Allison Randal

Is a software developer and open source strategist. She is chair of the board at the Software Freedom Conservancy, vice-chair of the board at the Open Infrastructure Foundation, board member of Open Usage Commons, 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 her love of coding led her away from natural languages to computer languages. In over 35 years as a programmer, she has developed everything from games, linguistic analysis tools, websites, mobile apps, and shipping fulfillment systems, to compilers, hypervisors, database replication, deployment automation, and talking smart-home appliances, worked as a language designer, engineering manager, CTO, conference organizer, and editor, written three books, and founded two non-profit foundations and five 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, chairman of the Parrot Foundation, chief architect of the Parrot virtual machine, Open Source Evangelist at O’Reilly, conference chair of OSCON, Technical Architect of Ubuntu, Open Source Advisor at Canonical, Distinguished Technologist and Open Source Strategist at Hewlett Packard Enterprise, and Distinguished Engineer at SUSE. She collaborates in the Debian and RISC-V projects, and is currently working on a PhD in Computer Science at the University of Cambridge.