<divclass="bio">Ray is a Community Manager at PingCAP where he is helping to grow the TiDB community. Prior to PingCAP, Ray managed open source communities at Cube Dev, GitLab and the Linux Foundation. Ray has been a speaker at open source conferences such as All Things Open, Community Leadership Summit, FOSDEM, GitLab Commit, Open Source Summit, and SCaLE.
Ray lives in Sunnyvale, CA with his wife and daughter and all three are loyal season ticket holders of the Bay FC women's soccer team.</div>
<divclass="bio">Dr. Allison Randal is a free software and open 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. In the past three decades, 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, 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, Distinguished Engineer at SUSE, and Principal Engineer at Rivos. She collaborates in the Debian and RISC-V projects.</div>
<divclass="bio">Dr. Dawn Foster works as the Director of Data Science for the CHAOSS project where she is also a board member and maintainer. She is an OpenUK board member and co-chair of the CNCF Contributor Strategy Technical Advisory Group. She has 20+ years of experience at companies like VMware and Intel with expertise in community building, strategy, open source, governance, metrics, and more. She has spoken at over 100 industry events and has a BS in computer science, an MBA, and a PhD. In her spare time she enjoys reading science fiction, running, and traveling.</div>
<divclass="bio">Ildikó is working for the Open Infrastructure Foundation as Director of Community. As part of her role, she is the Community Manager for the StarlingX open source distributed cloud project and the Kata Containers secure container runtime project, and a co-leader of the OpenInfra Edge Computing Group. Ildikó has been contributing to projects like OpenStack, Anuket and State of the Edge for over 10 years with focus areas of Edge Computing, Telecommunications and NFV. She is an evangelist of open collaboration and is using her experience to help individuals, companies and organizations to learn and get more involved and active in open source communities.</div>
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<h2class="mt-4">Abstract</h4>
<divclass="abstract pb-4"><p>There isn’t one way to build your career in open source as there are a variety of roles beyond writing code and many different routes into those roles. It’s also important for individuals to chart their own path that aligns with their unique experience and interest.
In this panel discussion, panelists will share how they got started in their career and their journey over the past two decades. For people looking for jobs in open source, we’ll discuss what we look for in candidates and why it’s not necessary to check all the boxes in job descriptions. We’ll also discuss challenges in balancing your day jobs vs. open source activities during your career.
In addition, we’ll also delve into other challenges and opportunities of an open source career that range from dealing with the impostor syndrome, DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) challenges, exploring open source communities for self growth, and more.
The goal of this session is to help attendees feel more comfortable exploring opportunities in open source and be confident in charting their own path. Our panel members will share what contributed to their success and the lessons learned throughout their extensive experience in open source. This session is meant to be interactive, and we’ll encourage attendees to ask questions and engage in the conversation.</p></div>
