Biography

Allison Randal is a computer scientist and open source strategist. In over 30 years as a developer, she has worked on everything from games, linguistic analysis tools, websites, and shipping fulfillment, to hardware security, compilers, hypervisors, database replication systems, deployment automation, mobile apps, and talking smart-home appliances.

She is a board member of the Software Freedom Conservancy, board member of the Open Infrastructure Foundation, and co-founder of the FLOSS Foundations group for open source leaders. At various points in the past she has served as chair of the board at the Open Infrastructure Foundation, president and board member of the Open Source Initiative, president and board member of the Perl Foundation, board member of the Python Software Foundation, chair of the board at the Parrot Foundation, chief architect of the Parrot virtual machine, Open Source Evangelist at O’Reilly Media, 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 OpenStack projects, and is currently taking a mid-career research sabbatical to complete a PhD at the University of Cambridge.