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, a Japan-based telecommunication company. He has been a maintainer of several opensource container software such as Moby, BuildKit, containerd, runc, and Lima. He has previously talked at several FLOSS conferences such as KubeCon, DockerCon, FOSDEM, ApacheCon, and Open Source Summit.

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.

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. 

Jolo founded of Sysarmy and Nerdearla and has significantly contributed to Open Source in Latin America. With extensive experience as a SysAdmin and in communications, he has effectively engaged with the tech community across various companies.

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. 

Cara Delia is the Sr Principal Community Architect with responsibility for spearheading initiatives in financial services related open source software communities to grow Red Hat’s presence.Additionally, advocate for open source principles and assist Red Hat’s customers in those upstream communities to contribute. 

Cara has over 15 years in marketing and community engagement with the primary focus being in the financial services industry. Cara holds a B.S. in Political Science from Virginia Polytechnic & State University.

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 serves as the Head of Open Source Strategy at Futurewei, where he leads various strategic open source initiatives. His involvement in diverse open source communities has established him as a knowledgeable and strategic thought leader. Chris plays an active role in several key projects and committees, contributing to organizations like LF Research, LF Energy, Green Software Foundation, and OpenSSF, as well as the Todo Group (OSPO). Earlier in his career, Chris started a software startup company as a Silicon Valley entrepreneur , focusing on decentralized computing. Chris holds patents in network management and distributed systems, reflecting his strong technical expertise. Recognized for his cross-cultural leadership, he has been featured in the San Francisco Chronicle Business News.

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 is currently part of the organizing team of CURIOSS, a community for university and research institution OSPOs. Alongside her work at CURIOSS, Clare is a member of the Lero (Science Foundation Ireland Research Centre for Software) 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. 

Daniel Izquierdo Cortazar is a researcher and one of the founders of Bitergia, a company that provides software analytics for open and InnerSource ecosystems. Currently holding the position of Chief Executive Officer, 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. Izquierdo Cortázar earned a PhD in free software engineering from the Universidad Rey Juan Carlos in Madrid in 2012 focused on the analysis of buggy developers activity patterns in the Mozilla community. He is in an active contributor and board member of CHAOSS (Community Health Analytics for Open Source Software) as well as President of the InnerSource Commons Foundation.

Dr. David A. Wheeler is an expert on open source software (OSS) and on developing secure software. 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 Senior Technical Evangelist at SUSE, where she contributes to Rancher’s cloud native open source projects. She co-chairs the documentation for the Kubernetes project & has previously worked extensively in the systems engineering space during her tenure with HSBC & IGate Global Solutions Pvt Ltd. A co-creator of the KCNA exam & a CNCF ambassador, 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.

Eric Egan has an M.S. in computer science and has worked as a release manager and technical trainer at the Linux Foundation.

Software Engineer at Stacklok, securing the software supply chain. Knative steering committee member. Previously at VMware and Google, founding member of Knative. Also previously worked on Google Serverless (Cloud Run, Functions, App Engine) and Google Compute Engine.

Technical trainer and Kubernetes course maintainer for 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 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.

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]

Jake has been wrassling with computers since he first laid eyes on a TRS-80 lo these many years ago. After graduating with a Computer Science degree and a brief dabble in grad school, he did systems programming for a (too) long list of startups, mostly in Colorado. He wrote software for around 20 years and, since 2007, now he writes about software — Linux and free software, in particular — at LWN.net. He lives with his wife and a loony dog near the beach in Baja California Sur.

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, 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.

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 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.

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 focuses on coaching operators and developers on sustainable practices around infrastructure and orchestration workflows.

He enjoys the challenge of codifying the fragile bits of complex systems but is also excited to no longer be on-call, all the time.

Before he joined HashiCorp, Kerim worked on Industrial IoT for the Amsterdam airport and helped cultural institutions navigate the journey from offline to online collections.

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

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.

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 Cloud Security Architect and Intel Sr. Principal Engineer. Her focus areas are confidential compute and cloud to edge security. She has worked for over a decade in open source on projects such as Confidential Containers, EdgeX Foundry, KubeFlow, OpenStack, and OpenDaylight.  At Intel, she first worked on Xeon server power and performance architecture and over her career on applications spanning autonomous driving, health care, and telco. Malini holds over 20 patents, has served on the Open Source Summit, ONES, KubeCon  program committees and is a frequent conference speaker. She has a Ph.D. in Machine Learning, is a STEM coach and loves gardening.

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.

I am a Staff Open Source Program Manager, leading the company’s open source business and community strategy alignment, and strategy consultations. Previously I 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 blue chip companies. I began my career as a software developer in Japan, then worked in the US. I now live 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 utilising 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 licence 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 technical business development manager at Robert Bosch GmbH with focus on Open Source activities. He represents the ELISA project of the Linux Foundation as ambassador and TSC chair. In 2023 he also became advisory board member of the Linux Foundation Europe. He has more than 10 years of experience in the field of Linux automotive SW base platforms working as engineer, team leader for testing and as project manager. All of these projects utilized complex multi-core chipsets. In his current position he contributes to a project focusing on embedded Linux and open source software in industrial applications and wider IoT scope beyond Automotive.

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 Google where he helps make Linux better. Previously, Sasha was employed by 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.

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.

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.