Featured Speakers

Dirk is the Head of the Open Source Program Officer at Verizon. Prior to that, Dirk was VMware’s Chief Open Source Officer, where he lead the company’s Open Source Program Office, directing the efforts and strategy around use of and contribution to open-source projects and driving common values and processes across the company for VMware’s interaction with the open-source communities. Before joining VMware, Dirk spent almost 15 years as Intel’s Chief Linux and Open Source Technologist. Before that, among other roles, he worked as Chief Technology Officer of SuSE and Unix Architect of Deutsche Bank.

Dirk has been an active developer and contributor in several dozen open source projects since the early 1990s, today most of his work is on the Subsurface dive log project and many of the related open source projects around that. Dirk holds a degree in Mathematics and Computer Science from the University of Würzburg, Germany. He lives in Portland, OR.

Margaret Heffernan is a renowned entrepreneur, CEO, professor, and author. Her books include Embracing Uncertainty, Wilful Blindness, and Beyond Measure.

She formerly led both UK and US companies including IPPA, Marlin Consulting, and iCast Corp.

Today, she mentors CEOs and senior executives in order to help them build resilient leadership strategies.

Margaret is an expert in business, leadership, and innovation and regularly contributes to both The Financial Times and The Huffington Post.

She is also among the highest watched TED speakers, with over 16 million views worldwide.

Furthermore, she is a Professor of Practice at the University of Bath and also Lead Faculty for Forward Institute’s Responsible Leadership Programme.

Stacey Kruczek is a Developer Relations leader and a founding Steering Committee member of the Developer Relations Foundation. With nearly a decade in DevRel, she has built and scaled technical communities from hands-on developers to senior technical executives. Stacey has led champion programs and developer-first marketing strategies that drive measurable business impact. She focuses on connecting technical audiences with business outcomes, ensuring the right support, insight, and engagement at every level. Passionate about the evolving role of DevRel, she advocates for its strategic value in modern organizations.

Ramón Roche is General Manager of the Dronecode Foundation, an open-source project under the Linux Foundation supporting drone and robotics development. He leads a global ecosystem behind technologies like PX4 and Pixhawk, and has over a decade of experience in open source. Ramón also organizes the PX4 Developer Summit, uniting hundreds of drone developers and innovators each year.

Kimberly McGuire is an independent roboticist and co-lead of the Aerial Robotics ROS interest group. She is a former robotics engineer and embedded software developer at Bitcraze and has done her PhD in Swarm Robotics at the Delft university of Technology. Kimberly is currently working on projects for simulation for robotics and is an independent contractor for various robotic companies.

An entertainer by nature and tech muse by trade, Daryl is a Seattle based developer advocate for Google’s Open Source Programs Office. Previously, he worked at Google on Cloud Information Experience, Cloud Podcasting team, as well as the Android messages team. Before that he worked at  Amazon on the Kindle for Android and Amazon Game studios teams. Daryl has been a tech professional since 2005 and he’s been performing improv since 2010 and finds those skills help his creative and learning processes for work. If you’ve gotten this far in the bio, make sure to ask him about his 4 years as a professional wrestler.

Lingli obtained her Doctorate in Computer Application Technology from the Institute of Software, Chinese Academy of Sciences and joined China Mobile in 2009. She was a core member of the Novonet project which drives SDN/NFV strategy for China Mobile, and had been working on evaluation and introduction of data plane acceleration technology, running the Novonet Testing Lab for the SDN/NFV trial network for the company. She has been an active contributor and community leaders in various SDOs (ETSI, 3GPP and ITU-T) and open source communities (OPNFV, ONAP and LFN) to boost corresponding industrial collaboration. Currently, she is leading the network intelligent industry operation ecological construction team which drives the auto no mous network transformation with AI/ML enabled internal operation and external enrichment , as a director researcher at the artificial intelligence and intelligent operation center of China Mobile Research Institute.

Arpit Joshipura is an executive leader and open source software evangelist across carriers, cloud and enterprise IT – spanning networking, orchestrations, operating systems, security, AI, edge, hardware and silicon. He was recently voted among the Top 5 Movers and Shakers in the Telecom Industry. At the Linux Foundation, Arpit leads open source networking, orchestration & edge/IOT, including LF Networking projects (ONAP, OPNFV, ODL, FDIO, OvS, DPDK, OpenSwitch, Akraino/Edge/IOT, etc.) as well as major industry disruptions including VNFs to CNFs (Cloud Native Network functions), 5G, AI, etc.

Arpit brings 30 years of networking expertise and vision to The Linux Foundation, with both technical depth and business breadth. He has orchestrated and led major industry disruptions across enterprises, carriers, and cloud architectures, including IP, broadband, optical, mobile, routing, switching, L4-7, cloud, disaggregation, SDN/NFV, and open networking, and has been an early evangelist for open source. Arpit has served in CMO, VP, and Engineering roles within both startups and larger enterprises.

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

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

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