Program Committee

Aeva Black is an incurably queer geek and open source hacker, passionate about privacy, ethics, and ancient languages. They work in Azure’s Office of the CTO and hold seats on the Board of the Open Source Initiative and on the OpenSSF’s Technical Advisory Council. Aeva previously served on the OpenStack Technical Committee and on the Board of the Consent Academy. Many years ago, Aeva founded the OpenStack Ironic project, wrote a lot of Python, and managed a few small MySQL databases.

Aeva is a lifelong student of the Buddha Dharma and a frequent keynote speaker at open source conferences around the world. They are also an aspiring, yet time-starved, writer whose recent works include contributing to “Transending: An Anthology Of Trans Buddhist Voices” (2019), and being the technical editor for “Trust In Computer Systems And The Cloud” (2021).

You can reach them at aeva at aeva dot online, or find them on twitter at @aevavoom.

Senior technology leader passionate about building great teams, driving large software engineering projects using open source best practices and creating web and cloud products and services. Subject matter expert in language technologies including internationalization, NLP, machine learning, conversational AI, machine translation, localization.

Currently, Senior Manager managing observability and search services engineering. Open Source subject matter expert at Amazon (AWS), guiding open-source strategy. Co-chair of CNCF observability technical advisory group. Governance Committee member at OpenTelemetry. Board director at Unicode Consortium. Well known speaker at top technology conferences.

20+ Years of ICT, Cloud, Open Source Strategy/Operations/Governance/Compliance (patent, trademark, license, copyright), Business Development, Product Management/Marketing, Partnership Strategy/Recruitment/Management/GTM, Technology Evangelism, Developer Relations, Enterprise Sales and Consulting. Recent focus: Open Source, Cloud/Edge Computing/Monetization, AI/Deep Learning, Diversity & Inclusion Extensive business & technical experience from 6 major platform companies: Sun Microsystems (Solaris & Java), Oracle (Oracle Fusion), FAST Search and Transfer/Microsoft (Enterprise Search), Salesforce.com (AppExchange), SAVVIS/Centurylink (IaaS), and Futurewei (OpenStack, CNCF, OCI, AI/Deep Learning). Built relationships with Board Directors, C-levels, and responsible for managing partnerships & negotiation with/for Oracle, Sun, Salesforce.com, and Huawei in joint engineering development, product integration/certification roadmaps, co-marketing/co-sales, and joint go-to-market strategies. Extensive experience in working with global partners in “co-opetitive” situations. Travelled to 30+ countries, 5 continents, conducting C-level meetings with enterprises, telcos, and operators, and keynote speeches at partner & industry forums/conferences. Passion: Growing Open Source communities, and championing Diversity & Inclusion in tech Language fluency (read, write, and speak at business level): English, Chinese.

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.

Advocating open source principles and practices by contributing to external open source communities focused on Financial Services and Climate Sustainability at Red Hat. Community leadership includes: FINOS Open Source Readiness Co-Chair, FINOS Technical Steering Committee and Technical Lead and founding charter member for the CNCF Environmental Sustainability TAG.

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.

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.

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.

Dawn is Director of Open Source Community Strategy within VMware’s OSPO. She is an OpenUK board member, Governing Board member / maintainer for CHAOSS, and co-chair of the CNCF Contributor Strategy TAG. She has 20+ years of experience at companies like Intel and Puppet with expertise in community building, strategy, open source software, governance, metrics, and more. Dawn holds a PhD, an MBA, and a BS in Computer Science. She has spoken at over 100 industry events, including many Linux Foundation events, KubeCon, OSCON, SXSW, FOSDEM and more. In her spare time she enjoys reading science fiction, running, and traveling.

Evan Anderson is a software engineer focused on serverless and cloud-native software systems at VMware. He is one of the founders of the Knative project, and a member of the Knative Technical Oversight Committee. Prior to Knative, he worked on cloud at Google for 10 years. Outside of work, Evan is a father of two and likes to run on the trails around Seattle.

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.

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]

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. 

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.

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.

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.

Masae is a Senior Program Manager in the Open Source Strategy team within VMware’s OSPO, where she leads the company’s product strategies and community contributions alignment, to improve the business and entire ecosystem’s sustainability. She has presented at LF Open Source Summit/Members Summit/OSPOCon, FOSSBackstage and many other internal conferences. Previously, she led numerous programs including large scale IT transformation as part of a M&A program at Cisco (github dev environment, data center and compliance track), DX, and product and platform development on Linux/Android/iOS at multiple blue chip companies. Masae began her career as a Windows Software Developer in Japan and in the US at NEC/Microsoft. She lives in the UK with her English husband and 16yr 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.

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.

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 recently joined Amazon as 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 technical steering committee chair and leads the automotive as well as systems work group. He has more than 10 years of experience in the field of Linux automotive SW base platforms acting in multiple roles. Currently he contributes to a project focusing on embedded Linux in industrial applications and wider IoT scope.

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.

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 Consultant and GitHub Star. At the early stage of her career in 2020, after she switched from Microbiology, she got introduced to Open Source, an avenue to volunteer and bring ideas to life in tech, and she ran with it. She has, since then, contributed to various projects, including the CHAOSS project and Layer5.

She serves as the Community Lead at CHAOSS Africa, working to improve the health of Open Source communities on the continent. She also doubles as a maintainer in the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) working group at CHAOSS.

She believes in giving back via volunteering, which is why she is actively involved in different communities, including She Code Africa (SCA), GitHub Africa, Layer5, Open Source Stories, etc.

As a result of her commitment and consistency, she received a GitHub Star Award in 2020, becoming the first female in Africa to bag the award. She also received the GitHub Pioneer Award in 2021 and got her status as a GitHub Star renewed in 2022.

Ruth is passionate about helping beginners find their footing in tech; hence, she uses her social platforms to interact with them, providing answers to crucial questions and handholding them through the early phase of their careers.

Stefka Dimitrova is a Senior Program Manager within VMware’s Open Source Community 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.

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.