Allison Randal

Is an open source/hardware developer and strategist. She is chair of the board at the Software Freedom Conservancy, vice-chair of the board at the Open Infrastructure Foundation, and co-founder of the FLOSS Foundations group for open source leaders.

Her first geek career was as a research linguist in eastern Africa, but an affinity for technology led her away from natural languages to computer languages. In over 40 years as a software and hardware engineer, she has developed everything from games, linguistic analysis tools, websites, mobile apps, and shipping fulfillment systems, to compilers, hypervisors, database replication, deployment automation, large-scale server hardware, and talking smart-home appliances, worked as a language designer, security researcher, engineering manager, CTO, conference organizer, and editor, written three books, and founded two non-profit foundations and six companies.

At various points in the past, she served as president and board member of the Open Source Initiative, president and board member of the Perl Foundation, board member of the Python Software Foundation, board member at Open Usage Commons, chair of the board at the Parrot Foundation, chief architect of the Parrot virtual machine, Open Source Evangelist at O’Reilly, conference chair of the O’Reilly Open Source Convention (OSCON), Technical Architect of Ubuntu, Open Source Advisor at Canonical, Distinguished Technologist and Open Source Strategist at Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Distinguished Engineer at SUSE, and Principal Engineer at Rivos. She collaborates in the Debian and RISC-V projects and has a PhD in Computer Science from the University of Cambridge.