In this episode of the Open at Intel podcast, host Katherine Druckman chats with Demetris Cheatham, chief of staff to the CEO at GitHub. They talk about everything from lowering barriers to entry for open source developers to impactful DEI programs to why you need to help everyone in your life become a developer. What do they mean by that? Check it out.
“How can you use what's available today or how can you create what's not available today to introduce more and more people in your lives into our developer community? Whether it is your 85-year-old grandmother or your five-year-old little cousin? Whether it's a little girl, whether it's a little boy, how do you be an onramp? A conduit into the developer community that we all love so much and that we all know is the gateway to innovation.”
— Demetris Cheatham, chief of staff to the CEO at GitHub
Katherine Druckman: Thank you, Demetris. I really appreciate you taking the time to talk to me today. Demetris, as many of you probably know, is with GitHub. She is the chief of staff to the CEO of GitHub. So she has a really, really special perspective on, I would say, the entire open source developer landscape. That's one of the reasons I'm really excited to talk to you today.
Demetris Cheatham: Oh, I'm so delighted to be here, Katherine. Thank you for the invitation.
Katherine Druckman: So really quickly, I have to tell you, my team was following all the activities at the OSPOs for Good Event at the UN recently. That's how we came across your name and thought, well, wow, this is a great person to talk to. We are fellow travelers in this open source journey. And I think you're going to have some interesting stories to tell.
Demetris Cheatham: Absolutely. I'm full of stories. Pre-open source and definitely during open source and, oh my gosh, that UN OSPO for Good Event was just amazing. I'm glad that someone actually came across me because I just love that conversation and all the dialogue we had as part of that conference.
Katherine Druckman: It was exciting to see that kind of open source community world elevated on a stage like the UN. It makes you feel a little bit validated, right? That our work is important and impactful.
Demetris Cheatham: Katherine, I mean, I'm always... And I don't know why I keep being surprised, but I constantly get these moments that remind me of the impact of open source and the UN event was definitely one of those where sometimes you have your head down and you're working all the time in your day to day. And sometimes you forget the ripple effect and the impact of the work that we do. And so you're right, at the UN and being on that stage and that platform, I'm not sure if I would've gotten that opportunity anywhere else, but open source.
Katherine Druckman: Yeah, the ripple effect is a really great term. Tiny little things that we do as individuals have this massive, massive potential, right?
Demetris Cheatham: Right.
Role and Responsibilities at GitHub
Katherine Druckman: I wondered if you could tell us a little bit about your role at GitHub and then how you got to where you are.
Demetris Cheatham: Oh, my goodness. My role at GitHub, you've already given my title, and that's probably the most predictable thing I can say about my role. I tell people all the time. What I do, it literally changes day to day. And even I try to anticipate what had happened the night before by looking at my calendar, looking at Slack, seeing what I have, and almost invariably whatever I thought I was going to be working on the next day ends up not being it. So as you mentioned, I'm the chief of staff to the CEO of GitHub, and I think my job really is just being a trusted advisor and being that kind of extra person for him to make sure... Thomas, when I say him, to make sure that he's able to execute on the vision of GitHub. There's so many things that would come across his desk, and I think I kind of serve as that, not necessarily a gatekeeper, but probably that entryway I would say, into what gets to hit his desk so that there's not a lot of interference.
He's able to make those big decisions that he needs to make, not just for GitHub and our employees around the world, but also for the open source community throughout the globe. And so that's kind of what I do, and I probably cut across just every aspect of the business. I might be working on something HR related one day, might be finance another day. I'm getting ready to jump into some product marketing things. And so I just kind of make sure that everything keeps running smoothly. Just unlock any blockers, serve as a proxy. I speak a lot as you know. So that's why I said there's no one formula for what I do on a day-to-day basis. How I got here, if I was to walk you through my career, you'd see a lot of twists and turns. But where I landed as a chief of staff at a tech company, it totally makes sense, all of those twists and turns.
What a lot of people don't know, is this is my third stint as a chief of staff. I've served as a chief of staff in government to an elected official in Washington, D.C. I've served as a chief of staff at an international nonprofit organization. So the chief of staff role wasn't new to me, but I also have a tech background. I was originally a computer science major as my undergrad from North Carolina A&T. And I have my law degree and my MBA. I've been in finance consulting. If you just mash up a career, I probably use every last one of my degrees and my experiences to date in this role.
Katherine Druckman: Wow. So I think what I hear you saying is you can't possibly ever get bored.
Demetris Cheatham: There's never a boring day at all. At all.
Diversity and Inclusion Initiatives
Katherine Druckman: That is amazing. I bet you have some really good stories. I'd love to hear about your work with a project called ‘All In’ to elevate developers who might be from diverse backgrounds, probably new to the field. I know that's not what you're working on anymore, but I'd love to hear just a little bit about your experiences with that.
Demetris Cheatham: Yeah, definitely not working on it anymore in my day-to-day, but it is near and dear to my heart. I'll just start with, I actually was in open source even before I came to GitHub, I was working for Red Hat. Well, for those…
Katherine Druckman: Yeah. I can see the hat.
Demetris Cheatham: You can't see the hat that's in my background now. But I was the global leader of diversity and inclusion for Red Hat. And GitHub came calling and what really, really intrigued me and made me jump at the opportunity was the opportunity to think about advancing diversity and inclusion beyond just the employees of the company, which is what I was doing at Red Hat. But for the entire open source ecosystem at that time, which is less than four years ago, GitHub had 50 million developers on its platform. So think about the impact you can have there, right?
And even now they have a hundred million developers. So, when I got to GitHub, they asked me to put together a strategy, and I got that together really, really quickly, probably a lot more quickly than they anticipated. So, they said, Demetris, go out and innovate and create. And who doesn't want to hear that, right? You get to think about all of these opportunities and all of these people where you can make a difference. And I got to really think about things. So when I started talking to so many people about open source, what I was hearing is that maintainers, they're the ones that really drive the culture of inclusion within their community or their culture of exclusion, right? And so I have to admit that All In was really focused on how can we give maintainers what they need to create an inclusive environment. But once I started talking to maintainers and others in the ecosystem, they said, we need more maintainers that are from diverse backgrounds.
And so I said, okay, well, if we don't have enough maintainers, where do they come from? How do we get that system moving so we can get more maintainers from diverse backgrounds? And we realized that we had to start earlier. That's when I started focusing on All In as a pilot, with a focus on students from underrepresented backgrounds, particularly students at minority serving institutions in the U.S. Now we know that you do not have to be in college or have a degree in order to have a meaningful career in open source, but I just thought that for a pilot that was a readily available population. We also were thoughtful about what universities, even the minority serving institutions that we focused on, because you have these... Well, I would call, and I'm putting up quotes here, “top tier institutions” that everybody goes and recruits at, but there are some amazing students that for all sorts of different reasons aren't at those universities.
And so I wanted to focus on those ones that are often forgotten about, those that companies might not ever recruit at. And so that's where we started. It is my utmost belief, and I stand on this a lot, that open source is the lowest barrier to entry into software engineering. And yet we had so many students who didn't even know that open source was a thing. They didn't even know what GitHub was. And so that's what we set out to do at All In, is just to give students exposure, access, education on what is open source, and then connect them with meaningful career opportunities. And we have some amazing corporate partners that partner with us on that. And so that's how All In got started. And again, that's still my heart work. I might not work on it day to day, but I was literally in a conversation about All In earlier today with one of our revenue partners who wanted to get another corporate partner into that program, and I was connecting them.
Equity and Systemic Change
Katherine Druckman: That's fabulous. Something that you said is something that I learned not that long ago and was surprising to me. And that is a lot of students don't know about open source. And, for example, don't have a GitHub account, right? It's been a while since I was a student, I'll just say that. And at that time, I was not at all plugged into technology, but it surprised me to know that students who were studying things like computer science even and were programmers, didn't just have a GitHub account. It's something that I take for granted as somebody who's been around a while, and I found that really surprising.
Demetris Cheatham: One of probably the biggest aha moments that I had when I was running All In was the fact that not all computer science programs are created equal. They're just not. I was looking at a statistic that someone on my team shared with me a few weeks ago, and it was stating that... I think that John Hopkins received maybe $100 million by the... I think it was the federal government for their computer science program. And all historically black colleges and universities in the U.S. collectively received less than $2 million during that same period.
There are so many disparities there. Some of the students that I came across in the All In Program, they didn't even have computer science professors. And I said, well, how are you getting your computer science degree? And they literally have professors from other departments giving them access to YouTube videos. You have some universities here in the United States where students are unable to connect to the internet and to Wi-Fi. So they are going down the street to all-night McDonald's to do some of their assignments or they're sneaking on the college campuses of larger universities and hoping that security isn't called on them.
That digital divide is not a word that you hear. It was a big buzzword a few years ago or even a decade ago. You don't hear it as often anymore. And if you do hear it, you hear about it in Third World countries, but it's still very, very real here in the United States. When talking to some of our corporate partners, they said, oh, we've lowered the barriers to entry to even get internships at our companies. Now we only require LinkedIn profiles and their GitHub profiles, but as we've been talking about Katherine, some of these students don't even have those. Or you might have companies that we're looking at, oh, students don't have previous internship experience, so they're not ready for our entry level. Well, during the pandemic, there were a lot of students that were sent home because universities were closed, McDonald's were closed, the libraries were closed, and they live in rural areas that they didn't have access to the internet.
So while we celebrated the fact that during the pandemic everybody working from home, you now have access to a larger talent pool, but there's still a segment of our population that got left behind. And they were left out through no fault of their own. Those are the things that we talk about when we talk about equity. The diversity piece we can actually solve for. There's all sorts of things. We can get people into a system. Inclusion, we can do all sorts of things to make people feel like they belong. But the equity piece, that's the hard work. That's the systemic work. That's the work that spans decades, and that's the step that you don't see the quick ROI. A lot of people just don't want to touch it. So when I start seeing erasure of the word equity that's happening in government and the institutions across the U.S. right now, that's what really, really keeps me fired up and passionate about this work. Because that's the work that everyone doesn't want to focus on, but that's the work that has the biggest meaningful impact.
Katherine Druckman: Wow. There's so much to unpack there. First, I have to say, I'm really relieved that we have somebody like you in such an impactful position who has this awareness, right? So many of us are so disconnected from those kind of realities. You're in your day-to-day work, and we just don't think about it, right? Unless you are actively going out there and learning about that kind of equity problem, then we just don't know. And I have a lot of concerns. I know you kind of hinted at them, but I've seen some things lately that give me grave concern. I think there are some trends and some of them are economic and some of them are not. And I worry about programs that you mentioned and others losing funding, losing support, and like you say, how do we solve for these really critical multi-decade long problems if they're underfunded and under supported? So that's something I wondered if you're kind of plugged into it all or have some visibility.
The Journey to a Billion Developers
Demetris Cheatham: Interestingly enough, I think you might've answered your own question in the lead up to this question, right? One of the things that I hope that people seeing the diversity and inclusion lady ascending to chief of staff to the CEO of a major tech company is that they can see that this work can be done from any seat no matter where you are in any position. And I actually will also assert that people who are not in diversity and inclusion roles have the potential to actually do more to advance diversity inclusion than people that do this every day. As far as exposure, that's the number one way to increase representation. People have to see people that look like them in these positions. They have to see the Katherines and the work that you're doing at Intel. They have to see the Demetris, they have to see… name anyone else.
And, quite honestly, we have the ear of people that actually have the funding and the budgets because oftentimes, like you said, the diversity and inclusion, the social impact budgets are the ones that get cut first, but usually the tech and the other budgets are the ones that do not. And there's a lot of discretion there. I think that, quite honestly, I've been able to do probably just as much in my one year so far in this role as Thomas's chief of staff than I probably have been able to do in several years leading diversity and inclusion. Because I have the ear to be able to impact so many parts of the business to advance diversity, equity, and inclusion. So that part that you said at the tee up of the conversation, like you're lost at what you can do in your seat, that's where I want people to actually start taking the time to think about, ‘What can I do? What can I influence in my day-to-day versus looking at it as a separate thing that I have to get to once all the other stuff that I'm working on is taken care of?’
I think that's the biggest thing I would say there. But as far as funding, you're also hitting at something that we had top of mind when we created our winning aspiration at GitHub, which is to create a world in which there are 1 billion developers on this planet. And so the thing about an aspiration, and we were careful to use the word ‘aspiration,’ is that it's meant to be big and far out there so that people will have to be forced to think differently about something. If we actually said that we wanted to increase the number of diverse developers from 4% to 10%, we probably would think that we just need to make incremental steps to what we're already doing currently.
And, as you just pointed out, we've been making those incremental steps for decades, and they have not moved the needle at all. We needed to actually do something and say something that made people rethink their approach. Because you have to do things differently to reach 10% of the world's current population. You have to really take a look at how do you lower the barriers even further? I said earlier, open source is the lowest barrier into software development, but if we hadn't set up winning aspiration like a billion developers, we probably wouldn't have thought about natural language. We probably would've said what we were already doing.
But now we're saying we need to make sure that people using their natural language, no matter what that is, no matter the language their grandmother speaks, can actually start coding without having to learn the English language. So unlocking the potential, using AI, using natural language, using all of these things that we've taken for granted but haven't applied to the software industry, that's how we're going to reach that aspiration. And that's how we're going to do things in spite of us not having the funding or the funding getting drastically reduced.
Moving the Needle Beyond 2%
Katherine Druckman: Wow. Yeah, that's interesting. Yeah, the natural language thing is an angle I hadn't considered either. See, I'm learning things. I'm learning things in this conversation. This is fabulous. But I do still have a lot of concerns. I mean, I'll call one of my concerns out. I'm speaking at Grace Hopper next month at the Grace Hopper Celebration. I'm really looking forward to it. But they just announced cuts and whatnot because they're not getting the support that they need. And you think of something like that, that's an iconic established event.
And I wondered if you could give me a little bit more updated information here. When I first started in open source, it was a while ago, but the statistics we threw around at the time were that in technology as a whole, if you looked at employees across the industry, was probably about 20% women. But in open source it was only 2%. And so while we do have a lower barrier to entry, I don't know how much we've moved the needle even in those long, many, many years since then. I wondered if you had some thoughts on that and maybe where we are today and have we moved the needle.
Demetris Cheatham: Yeah, I definitely think we've moved the needle beyond 2%. We actually partnered and I authored a survey in partnership with the CHAOSS project and a few other open source leaders around the industry. We partnered with the Linux Foundation to publish the 2021 diversity equity and inclusion survey. There's all sorts of updated statistics on that that you definitely should check out and make sure it's available to your listeners. We saw that women responded to the survey, and we had over 7,000 respondents who said that they felt a lot more welcome in open source than they have in the past. So we are moving the needle somewhat, but there were still some pockets that we have to work on. I would say that one of the things that we have to do is again, increase the numbers as well as be mindful of not taking an open source approach to diversity and inclusion.
One of the tag lines that we thought of at GitHub was, ‘how can we open source diversity and inclusion, having people come together to solve some of these persistent issues?’ And we saw that, particularly with maintainers, when we did a maintainers listening tour where you had a lot of people of color, black indigenous people of color, you had a lot of women who said that they are loving open source and feeling welcome. And they said that it was different than how when they first started open source. And once we kept digging deeper, what ended up happening is people come into open source, whether it's women, whether it folks from underrepresented backgrounds, and if they don't feel welcome in a project, they go and start their own project. And so then it is having this feeling of belonging for them. But then you're kind of breaking apart into silos, right?
Grace Hopper is huge. It's huge. It's huge. I love Grace Hopper. I've never felt so empowered to be a woman in tech than when I've gone to Grace Hopper conferences. I mean, just the beauty and diversity of women across the entire world, all generations, it’s amazing, but setting an aspiration, like how do we create 1 billion developers? What is it that Grace Hopper can do? I think they may have to open their doors to partnerships in a way that they might not have before. There are so many different conferences, and we've talked about this earlier, about how many we go to and travel to, and being on the circuit that, oh my gosh, imagine if they were to partner with Grace Hopper. Imagine if they were to do some things together. And so I think that we are going to have, like I said, to take this open source approach where we're partnering in a collective to take advantage of, and I hate to say this because it's total bull, limited resources, right? That is being driven…
Katherine Druckman: Limited to who?
Demetris Cheatham: Yeah, that's what I said, limited to who? But we have to create a net new value proposition, and I think that we have to evolve. Diversity and inclusion evolves every few years. And I think we're in the midst, especially in this age of AI, with another evolution of diversity and inclusion. And so we have to go back and make sure that the things that we're passionate about, we are evolving our thinking, we're evolving our business model. We are evolving our collaboration models, we are evolving our value. Unfortunately, we're reverting back to it has to be more than just this moral value. It has to have that business impact.
And we're not short. We're not short on research, we're not short on just proof points on how it is a value, but we got to come back and bring everybody back to the table. And so I think Grace Hopper, we got to make sure that we have those institutions and those organizations sustain themselves, but we got to bring more and more people into the fold because there's a net new Grace Hopper that is probably going to start up. How do we make sure that they're a part of the long-standing history of Grace Hopper instead of going out and doing something on their own and diverting resources?
Building Relationships in Open Source
Katherine Druckman: Yeah, that's a fair question. I wanted to get back to this idea of this journey to a billion developers. This is a topic near and dear to my heart, obviously. Because this is what gets me going, right? Talking to developers and nerding out with developers is what I do all day, every day, and it fuels me. One of the things that I always like to talk about is just the human aspect. I feel like in many ways the code is the easy part, right? Solving the technical problems. That's kind of the easy part. Once you get started and get a few years of experience under your belt, that's the kind of stuff that's less complicated, but it's the human part.
It's the stuff that you mentioned, right? There aren't enough maintainers. The maintainers are lacking support systems. The maintainers are lacking enough contributors. There are a gazillion new projects spinning up all the time. How do you support the ones that become the most impactful? I think a lot of that is something that I've seen you reference elsewhere, and that is the importance of building relationships. Could you speak a little bit about your approach and GitHub's approach to creating these meaningful relationships that then lead to the support systems that are so critical for open source sustainability?
Demetris Cheatham: Yeah. At GitHub, you'll see the word over and over again in everything we do: community, community, community. If you really get down to the heart of what we do, we're all about developer happiness. And developer happiness usually is driven by their ability to collaborate and connect to others throughout the world. And so what we're doing and what we're having an easier time doing, especially now in the age of AI, is just growing that community. And you grow that community by giving more and more people the tools that they need to be able to contribute to that community, to be able to build those relationships. You talked earlier about stories, right? I'll give you a prime example and then I'm going to bring it back to GitHub. So, my daughter had the opportunity to travel with me this summer a little bit. I was in Berlin and she had never been to France, she had never been to Germany, and all those things.
I also look at this when I'm traveling around the world with Thomas, when I'm in Italy, when I'm in Singapore, whatever, and I'm always surprised and always struck by the number of, usually teenage girls, who are doing the same TikTok dances that my daughter is doing. They always have this camera set up and they're doing the same exact moves, no matter what their language is. I knew that I could take my daughter and probably plop her anywhere in this entire world. And if she pulls out her phone and starts doing a TikTok dance, she immediately can create a relationship with others. The language barrier is not there.
That's what we're thinking about at GitHub. How do we create that same type of TikTok… forget how you feel about TikTok…how do we create that same type of TikTok community that no matter where you are in the world, you can find those with whom you can collaborate? And that very fundamental thing of natural language is no longer the barrier. That's why we really, really focused on natural language with our Copilot, with Copilot chat, where you can ask a question in the chat box in whatever language you want to, and it's going to respond in your chosen preferred language. All of a sudden, you no longer have to learn English. All of a sudden, you can introduce coding to kids all over the world as early as age... and I think we're using the age of six, but quite honestly, you probably can do it at the age of two or three. And they don't have to learn a second language at home before they can actually start tinkering with the beginning blocks of being a software developer one day.
And so I think the more and more you introduce as many people around the world with vast different experiences, the more that this community becomes so rich and vibrant. The richer the relationships will become. That's what we're all about at GitHub. And you have to make sure that those who are shepherding or mining the community, that they're not bogged down with this massive influx, right? Because when we were talking about just pushing all of these folks into open source, the first ones that started raising their hand saying, wait a minute, we're our maintainers. They have such a backlog of things that they have to attend to. Whether you're talking about all of the bugs that people are reporting, the PRs that they have to attend to, the documentation that they have to upkeep, the hospitality, the onboarding that they have to do.
Even with GitHub Copilot and AI, we're thinking about how can we introduce AI at the entire developer lifecycle so that developers do not have to focus on, or the burden is greatly reduced for them having to do some of this mundane work, right? Thomas likes to give this example of a lot of the security features of software products has been, oh, let us identify all these bugs for you. And he's like, that's just like a vacuum cleaner going around showing you where all the dirt is and picking it up for you. That's why we introduces Autofix at GitHub.
So that “found” now means “fix.” We're not just finding the bugs for you, we're actually fixing them for you too, so that you can continue to stay in the flow and are coding and doing the things that you love to do. Introducing it so that your PR workspaces and GitHub Copilot workspaces, that they're actually working on your PRs, your documentation for you. Just all those end-to-end things. We really want to enable people to enter in the community at just massive influx and make sure that the people who have to welcome and introduce them into these communities have the space and time to do so as well as focus on those things that give them passion as well.
Katherine Druckman: I love the analogy of the TikTok dance being universal. Now I'm going to spend the rest of the day wondering what our open source TikTok dance is. What is our universal truth? For me, I have a security bias, so I'm thinking about panic. Panic is our universal.
Demetris Cheatham: But, Katherine, that thinking what you and I just did, that was the reason that we set that 1 billion aspiration. Because we might not have been thinking of what's the universal connection for open source that anybody anywhere in the world can automatically recognize it if we hadn't set that aspiration so hot. That's the thinking that we're hoping to unlock across, not just GitHub. This isn't a GitHub aspiration, this is a world aspiration, a developer community of open source, a tech industry aspiration.
The Onramp to Innovation Is…You
Katherine Druckman: Well, it's certainly a worthy one and a necessary one. I mean, open source really does power everything in the world to some degree. So if we don't train up and ensure that there are people here to deal with all of it, manage it, sustain it, it's not a good situation. Oh, I feel like I could talk to you all day, but I don't want to keep you the whole day. I really appreciate this. If you could give the listeners a takeaway, an action item, a homework assignment, what would that be?
Demetris Cheatham: How can you use what's available today or how can you create what's not available today to introduce more and more people in your lives into our developer community? Whether it is your 85-year-old grandmother or your five-year-old little cousin? Whether it's a little girl, whether it's a little boy, how do you be an onramp? A conduit into the developer community that we all love so much and that we all know is the gateway to innovation. As you just said, it powers everything. The more people we can get into our developer community, the better our entire world will be. That doesn't mean that we want everybody to go and work for Intel or GitHub. But we want people in their day-to-day lives, to be able to tinker, be able to innovate, to solve whatever their most pressing problems are.
For my mother, it could be whatever her gardening challenges are. For my daughter, it could be the creation of some new TikTok dance that she can get all of her friends to do. Whatever it is, we just want to empower people to innovate, and we feel that open source, which is already the lower barrier to entry, is the vehicle to do just that. I would ask everybody to think about that aspiration of a billion developers, which is going to require people in your households, your neighbors, people in your apartment buildings, people in your community, your local organizations, to join us. Just think about how to unlock their potential as well. That would be my takeaway.
Katherine Druckman: I love it. I could not agree more. I always say that everyone really should learn to code a little bit just to survive in the world at this point. Everyone should participate in some way.
Demetris Cheatham: And we've made it so much easier now. Natural language.
Katherine Druckman: It's true. It fixes bugs for you. That's amazing. I love the sound of that. Well, thank you. I would also love, also for anybody listening, if you have an idea of what our open source TikTok dance should be, please reach out to me. Maybe we'll even do it…
Demetris Cheatham: Circle back, Katherine.
Katherine Druckman: I will. Oh, fabulous. Well, cool. Well, thank you so much for joining me and for sharing. I've learned a lot. I think everybody listening is going to learn a lot. And I truly, truly appreciate it.
Demetris Cheatham: Thank you, Katherine, so much for the invitation. I love this conversation.
About the Guests
Demetris Cheatham, Chief of Staff for the CEO of GitHub
Sitting on GitHub’s Executive Leadership team, Demetris Cheatham is currently the chief of staff for the CEO of GitHub, where she acts as the CEO’s trusted partner to move all of software development forward. Demetris is particularly passionate about the evolving nature of open source in the age of AI. Before her time as COS to the CEO, Demetris was senior director for Diversity, Inclusion, and Belonging Strategy at GitHub, the global diversity and inclusion lead at Red Hat, and was the first woman and youngest executive director to lead the National Bar Association, the United States’ oldest and largest international network of over 65,000 predominantly African-American attorneys and judges.
About the Host
Katherine Druckman, Open Source Security Evangelist, Intel
Katherine Druckman, an Intel open source security evangelist, hosts the podcasts Open at Intel, Reality 2.0, and FLOSS Weekly. A security and privacy advocate, software engineer, and former digital director of Linux Journal, she's a long-time champion of open source and open standards. She is a software engineer and content creator with over a decade of experience in engineering, content strategy, product management, user experience, and technology evangelism. Find her on LinkedIn.