing open source at a national level in Ireland. Clare is a qualified coach and frequently speaks on topics relating to open collaboration and the future of work.

Daniel Izquierdo is a researcher and co-founder of Bitergia and currently holding the position of CEO, he is focused on the quality of the data, research of new metrics, analysis and studies of interest for Bitergia customers via data mining and processing. Daniel earned a PhD in free software engineering in 2012 focused on the analysis of buggy developers activity patterns in the Mozilla community. He is board member at CHAOSS community, President of the InnerSource Commons Foundation, and board member at the Apereo Foundation.

Dr. David A. Wheeler is an expert on open source software (OSS) and on developing secure software. His works on developing secure software include “Secure Programming HOWTO”, the Open Source Security Foundation (OpenSSF) Secure Software Development Fundamentals Courses, and “Fully Countering Trusting Trust through Diverse Double-Compiling (DDC)”. He is the Director of Open Source Supply Chain Security at the Linux Foundation and teaches a graduate course in developing secure software at George Mason University (GMU). Dr. Wheeler has a PhD in Information Technology, a Master’s in Computer Science, a certificate in Information Security, a certificate in Software Engineering, and a B.S. in Electronics Engineering, all from George Mason University (GMU). He is a Certified Information Systems Security Professional (CISSP) and Senior Member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE). He lives in Northern Virginia.

Dr. Dawn Foster works as the Director of Data Science for CHAOSS where she is also a board member / maintainer. She is co-chair of CNCF TAG Contributor Strategy and an OpenUK board member. She has 20+ years of experience at companies like VMware and Intel with expertise in community, strategy, governance, metrics, and more. She has spoken at over 100 industry events and has a BS in computer science, an MBA, and a PhD. In her spare time she enjoys reading science fiction, running, and traveling.

Divya is a Principal Technology Advocate at SUSE, advocating for and contributing to its projects. She is a Kubernetes documentation maintainer and a co-chair for the SIG Community under the Bytecode Alliance. As one of the KCNA exam creators and a lead for the Asian chapter of the CHAOSS Project, she is invested in making technical communities & technologies more accessible & inclusive.

Dr. Youakim Badr is Full Professor of Data Analytics and Artificial Intelligence at the Pennsylvania State University – Great Valley.
Dr. Badr’s current research strategy aims designing and deploying “Trustworthy AI Service Systems.” He investigates research challenges and business problems from a multidisciplinary and systemic perspectives, focusing on the following research areas: AI analytics systems, Trustworthy AI systems, Composable AI systems.

Elena Zannoni is an Senior Director of Linux Engineering at Oracle, with focus on Toolchain and Tracing. Elena has presented at many Linux Foundation conferences on various development related topics, like Tracing, BPF, DTrace, CTF, and more. Elena has been part of the LPC committee, and part of the OSS/LinuxCon Program committee for several years.

I have a unique background that melds modern software development skills with project management and creative experience. This enables me to efficiently shepherd the software development process from ideation to deployment and beyond.

As a teaching assistant at Northeastern University I guided students through the process of learning software engineering. I achieved this by leveraging my ability to communicate complex, technical and abstract concepts.

Founder of Knative serverless project, maintainer of Minder (OpenSSF) and member of sigstore oncall. Currently at Stacklok; previously at Google and VMware, recovering SRE, ongoing runner.

India’s First!!! Technical Trainer, Author, Maintainer, Moderator and Kubestronaut at The Linux Foundation

Georg Link is an Open Source Strategist. Georg’s mission is to make open source more professional in its use of community metrics and analytics. Georg co-founded the Linux Foundation CHAOSS Project to advance analytics and metrics for open source project health. Georg is an active contributor to several open source projects and has presented on open source topics on many occasions. Georg has an MBA and a Ph.D. in Information Technology. As the Director of Sales at Bitergia, Georg helps organizations and communities with adopting metrics and making open source more sustainable. In his spare time, Georg enjoys reading fiction and hot-air ballooning.

Greg Kroah-Hartman is among a distinguished group of software developers who maintain Linux at the kernel level. In his role as a 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. He also works closely with Linux Foundation members and projects, and on key initiatives to advance Linux.

Greg created and maintains the Linux Driver Project. He is also currently the maintainer for the Linux stable kernel branch and a variety of different subsystems that include USB, staging, driver core, tty, and sysfs, among others. Most recently, he was a Fellow at SUSE.

Greg is an adviser to Oregon State University’s Open Source Lab and a member of The Linux Foundation’s Technical Advisory Board. He has delivered a variety of keynote addresses at developer and industry events, and has authored two books covering Linux device drivers and Linux kernel development.

CoFounder and CTO @ Union.ai and co-author of Flyte.org, the LF AI&Data Workflow orchestrator.

Heather Ackenhusen has over 25 years of technical leadership experience, directing large engineering organizations in software development, data science & engineering, network engineering, security, and quality assurance.  Throughout her career, she has driven the introduction of new technologies, products, and services for customers, focusing on product, portfolio, and program/project management.  Heather’s background extends into a variety of industries such as fintech, e-commerce, smart devices, telecommunications, and IT.  Heather has held director and senior leadership roles at Amazon, U.S. Cellular, SAIC/Telcordia, and AT&T.  She recently pivoted to mission driven work, and currently serves as a principal consultant for the Linux Foundation on the OS-Climate project, a non-profit, collaborative Open-Source community, focused on building the data infrastructure and analytical tools required to dramatically increase the flow of global capital investments into climate change mitigation and resilience solutions.

Dr. Ibrahim Haddad is the Executive Director of the LF AI & Data Foundation . Throughout his career, Haddad has held technology and portfolio management roles at Ericsson Research, the Open Source Development Labs, Motorola, Palm, Hewlett-Packard, the Linux Foundation and Samsung Research. He writes and speaks on topics ranging from legal compliance to using open source as an R&D tool to drive collaboration and innovation. [@IbrahimAtLinux]

After 20 years of working as a software engineer, Jake stopped writing software and started writing *about* software—and more—at LWN.net. 17 years later, he’s still at it. He lives in Baja California Sur, México with his wife and a loony dog.

Jim Spohrer is a student of service science and open-source, trusted AI. He is a retired industry executive (Apple, IBM), who is a member of the Board of Directors of the non-profit International Society of Service Innovation Professionals (ISSIP) and ServCollab. At IBM, he served as Director for Open Source AI/Data, Global University Programs, IBM Almaden Service Research, and CTO IBM Venture Capital Relations Group. At Apple, he achieved Distinguished Engineer Scientist Technologist (DEST) for authoring and learning platforms. After MIT (BS/Physics), he developed speech recognition systems at Verbex (Exxon), then Yale (PhD/Computer Science AI). With over ninety publications and nine patents, awards include AMA ServSIG Christopher Lovelock Career Contributions to the Service Discipline, Evert Gummesson Service Research, Vargo-Lusch Service-Dominant Logic, Daniel Berg Service Systems, and PICMET Fellow for advancing service science. In 2021, Jim was appointed a UIDP Senior Fellow (University-Industry Demonstration Partnership).

Joe Sepi is passionate about advancing the web forward through open source technologies and open communities. He has held engineering leadership positions at The New York Times, Adobe, Credit Suisse, Sears as well as a few start-ups. He joined IBM to lead developer advocacy for StrongLoop, lead the North America-East (NYC and beyond) dev advocacy team, and is currently focused on his passion, Node + JS, as an open source engineer. He was also recently promoted to be Program Director of Open Tech at IBM. At night, he plays in a couple punk rock bands. 

Jonathan Corbet is the kernel documentation maintainer, co-founder of LWN.net (and the author of its Kernel Page), a member of the Linux
Foundation’s Technical Advisory Board, and the lead author of Linux Device Drivers, Third Edition. He lives in Boulder, Colorado, USA.

For more than 19 years I have been helping organizations being Lean\Agile and modernizing their App Portfolios and Software Development Life Cycle. Using DevOps, Cloud, PaaS, Containers, Microservices, API we increased delivery velocity and reducing TCO.
Passionate by Open Source, as a pragmatic leader I’m used to work with partners and technologies from everywhere and building bridges between traditional IT and innovative approaches.

As a community member, I have been engaged in various non-profit communities to contribute and promote Open Source. Throughout my career I have been active on producing content as Blog posts, articles, videos about technologies.

Jono Bacon is a leading community and collaboration speaker, author, and podcaster. He is the founder of Jono Bacon Consulting which provides community strategy/execution, workflow, and other services. He previously served as director of community at GitHub, Canonical, XPRIZE, and OpenAdvantage. His clients include Huawei, GitLab, Microsoft, Intel, Google, Sony Mobile, Deutsche Bank, Santander, HackerOne, Mattermost, SAP, FINOS Foundation, The Executive Center, data.world, Creative Commons, and others. He is the author of ‘People Powered: How communities can supercharge your business, brand, and teams’ and The Art of Community, a columnist for Forbes and opensource.com, founder of the Community Leadership Summit, founder of Conversations With Bacon, and co-founder of Bad Voltage. He is an advisor to AlienVault, Moltin, data.world, Mycroft, Open Networking Foundation, and Open Cloud Consortium.

Kaliya, widely known as the Identity Woman, is a top expert in decentralized / self-sovereign identity. She has committed her life to the development of an open standards based identity layer of the internet that empowers people. Kaliya co-founded the Internet Identity Workshop (IIW), which in the past 17 years has nurtured standards being used all over the internet, like OpenID Connect and OAuth. In January 2020 she was featured in Wired UK.

Kamlesh is a TEDx speaker and CTO Blockchain at Snapper Future Tech. He is among the top 30 Influencers of Blockchain in India. He is Hyperledger India Co-Chair and a member of the Hyperledger Technical Steering Committee(TSC) drives technical directions of Hyperledger Foundation which is The Linux Foundation enterprise blockchain project. He plays an active role across the Hyperledger community, contributing to the Climate Action & Accounting SIG, Trade Finance SIG, and Hyperledger Global Forum Committee member. He is also a Co-chair of the IEEE Blockchain initiative at the IEEE Global level. Mentor at APIARY Blockchain COE which is STPI & MEITY initiative.

Kate Stewart works with the safety, security and license compliance communities to advance the adoption of best practices into embedded open source projects. She has launched the ELISA and Zephyr Projects, as well as supporting other embedded projects. With more than 30 years of experience in the software industry, she has held a variety of roles in software development, architecture, and product management, primarily in the tooling and embedded ecosystem working with international teams.

Keqiu leads the AI Training & Pipeline Platform team at LinkedIn, empowering AI engineers to develop and deploy larger models faster. Prior to joining the AI Platform team, Keqiu led efforts in scaling LinkedIn’s Hadoop infrastructure.

Kerim is a senior developer advocate at HashiCorp, where he coaches operators and developers on sustainable infrastructure and orchestration workflows.

Before he joined HashiCorp, Kerim worked on Industrial IoT for the Amsterdam airport and helped museums bring more of their collections online.

When Kerim isn’t working, he’s either spending time with his daughter, enjoying aerial photography, or baking a cake.

As a Principal Engineer at Red Hat, Laura Santamaria loves to learn and explain how things work to bridge the gaps in engineering disciplines. She is the host of [Technically Leadership](https://packetpushers.net/podcast/technically-leadership/), a podcast on the Packet Pushers network, as well as a cohost for the the [Cloud Native Compass](https://cloudnativecompass.fm/) podcast and was the curator for [A Minute on the Mic](https://aminuteonthemic.com), a cohost for [The Hallway Track](https://thehallwaytrack.fireside.fm/) podcast, and the host of [Quick Bites of Cloud Engineering](https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLyy8Vx2ZoWlohOiedbaQqT5xYRkcDsm10). As a community member, she co-hosts multiple meetups in the Austin, Texas, area, including Cloud Austin. For many years, she taught Python for the Women Who Code Austin meetup, as well. She is an organizer for DevOpsDays Austin and PyTexas and advises KCD Texas, all community-run conferences, as well as a global core member for the DevOpsDays community. For the past few years, she has been a returning program committee member for Open Source Summit’s Cloud Open track that explores cloud infrastructure and cloud apps. Outside of tech, Laura runs, reads, and watches clouds—the real kind.

Lauren is an award-winning author, analyst, and designer of data systems for the U.S. Federal government. Career highlights include leading service design for an agency database with 46 million+ unique data points, PDF parsing for a website migration from PHP to Drupal, and designing the first service models for Chief Data and AI Offices.

Lauren currently supports the U.S. Coast Guard’s first Chief Data and Artificial Intelligence Officer (CDAO), where she leads design activities to align data mesh, governance, AI, and analytics with the Coast Guard’s key priorities. Her first book, “Designing Data Governance from the Ground Up”, was adapted into a LinkedIn Learning course.

Lauren is a founding editor of Springer’s AI and Ethics journal and a former area editor for Data and Policy, an open access journal with Cambridge University Press. She has presented at venues/with partners including Princeton and Columbia Universities, the U.S. State Department, and Twitter’s San Francisco headquarters. 

Prior to joining Steampunk, Lauren was an associate principal analyst at Gartner, where she covered the impact of emerging tech like AI and blockchain on small business owners. Lauren has written for Harvard Data Science Review, Financial Times, and The Guardian, among other publications. She has also peer reviewed technology research and books published by the GovLab at NYU, O’Reilly Media, and The Atlantic Council. 

Lauren is a fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, a former member of the Association for Computing Machinery’s Distinguished Speakers Program, and a member of the International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences, where she helps judge the Webby Awards. She is on 2 nonprofit boards and volunteers with The Linux Foundation.

Dr. Malini Bhandaru is a Senior Distinguished Engineer and Cloud Native Architect focused on AI, confidential compute, security, and performance at Intel. She has over a decade of open source cloud experience working on projects such as the Open Platform for Enterprise AI (OPEA), Confidential Containers, Kubeflow, Kubernetes, EdgeX Foundry, and OpenStack. At Intel, she leads the Cloud Native Open Source team to enable the discovery, monitoring, and management of hardware resources and capabilities in a generic manner to Kubernetes workloads, be they processor cache, memory bandwidth, accelerators, or confidential computing. Currently, she chairs the OPEA Technical Steering Committee. She started at Intel as a Xeon Server power and performance architect. She has also worked on autonomous driving, health care, online billing, and telecommunication applications. Malini is a frequent conference speaker, served on KubeCon, Open Source Summit, and OpenStack program committees, co-authored the OpenStack security guide, and is a co-author of the AI and Cloud Native whitepaper to name a few. She has a Ph.D. in Machine Learning, 25+ patents, a mentor for women in technology, a STEM coach, and avid gardener.

Marlow is a Cloud Software Architect working on resource management for Kubernetes at Intel. She also is a chair for the CNCF Environmental Sustainability TAG. Marlow has expertise in resource management, the AI/ML Kubernetes cloud compute ecosystem, embedded systems, high performance compute system tools, kernel drivers, tracing libraries, and security. Marlow’s interests lie in optimizing the cloud native ecosystem for both heterogenous systems and also for HPC/AI/ML compute with an eye for both performance and sustainability.

Masae is a Staff Open Source Program Manager, leading the company’s open source business and community strategy alignment, and strategy consultations. Previously she led numerous programs that include large-scale DX/IT transformation as part of M&A at Cisco, security compliance process implementation, consumer platform development on Linux/Android/iOS at multiple companies including NEC and Renesas. She began her career as a software developer in Japan, then worked in the US/Microsoft, now lives in the UK with English husband and son.

Michael Dolan is VP of Strategic Programs supporting open source projects and legal programs at The Linux Foundation. He has set up and launched dozens of open source and open standards projects covering technology segments including networking, virtualization, cloud, blockchain, Internet of Things, big data and analytics, security, containers, storage, and embedded devices.

Mike is also involved in OpenChain and SPDX, and runs open source legal programs such as The Linux Foundation’s annual Legal Summit and Open Compliance Summit. Prior to joining The Linux Foundation, he spent eight years at IBM in roles across systems, services, and software.

He received an M.B.A. from Case Western Reserve University, a J.D. from Cleveland State University, and a B.S. in economics from John Carroll University. Mike is a member of the Ohio State Bar Association.

Nancy Rausch is an R&D Manager and Data Scientist in Research and Development at SAS Institute. She leads a team of research engineers that focus on the application of AI and machine learning methods for Data Management. She is also a researcher in SAS’ energy technology sector, with a focus on leveraging machine learning methods for energy forecasting. 

Natali Vlatko (she/her) is an Open Source Architect at Cisco, specializing in open software, policy, compliance, and governance, and is a SIG Docs Co-Chair for Kubernetes. She plays on the fun computer in her spare time. Her academic background is in Egyptology and Archaeology; specifically, burial customs across the various kingdoms of Ancient Egypt. Ask her about dead stuff.

Nathan Walker has enjoyed the opportunity to work in the web/mobile app development industry for over 15 years now. Spending several years working across multiple industries helped establish a focused sensibility with client needs. A cofounder of nStudio and an active member of the NativeScript Technical Steering Committee with a passion for open source.

Nicole has worked in different projects developing safety relevant embedded software before starting as an independent safety assessor. 
With now more than ten years of experience as a functional safety expert, she supported several customers to show their compliance with ISO 26262 and/or other safety standards. Currently she is utilizing her experience regarding the development of highly reliable software to enable both closed and open source solutions to be used in critical products, focusing on safety, security and compliance.

Niki Manoledaki is a Software Engineer at Weaveworks working on various open source cloud native tools. She is an advocate for environmental sustainability initiatives at Weaveworks as well as the CNCF Environmental Sustainability TAG and GitOps WG. She was previously a maintainer of eksctl, the official AWS EKS CLI.

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/

Philipp Ahmann is a Senior OSS Community Manager at ETAS GmbH (a Robert Bosch GmbH subsidiary), specializing in safety-critical and automotive-grade open source software. With over 15 years of experience in Linux-based automotive software platforms, Philipp has held various roles including Software Engineer, Technical Team Lead, and Project & Line Manager. He also has experience in technical business development and product management for embedded open source software within Bosch, with a focus on Linux & IoT products.

Currently, Philipp chairs the Technical Steering Committee for the ELISA Project (Enabling Linux in Safety Applications) at the Linux Foundation (LF) and leads the project’s Systems Working Group. He is further inaugural advisory board member of the Linux Foundation Europe.

I am a Software Engineer at IBM, where I play a key role in developing the IBM CI/CD Offering based on Tekton Pipelines. As a lead on the platform development team, my primary focus is on designing and implementing prescriptive pipelines that cater to the diverse needs of hundreds of teams across the organization. I am also a maintainer for Tekton Pipelines and have been serving on the program committee since 2022.

Robin Bender Ginn is the Executive Director of the OpenJS Foundation, the open and neutral home to grow and sustain the JavaScript and web ecosystem.

Rose Judge is a Senior Open Source Engineer at Broadcom (formerly VMware) where she works on the supply chain security team to improve gaps around SBOM creation, quality, distribution and policy. She is also an open source project maintainer, Chair of the SPDX Steering Committee and Chair for the Linux Foundation’s Automating Compliance Tooling Technical Advisory Council.

Royal O’Brien is a software and hardware engineering veteran with more than 30 years of experience in the corporate enterprise and video game industries, having founded multiple companies from software development to service solutions. He has multiple patents in both video, telephony & digital distribution technologies. He has invented and holds multiple issued patents in the video, VOIP, game, and digital distribution technology industries and has successfully commercialized multiple products in the marketplace from theory to final release.

Ruijing is a software engineer with deep knowledge in virtualization, network, storage, embedded system.

Ruth Ikegah is an Open-Source Program Manager, Community Manager, GitHub Star, and Technical Writer. She is sparked about onboarding beginners into the tech system, especially the open-source space. 

Sasha helps maintain the Linux Kernel Stable and LTS trees. He is currently employed by NVIDIA where he helps make Linux better. Previously, Sasha was employed by Google, Microsoft, and the Ksplice team in Oracle.

With a passion for community building and a focus on developer happiness, Shilla Saebi champions using open source and empowers technologists to create innovative solutions while collaborating with upstream open source communities. As the Sr. Director of Comcast’s Open Source Program Office, Shilla, drives the company’s open source strategy and advances collaboration within the broader tech ecosystem. Shilla has a wealth of experience in the open source world. Her commitment to open source extends beyond her work at Comcast, as evidenced by her role as a CNCF Ambassador and a member of the TODOGroup Steering Committee since 2021. She was involved with OpenStack for over five years, serving on both the User Committee Board and the Superuser Editorial Advisory Board, and is a maintainer of several open source projects. Shilla enjoys good music, traveling, coffee, outdoor activities, and art when she’s not working.

Shuah Khan is a Kernel Maintainer & Linux Fellow at The Linux Foundation. She is an experienced Linux Kernel developer, maintainer, and contributor. She authored, A Beginner’s Guide to Linux Kernel Development (LFD103) training course. She designed and leads the Mentorship program aimed at increasing diversity in open source and providing equitable access to learning resources.

She serves on the Linux kernel Code of Conduct committee and the Linux Foundation Technical Advisory Board.

Stefano Stabellini is a Fellow at AMD, where he leads system software architecture and the virtualization team. Previously, at Aporeto, he created a virtualization-based security solution for containers and authored several security articles. As Senior Principal Software Engineer in Citrix, he led a small group of passionate engineers working on Open Source projects. Stefano has been involved in Xen development since 2007. He created libxenlight in November 2009 and started the Xen port to ARM with virtualization extensions in 2011. Today he is a Xen Project committer, and he maintains Xen on ARM and Xen support in Linux and QEMU.

Stefka Dimitrova is a Senior Program Manager within the Source Strategy team, where she fosters community development and works on guidelines and tools to improve the health of open source projects. She has a business and financial background and has been working in the Software Development industry for the last 10 years, managing program-level tasks, process responsibilities, and continuous improvement initiatives. In her free time, Stefka loves rock climbing and hiking, and guides kids and teenagers in adventure programs and summer camps. She acts in an improv theater called “Playback” and is fascinated by human nature, psychology and personal development, in which she is an avid reader and learner.

Steven Rostedt currently works for Google on the ChromeOS baseOS performance team. He is the main developer and maintainer for ftrace, the official tracer of the Linux kernel, as well as the user space tools and libraries that interact with the Linux tracing interface. Steven is also one of the original developers for the Real Time patch (PREEMPT_RT) and still helps maintain the stable releases of the Real Time patch set. He also develops ktest.pl (in the kernel) and created the “make localmodconfig” option.

Theodore Ts’o is the first North American Linux Kernel Developer, and started working with Linux in September, 1991. He also served as the
tech lead for the MIT Kerberos V5 development team, and served as a chair of IP Security working group at the IETF. He previously served
as CTO for the Linux Foundation, and is currently employed at Google. Theodore is a Debian Developer, and is the maintainer of the ext4 file
system in the Linux kernel. He is the maintainer and original author of the e2fsprogs userspace utilities for the ext2, ext3, and ext4 file
systems.

Tim Pepper is an engineer with over 25 years in open source, with contributions to Kubernetes (emeritus Steering Committee elected member, emeritus Code of Conduct Committee elected member; past SIG Release co-chair and WG LTS co-organizer), open source security projects, Linux kernel/drivers/distributions, software update, Android, OpenStack, etc. Tim has spoken at multiple KubeCon + CloudNativeCon’s, many open source conferences and networking/mentoring events.

As the VP of education, I’ve had the privilege of leading and nurturing an exceptional team of technology experts while embracing a dynamic set of responsibilities in growing our training program.

My passion revolves around introducing and championing emerging open source technologies. With an eye on cost control, I’ve successfully implemented transformative solutions, including artificial intelligence, cybersecurity measures, and cloud-based applications. 

Collaboration is at the heart of my approach, forging strong working relationships across leadership teams, ensuring alignment with our organization’s strategic objectives. My focus lies in achieving the optimal organizational structure, integrating existing teams with acquired entities, and adapting to evolving business needs.

My technical experience spans training courses, application development, documentation, infrastructure, artificial intelligence, quantum computing, and cybersecurity. Staying ahead of technological advancements and ensuring our training program remains at the forefront of industry developments is my commitment.

Attracting, developing, and retaining top-tier technical professionals is a personal passion. I continuously evaluate and enhance teams to ensure they possess the necessary skills to excel.

Ting Zhou works on open source Cloud Native Storage solutions such as MinIO and Ceph at Intel, optimizing secure storage by leveraging hardware features for fast cryptography. She has also worked on Deep Learning optimizations across Intel Server and FPGA offerings, media SDK development for embedded systems, audio enablement for Android systems, and worked on Carrier Grade Linux validation. Ting’ has worked closely with SUSE, Alibaba and Samsung teams, contributing to DL, smart phones, and tablet design wins for Intel. 

Anthony I. (Tony) Wasserman has been a Professor in the Software Management program at Carnegie Mellon University’s Silicon Valley campus since 2005. At CMU-SV, he created the Center for Open Source Investigation, a center that serves as a focus for his research.

Previously, Tony was the founder and CEO of Interactive Development Environments (IDE), a company that was one of the first 100 dot-coms and created the innovative multiuser platform for Software through Pictures (StP). He later served as VP of Engineering for a dot-com startup and as VP for Bluestone Software, a developer of a Java EE application server. His work at Bluestone included creating mobile web applications in 2000, as the very first smartphones were entering the marketplace. Early in his career, Tony was Professor of Medical Information Science at the University of California – San Francisco, leaving to start IDE.

Tony is a Life Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) and a Fellow of the ACM, honored for his contributions to integrated software engineering environments. From 2010 to 2016, He served on the Board of Directors of the Open Source Initiative (OSI) and since 2015 has been the chair of IFIP Working Group 2.13 (Open Source Systems), a group belonging to the International Federation of Information Processing’s Technical Committee on Programming. He is an advisor to several startups, has served as a judge at numerous startup competitions, and is a frequent speaker at both research and practitioner-oriented conferences around the world.

Tony has served as a Visiting Professor at the Vrije Universiteit (Amsterdam), the Université de Genève, and the National University of Singapore. He has visited more than 70 countries. Tony enjoys photography and posts many of his photos on Flickr.

A “jackie of all trades” (and mistress of being herself), Tracy is a Technical Community Advocate at Isovalent focusing on all things Cilium, security, observability, and Anxiety Driven Development. When she isn’t leveling up her programming skills, hanging with her pup, or learning all she can about the next “Something-OPS”, she likes helping others have “lightbulb” moments. Tracy is active in the open source community and is a strong believer that open source is like gardening – pay attention to your conditions, and water only when needed. You can find her everywhere @tracypholmes.

Vince McMullin is the Founder and CEO at GenXP.