Keynote Speakers

Dagney Braun is Senior Manager of Product on the OpenSearch Team at Amazon Web Services. She is passionate about improving the ease of use of OpenSearch, and expanding the tools available to better support users across all of OpenSearch’s use cases, including search, observability, security, and vector database applications. She is a graduate of the University of Washington.

Jochen Kressin is the Founder and Director of Eliatra and a pioneering figure in the OpenSearch ecosystem. As the creator of Search Guard, he brings deep expertise in search security, compliance, and enterprise-grade implementations. At Eliatra, he leads a team focused on delivering powerful, secure OpenSearch solutions tailored to modern enterprise needs.

A passionate advocate for Open Source software, Jochen champions data sovereignty, security, and control. His hands-on approach and practical insights into scaling OpenSearch while maintaining rigorous security standards have made him a trusted voice in the open-source search community. Jochen continues to push innovation forward, helping organizations across industries unlock the full potential of OpenSearch.

Eric Pugh is the co-founder of OpenSource Connections. Today he helps OSC’s clients, especially those in the ecommerce space, build their own search teams and improve their search maturity, both by leading projects and by acting as a trusted advisor.

He is an active maintainer on the OpenSearch Documentation project, and is focused on expanding the suite of Search Relevance features in the OpenSearch Project.

Fascinated by the craft of software development, Eric Pugh has been involved in the open source world as a tester, developer, committer and user for the past twenty years. He is a member of the Apache Software Foundation and co-authored the book Apache Solr Enterprise Search Server, now on its third edition.

OpenSource Connections mission to empower the world’s search teams comes directly from Eric’s belief in the open source software movement, and the importance of educating people to succeed with it, so that people own their technology.

When not thinking about search, Eric likes to get his hands dirty by building furniture. His next project is a reproduction Danish modern couch, using just hand tools!