Program Committee

Abigail Afi Gbadago is a software engineer, technical writer and an organizer across a number of open source communities. 
She is passionate about community building and sharing her experiences through global speaking engagements, workshops and articles. 

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.

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.

Aleksandra Jones works at The Linux Foundation as a course technical maintainer and writer, with a focus on emerging technologies like WebAssembly. Linux continues to fascinate her even with a certification in Linux Kernel Internals and Development. She has co-authored two courses and is authoring more courses to come. As an editor for the Evil Tux blog, she evaluates technical tutorials to ensure material is accurate and engaging for an audience seeking professional insight on topics like artificial intelligence and cybersecurity. In her leisure, she participates in capture the flag competitions and explores cybersecurity projects.

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.

Alexios Zavras (zvr) is the Chief Open Source Compliance Officer of Intel Corp. He has been involved with Free and Open Source Software since 1983, and is an evangelist for all things Open. Besides his duties in Intel, he is an active participant in a number of industry-wide efforts around compliance issues, like SPDX and OpenChain.

He has a PhD in Computer Science after having studied Electrical Engineering and Computer Science in Greece and the United States.

Alexey Brodkin is currently serving as Senior Engineering Manager at Synopsys Inc., where he manages the development of runtime software for ARC processors. A dedicated advocate for open-source software, Alexey has devoted a substantial part of his career to contributing to projects such as the Linux kernel, Zephyr RTOS, U-Boot, etc. Beyond individual contributions, he has also taken on roles as a mentor and team leader, fostering collaboration and innovation within the open-source community.

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.

Anas Nashif is a Principal Software Engineer at Intel. He is the upstream maintainer of various Zephyr subsystems and areas and the chair of the Zephyr Technical Steering Committee. Anas has been involved with Zephyr since 2015.

Dr. Andreas Fehlner works as software engineer for artificial intelligence in pre-development with a focus on transferring ideas in the field of AI to working products at TRUMPF Laser. He is passionate about the goals of Open Source for AI. As an elected member of the ONNX (Open Neural Network Exchange) Steering Committee, he is committed to establishing this standard. He also represents ONNX within the Technical Advisory Council (TAC) of the LF AI & Data project. He also is one of the Chairs of the Trusted AI Committee of the LF AI & Data project. 

Seasoned software builder and technology leader based in Seattle, Washington. Current research areas are on model serving and inference. Expertise in Open AI + Data, Containers & Virtualization. CNCF Ambassador at the Linux Foundation and Community Lead of Cloud Native Seattle. Packt tech advisory board. Guest lecturer at the University of Washington.  

Managed, built, and scaled numerous tier-1 products, new initiatives, businesses, and teams across various technical domains. Include Amazon Bedrock, Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3), AWS App Runner, AWS Fargate, Amazon Alexa, and Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS). 

Public speaker and author. Actively lead cloud-native solutions adoption across organizations and engage in open-source projects like Kubernetes, Envoy, OpenTelemetry, gRPC, containerd, Firecracker, Kafka, and RocksDB.

Serve as the program committees for esteemed global conferences: Open Source Summit, Open Source Summit GenAI & ML Summit, KubeCon and CloudNativeCon, Southern California Linux Expo, DockerCon. Homepage: https://pengandy.com/

Anita is a Developer Advocate and technical writer with a track record leading great efforts in open source and cloud communities on a global scale. Her dedication extends to fostering Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) within the tech ecosystem.

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).

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.

Arun Azhakesan heads the Secure Development and Compliance team that drive open-source compliance activities at Siemens Healthineers. He is co-project lead for Eclipse SW360 and an active member of the LF OpenChain Project and multiple open source communities that focus on developing open source-based tools for open source compliance.

Ayumi Watanabe is a core member of OpenChain Japan Sub Workgroup and known as a SBOM evangelist. Her strong point is a knowledge of many tools for SBOM generation and management, a wide range of experiences as an OSS management consultant, and strong connection with some communities regarding OSS compliance.

I am an engineer in the Virtualization group with focus on KVM and the Linux kernel. I am broadly interested in the topics of Virtualization performance and hypervisor fuzzing. I have worked on other subsystems in the kernel such as PCI and device drivers.

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.

Catherine is a software developer passionate about building solutions at the intersection of technology, product and open source 

She thrives in using technology to build user-centric products & solutions that make a positive impact in people’s lives. 

Her diverse skillset has enabled her to adapt and contribute rich perspectives to product and engineering teams.

She also enjoys mentoring people, and contributing to technical communities through Open Source initiatives. 

Chan is a Sr. Technical Program Manager at the Comcast Open Source Program Office, where she works closely with technologists to successfully open source and innersource projects. Chan is a certified Project Management Professional (PMP) and a previously practicing scrum master, with experience in program managing federally-funded, health-related, and data-driven research and software development projects. She holds a Master’s degree from the University of Pennsylvania’s Spatial Analytics program, and has a strong background in data analytics and informatics. During her free time, she explores adventures like rock climbing, snowboarding, hiking the backcountry, and meditating. 

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

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.

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.

Chuck Wolber is a Boeing Associate Technical Fellow primarily focused on embedded platform engineering. He has developed multiple DO-178C certified Linux platforms currently in service on Boeing production aircraft. Chuck is co-author of the book Linux Toys, he is credited with contributions to multiple early editions of the Red Hat Linux Bible, and has served as president and board member of the Tacoma Linux Users Group. Chuck holds a B.S. in Mathematics from Washington State University.

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. 

Cornelius helps teams at Deutsche Bahn, the German railway company, to use and contribute to open source software. He has a background from more than two decades in the open source community and industry. Originally a software developer he now focus on management of open source.

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. 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.

Inspired by the Inner Source movement years ago, Dr. Wolfgang Gehring turned into an ambassador for Inner and Open Source and has been working on enabling and spreading the good word of FOSS within Mercedes-Benz and its IT-subsidiary Mercedes-Benz Tech Innovation (MBTI). A software engineer by trade, Wolfgang’s goal is to enable Mercedes-Benz to fully embrace FOSS and become a true Open Source company. He leads MBTI’s Open Source Program Office, is a member of the Mercedes-Benz FOSS Center of Competence, and a Director of the Eclipse Foundation.

In his free time, Wolfgang likes to engage in conversations about soccer and is a passionate traveler and scuba diver. He calls Albert Einstein’s birth city of Ulm his home in Southern Germany.

I am a Linux kernel engineer located in Portland, Oregon. I focus on support for ARM and RISC-V SoCs in Linux as well as RISC-V architecture features like the RISC-V QoS spec (CBQRI). I serve on the board of directors for the BeagleBoard.org Foundation, and I’m an ambassador for RISC-V International.

Eduardo Casarero, a 20-year veteran in open source, leads the SysArmy tech-community, organizes Nerdear.la a technology event in Argentina and Chile, and he is Director of Business Services at Percona. 

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.

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.

Passionate about helping people discover the exciting world of artificial intelligence, Ezequiel is a frequent AI conference presenter and the creator of use cases, tutorials, and guides that help developers adopt open source AI tools.

Fabiano Fidencio, a Cloud Orchestration Software Engineer at Intel, has a strong passion for easing the usability of the projects he works on. For the past few years, he’s served as an Architecture Committee member of the Kata Containers project and has been involved with Confidential Containers from its early stages.

Fabio works as a Software Engineer for Google on the ChromeOS Embedded Controller project. He is an electronics hobbyist and embedded enthusiast, a Zephyr subsystem maintainer and release engineering team member.

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.

Technical trainer and Kubernetes course maintainer for Linux Foundation.

Gabriele Paoloni is an Open Source Community Technical Leader at Red Hat, working on innovative methodologies to qualify Linux for functional safety usage. He is a passionate technologist with strong experience in functional safety and Linux Kernel development, including previous roles leading FuSa software architecture for Intel platforms, CCIX vice chairman of the TDL working group and HiSilicon PCIe Linux maintainer. Gabriele received a master’s degree with honors in electronic engineering from the University of Rome

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.

Working in the telecom industry in the last two decades it was possible for Gergely to see the evolution from vendor specific hardware to virtualisation and cloud and a to cloud native. Currently Gergely is part of the OSPO team of Nokia CTO which is reponsible for open source. In the last year Gergely’s was working in Anuket, Nepio and several CNCF projects on the relationship of cloud native and telecoms. 

Glenn ten Cate is a seasoned security expert, holding key roles in the past and currently a Senior Cyber Security Instructor at The Linux Foundation. With a track record in security consultancy and training, Glenn is also an author to the Security Knowledge Framework and the OpenSSF. His skills span across security, Linux, and secure coder, complemented by multilingual proficiency in English, German, and Dutch. Glenn’s recognition includes nominations for WASPY in Innovation/Sharing and Best Innovator categories, and an Honorable Mention for the SKF project by Black Duck® Rookies of the Year.

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.

Hart Montgomery serves as the CTO of Hyperledger. Hart has extensive experience in blockchain and cryptography, and previously worked in blockchain and cryptography research at Fujitsu Research where he helped lead Fujitsu’s efforts in Hyperledger. Prior to Fujitsu, Hart received a Ph.D. in cryptography at Stanford under Dan Boneh, where he was a Stanford Graduate Fellow. Hart has numerous academic publications and patents in cryptography and blockchain and brings a wealth of experience in these areas to the Hyperledger Foundation.

I’m an embedded software/firmware engineer and a passionate open source developer. I started working on various open source projects back in the late 1990s and have not stopped since. I am mostly committed to writing low-level, hardware-near device drivers and communication protocols. Over the years I have been working on various, in-house embedded Linux and FreeBSD BSPs but nowadays my work (and my spare time) has shifted to working on the Zephyr Project, a small real-time operating system (RTOS) for connected, resource-constrained embedded devices.

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.

Jay has 20+ years of IT/information security experience dedicated to cyber risk, security, privacy, and compliance. He provides a combined tactical and strategic balance towards the implementation of security and compliance requirements that aligns to an organization’s broader business strategy. Jay believes we should exceed the standard for our customers and partners and take the community approach to understanding business needs. Jay is a trusted advisor, and proud US Army retiree

My name is Jerome Ju and I’m a software developer living in Toronto and loving the world of open source. My open source journey started with the Eclipse Adoptium project where I had the chance to learn from cross-project CI/CD designs. Currently, I’m at Google contributing to Tekton Pipeline OSS projects. This is my second year working on Tekton and I am honored to have been involved in the v1 software release, feature flags migration and etc. exciting projects. When I’m not coding, I’m either shredding snow on my snowboard, aiming for the bullseye in archery, or experimenting with new gelato flavours.

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).

Founding member of the Ericsson Open Source Program Office, working in the telecom industry with standardisation, IP, open source compliance, open source strategy and process management. Currently serving as the governing board chair person of the OpenChain Projects.

John is responsible for open source at TestifySec, a software supply chain security startup. He is a maintainer for the Witness and Archivista sub-projects under in-toto. Additionally, John is an active contributor to CNCF’s TAG Security and multiple projects within the OpenSSF. Before TestifySec, John was an engineering leader at VMware, helping to bring supply chain security features to the Tanzu Application Platform.

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.

Josh Bressers is the Vice President of Security at Anchore. Josh has helped build and manage product security teams for open source projects as well as several organizations. Josh is the co-lead of the OpenSSF SBOM Everywhere project and co-hosts the Open Source Security Podcast and the Hacker History Podcast. He also is the co-founder of the Global Security Database project to bring vulnerability identification into the modern age.

Karen Chu is the Head of Community at Fermyon Technologies. Having participated in the cloud native community since 2015, she is a CNCF Ambassador, Helm community manager/maintainer, emeritus Kubernetes Code of Conduct Committee member, meet-up organizer, and conference organizer. She has also worked on The Illustrated Children’s Guide to Kubernetes book series. When she’s not connecting dots in the community, you can find her pursuing photography, cooking, and sipping on chai lattes in NYC.

Working within the Chief Technology Office in building an Open Source Program Office for the Dutch Tax and Customs administration. 

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.

Katherine Druckman is an Open Source Evangelist at Intel where she enjoys sharing her passion for a variety of open source topics. She is a long-time open source advocate, developer, and podcaster, and is currently the host of Open at Intel and a co-host of the FLOSS Weekly and Reality 2.0 podcasts. Previously, Katherine spent over a decade as Director of Digital Experience at Linux Journal. A passionate Drupalist since she first downloaded a tarball in 2005, she has also been a Drupal contributor and a Software Engineer.

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.

Kersten Richter graduated from the University of Minnesota in 1999 with a degree in Scientific and Technical Communications. She started working for IBM, documenting information for AS/400, which eventually became IBM i. She then worked in the Linux Technology Center at IBM, writing docs around Linux and IBM Power. She then worked in IBM Cloud for several years, documenting Kubernetes, Red Hat OpenShift on IBM Cloud, Satellite, and Code Engine. She ended her 24 year career at IBM on December 31st, 2023. She started working for the Linux Foundation on Jan 1st, 2024, working for RISC-V. In her spare time, Kersten enjoys reading, running, and movies. She also spends time with her dogs, both permanent and foster.

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.

An internationally known open source strategist and community engagement expert, Leslie Hawthorn has spent her career creating, cultivating, and enabling open source communities. She has driven open source strategy in Fortune 10 companies, pre-IPO startups, and Foundation Boards including senior roles at Red Hat, Google, the Open Source Initiative, and Elastic. She currently leads the team responsible for industry community strategy within Red Hat’s Open Source Program Office in the Office of the CTO.

Lucy is a former frontend software engineer (and JavaScript apologist) turned Developer Advocate. Their work is focused on developer education and community building in Intuit’s open source and API strategy.

I am currently working in Nokia Open Source Program Office.

I am interested in Open Source standards like SPDX and OpenChain and in tools that help managing Open Source.

I have been developing open source software for more then 20 years.

Marta Rybczynska has network security background, 20 years of experience in Open Source including 15 years in embedded development. She has been working with embedded operating systems like Linux and various real-time ones, system libraries and frameworks up to user interfaces. Her specialties are architecture-specific parts of the Linux kernel. In the past, Marta served as Vice-President and treasurer for KDE e.V. She has been involved in various Open Source projects, and also contributing kernel-related guest articles for LWN.net. In 2021, she founded Syslinbit, an Open Source consulting company. She has experience with presentations on both scientific and free software conferences, including LinuxCon, Open Source Summit, Embedded Linux Conference, Akademy, FOSDEM and FOSS-north.

Mary Hardy has more than a decade of specialized experience as an in-house open source attorney for large tech companies, advising on all aspects of the use of, creation of, and interaction with open source. She helps enable the responsible contribution to and adoption of open source AI. She has advised on large-scale Linux kernel contributions, corporate merger and remediation strategies on open source, and authored and delivered open source training to thousands of engineers.

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.

I have worked in the Open Source Community for several years working with SPDX and OpenChain. At Arm I manage the Open Source process management.

Maryblessing is a dedicated community architect and passionate advocate, with strong analytical and engagement skills in tech communities. She’s passionate about a sustainable tech ecosystem with a commitment to championing diversity, inclusion, and belonging within workplaces and the broader community.

Michael Gielda is VP Business Development at Antmicro, Marketing Committee Chair of the Zephyr Project and Chair of Outreach for CHIPS Alliance. A Computer Science graduate, he worked as a researcher in the fields of IoT and embedded systems before going on to found Antmicro. Michael is involved in many open source software and hardware projects related to software-driven tools and methodologies, AI, FPGA, ASIC development (among other things). He is working to build collaborations between projects with common goals, and expanding the lessons learned from the success of open source software into other fields.

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.

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.

Nigel is a Senior Developer Advocate based in Austin, Texas. He was drawn to the craft of software engineering because of the agency it provides people to build and interact with worlds of their own creation. He focuses on Cloud Native technologies and his passions in technology are community building, High Performance Computing, and free and open source software (and hardware).

Nikhita is a principal software engineer at VMware and a maintainer of the Kubernetes project. She is the vice chair of the CNCF Technical Oversight Committee and has won the CNCF Top Committer Award in 2021 for her technical contributions. She was also a member of the Kubernetes Steering Committee. Nikhita has been featured in Business Insider as one the ‘top 21 developers transforming Silicon Valley’.

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/

An alliance manager in Sony Group Corporation. He is the chair of Open Source Software License Committee in Sony and works to improve OSS compliance and relationships with OSS communities.

He represents Sony as a board member of OpenChain project. And he is participating the SPDX project and a contributor to SPDX Lite.

Olivier Charrier obtained a Master’s degree in Software Engineering (DESS) from Bordeaux University in 1989. Prior to joining Wind River, Olivier worked for Alsys/Aonix developing and integrating Ada development environment for embedded systems.

After an almost 4 years in the Ada95 engineering center of Aonix located in San Diego, California, Olivier moved back to a South European role, providing consulting on integrating Ada COTS development environment for Mission Critical Space programs.

Olivier Joined Wind River in June 2001 as Senior Field Application Engineer for the South-western region of Europe dedicated to the Aerospace & Defence Market, supporting Thales, Airbus and Safran groups as well as their subcontractors.

In 2007 he became EMEA Aerospace & Defence Principal Engineer to support and coordinate EMEA wide A&D programs, provide consulting on Integrated Modular Avionics and the use of COTS Software Development environment and Operating Systems for Safety Critical systems, also participating in the definition of Wind River corresponding solutions in particular for Safety Certification using Multi-Core systems. In the same timeframe he joined the SAE/ARINC APEX Software Subcommittee to participate in the elaboration of the ARINC 653 standard.

Since January 2017 Olivier has been extending his scope to contribute to other markets, like Railway, Nuclear, Medical and Automotive, worldwide.
In 2021, Olivier joined the Linux Foundation’ s ELISA Project (Enabling Linux In Safety Applications) and recently became one of its Ambassadors.

Paul Albertella is a consultant at Codethink, with more than 30 years of experience in the automotive, semiconductor and mobile device sectors. He’s passionate about software engineering processes and the role that open source software and communities are playing in their evolution. His current focus is on safety and the use of Linux and open source tools in the Automotive industry. He is a certified functional safety practitioner and a member of the technical steering committee for the ELISA project (Enabling Linux in Safety Applications). 

High tech executive with broad experience and proven ability to define and lead effective technical communication initiatives. Specialties: Refine & articulate high tech communication strategy, sharpen messaging, define & execute strategic communication programs, leadership.

Software with 37 years of experience working on embedded safety critical systems. Contributor to the Software Engineering Body of Knowledge and the Software Engineering Competency Model, Software Engineering Program Evaluator for ABET.
Experience with Safety Standards, DO 178C, ISO 13849, ISO 26262.
Experience with Cybersecurity Standards ISO 21434
Experience with Software Quality Standards ISO 12207

Phil is a Principal Engineer for Amazon Web Services (AWS), focused on core container technologies that power AWS container offerings like Fargate, EKS, and ECS. Phil is currently an active contributor and maintainer for the CNCF containerd runtime project, and participates in the Open Container Initiative (OCI) as the member of the Technical Oversight Board (TOB). Phil has also been a long-time core contributor and maintainer on the Docker/Moby engine
project where he contributed key features like user namespace support and multi-platform image capabilities.

Phil enjoys helping others understand and apply container and cloud native concepts and speaks worldwide at industry conferences and meetups, and is a member of the CNCF Ambassadors program. He maintains a blog on container topics at https://integratedcode.us and you can find him on Twitter tweeting away as @estesp.

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.

Rajas is a Senior Member of Technical Staff at VMware and a Tech Lead of Technical Advisory Group, Runtime in CNCF. He has served as the Co-Chair for Cloud Native AI Day Paris 2024. He is active in the AI working group in the CNCF landscape and has been a contributor to the Kubernetes project.

Robert Martin, a Senior Software and Supply Chain Assurance Principal Engineer at MITRE focused on the interplay of risk management, security, and assurance, author of over 60 standards, creator of CAPEC and CWE, and working on standardizing SBOMs and MITRE’s supply chain security System of Trust™.

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.

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. 

Ryan is currently Director of Open Source Security at Intel and is the chair for the OpenSSF Security Tooling WG as well as the alternate for the OpenSSF Governing Board. He has spent the last twenty five years working at the intersection of open source software and security.

Samina Husain brings 25+ years of industry experience in various technology domains: from standards development, satellite systems, software products, telecom infrastructure, broadcast solutions, and consumer electronics. Her industry roles vary from product development, customer operations to executive management. Currently she is the Secretary General of Ecma International, based in Geneva, a not-for-profit industry association facilitating the timely creation of a wide range of global standards.

She received her Bachelor of Electrical Engineering degree from Concordia University, Montreal, and her executive MBA in “Management of Technology” from University of Lausanne (EPFL), Switzerland. She is an IEEE senior member: Broadcast Technology Society, Vice-President; IEEE Future Directions Vice-Chair, Future Technology Forum Chair; and a member of IEEE European Public Policy (EPPC).

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.

Seth is a long time standards program Executive Director and he was the executive who brought the JDF into partnership with the Linux Foundation. Seth worked for the Linux Foundation from 2018 – 2022 and continues to provide consulting to the Linux Foundation. Seth is also the co-founder of Standards Hub, which provides services and consulting to standards consortia.

Shane Coughlan is an expert in communication, security and business development. His professional accomplishments include building the largest open source governance community in the world through the OpenChain Project, spearheading the licensing team that elevated Open Invention Network into the largest patent non-aggression community in history and establishing the first global network for open source legal experts. He is a founder of both the first law journal and the first law book dedicated to open source. He currently leads the OpenChain Project and is a General Assembly Member of OpenForum Europe.

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.

My name is Simon Hein, I’m living in southern Germany near Stuttgart. Currently I’m a embedded Software engineer and as functional safety engineer at Baumer as well as the safety chair and architect for the zephyr project. At my previous employer which was a automotive software supplier I worked mainly with the in-house AUTOSAR classic stack and customer driven middleware projects.

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.

Supriya has been a leader with passion for developing people and teams, delivering highest quality products. She has 20 years experience in software industry with specialization in topics related to Open Source and InnerSource. Her other areas of expertise include strategic planning, change management, and development of new areas, specifically for multi-cultural and globally distributed teams. She is currently working as Open Source Program Office Manager at IKEA.

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.

Thomas Petazzoni is the CEO of Bootlin, a consulting company specializing in embedded Linux engineering and training with a strong open-source DNA. Thomas was formerly an embedded Linux engineer at Bootlin, giving him a solid technical background in the field. Thomas is also the co-maintainer of the Buildroot embedded Linux build system and has contributed over 900 patches to the official Linux kernel.

Thomas Steenbergen helps organizations manage open source in a strategic and efficient manner that meets their business needs. Previously he was the Head of Open Source Program Office at EPAM Systems and HERE Technologies. He is maintainer of OSS Review Toolkit, SPDX, TODO group and a regular contributor to FINOS’s Open Source Readiness and OpenChain. He is a frequent speaker and panelist at various global open source conferences and is always happy to start a conversation around anything open source. See also github.com/tsteenbe for contact and project details.

Tim Bird is a Principal Software Engineer for Sony Corporation, where he helps Sony improve the Linux kernel for use in Sony’s products. Tim is also a member of the Board of Directors of the Linux Foundation. Tim is active in technical projects related to embedded Linux testing and standards, and is the maintainer of the Fuego test system.  He created the Embedded Linux Conference, and has been working with Linux for over 25 years.

A physicist by training, Tobias Kaestner has always been fascinated by the intersection of the physical with the digital world. His professional career started as a SW team lead in a medical device start-up and since then he has served a couple of roles for 15+ years in this industry. He is one of the maintainers of the Bridle project, an effort to publish integration patterns of FOSS into embedded devices and to promote the adoption of FOSS in safety regulated environments.

Tom is a software engineer at Google where he’s a tech lead for a team working to improve the supply chain security of all Google developed software that doesn’t run on Google’s Borg infrastructure.

Tom was also heavily involved in the initial development of SLSA which is partially based on his work at Google.

Prior to working for Google Tom spent much of his career working on software security projects in the defense industry.

Former developer, embedded systems/ HMI, cloud and mobile dev, automotive software manager and open source evangelist, critical to hyped technology, currently Rust fan

Venil Noronha is currently a Senior Software Engineer at Stripe. He’s been a contributor to open source projects in the service mesh domain, like Istio and Envoy proxy.

Victory Brown has worked in the technology space for over three years and is an expert in user experience research. Her involvement in open-source projects includes the open-source design community, sustain OSS organizer, Open Design Africa chapter lead, and CHAOSSBadging. As a researcher and designer, I am passionate about exploring the intersection of creativity and sustainability. With a strong academic background and practical experience in design, I am dedicated to using my skills and knowledge to contribute meaningfully to the field of climate research.

In my work and as a design researcher at Superbloom. I embrace a multidisciplinary approach, collaborating with scientists, engineers, policymakers, and communities to develop holistic strategies that address the complex challenges within and for the growth of ecosystems

Walt Miner has worked for The Linux Foundation as the Community Manager for Automotive Grade Linux since 2014. Walt has spoken at Automotive Linux Summit, Embedded World Conference in Nuremberg, Embedded Linux Conference, LinuxCon North America, and Open Source Summit North America and Europe. Walt has over 30 years of embedded software development and management experience in the automotive, mobile phone, and defense industries.

Yoshitake Kobayashi is the General Manager of Advanced Software Technology Office at Toshiba Corporation. A part of his team provides a Linux distribution for various Toshiba products. His research interests include operating systems, distributed systems, and dynamically reconfigurable systems. Additionally, he is the Chair of the Technical Steering Committee for the Civil Infrastructure Platform Project, hosted by The Linux Foundation.

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.

Benjamin Cabé is a technology enthusiast with a passion for empowering developers to build innovative solutions. He has over 15 years of experience leading developer engagement initiatives with some of the top communities and companies in the IoT, embedded, and AI space. He has invented an award-winning open source and open hardware artificial nose that he likes to use as an educational platform for people interested in diving into the world of embedded development. He is currently a Developer Advocate for the Zephyr Project at the Linux Foundation and lives in Toulouse, France, where he enjoys baking sourdough bread with the help of his artificial nose.

I manage communities for Red Hat focused on automotive, edge, IoT, and emerging hardware (RISC-V). I worked for the Linux Foundation as a program manager for two years, and prior to that I spent 7 years as the program & community manager for the Yocto Project at Intel.