Open Source Practitioners

Sayak Sarkar

Open Source Practitioner

ThinkRED Technologies

Software engineer with 15 years of experience in building products and helping teams work effectively. Contributed to open-source communities for over a decade, with community building experience in the Mozilla and Fedora Open Source Communities and more recent focus on platform engineering at Red Hat and Upwork. Currently building infrastructure automation tools through ThinkRED Technologies. Interested in sharing lessons learned from both successes and failures in open-source projects.

Shauna Gordon-McKeon

Open Source Consultant

Independent

I am a freelance/independent open source consultant, who has helped dozens of open source projects with a variety of issues, including governance, maintainer burnout, developing leadership pathways, making projects easier to contribute to, running events and workshops for projects, improving documentation, and more.

Coraline Ada Ehmke

Community and Governance Consultant

Independent

I am the creator of Contributor Covenant, the de facto standard for codes of conduct in open source. I co-founded the Organization for Ethical Source, served as Chair of the Governance Futures Network, and co-founded the tech justice collective (m)otherboard. I am the author of _We Just Build Hammers: Stories from the Past, Present, and Future of Responsible Tech_, published in 2025 by Apress/SpringerNature. Certified FOSS troublemaker.

Ruth Suehle

OSPO director and ASF president

Ruth Suehle is the director of the open source program office at SAS, an analytics, data management, and AI software company. She is also president of the Apache Software Foundation and a member of the Open Source Initiative (OSI) board of directors. Ruth has helped build open source communities for nearly two decades, much of which she spent in the Open Source Program Office at Red Hat. Co-author of Raspberry Pi Hacks (O’Reilly, December 2013) and previously editor of Red Hat Magazine and opens

Ruth Ikegah

Open Source Program Manager

CHAOSS Project

I am an Open Source Program Manager with extensive experience designing and implementing capacity-building programs that educate and engage developers in open source technology. I specialize in helping organizations build inclusive developer ecosystems, foster community-driven growth, and drive meaningful contributions to projects.

Christos Bacharakis

Community Manager/Dev Rel

Experienced technology leader who loves to solve complex problems, with 15+ years in program strategy, developer relations, and open source ecosystems. Free time includes basketball, building a campervan, dialing in specialty coffee, and exploring the outdoors with my never-getting-old puppy, Leo.

Dawn M Foster

Open Source Strategy Consultant

Independent

Dr. Dawn Foster provides consulting services around open source strategy, contributor strategy, improving project governance, and similar topics. She is an OpenUK and CHAOSS 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.

Emma Irwin

Open Source Person

Hi, my name is Emma. If we haven’t met before, the most important thing to know about me is that I care deeply about openness. I believe in the power of intentional transparency to drive democratization and to create opportunity for everyone. I hope to contribute to some wishes! I have helped organizations like Benetech, Royal Roads University, Mozilla, and Microsoft build and run successful strategies for consuming, releasing, growing and contributing in the open. I live in Sooke, British Columbia Canada.