Dawn Foster

Dawn provides consulting services around open source strategy, contributor strategy, improving project governance, and similar topics. She also leads the data science initiative for the CHAOSS project where she is a Governing Board member / maintainer. Dawn is an OpenUK board member and was previously a co-chair of the CNCF Contributor Strategy Technical Advisory Group.

Dawn has 20+ years of experience working in open source positions at companies like VMware, Intel and Puppet with expertise in managing people, open source strategy, building new communities, and managing existing communities with a particular emphasis on developer and open source communities. She has held a wide range of roles over the years, including UNIX system administrator, researcher, consultant, strategist, director / manager, and more.

Dawn holds a PhD from the University of Greenwich, an MBA from Ashland University, and a BS in Computer Science from Kent State University. Dawn blogs about online communities as the author of the Fast Wonder Blog, and she's blogged for The New Stack, Linux.com, GigaOM’s WebWorkerDaily, and in various other places.

She has done over a hundred talks at industry events, including many Linux Foundation events, KubeCon, OSCON, SXSW, FOSDEM and more.