Welcoming Deb Bryant, Senior Director, OSAS

We are excited to have Deb Bryant join the Open Source and Standards team (a.k.a., OSAS) in the CTO office, showing our continued focus on growing and investing in open source projects. In this interview, Deb offers a preview of her new role as Senior Director, OSAS.

Rikki: What will you be doing in your role as Senior Director, OSAS?

Deb: I’m going to be helping Carl Trieloff continue growing OSAS’s capacity and reach. Carl has spent the past two years building a strong team dedicated to open source communities and their projects in Red Hat’s ecosystem. As a starting point, I’ll provide management for some our our sub groups, such as Community, Leadership, and the CentOS teams. I’ll also be working with others in Red Hat's various business groups to increase our communication and collaboration within the Red Hat family. I’m sure there will be plenty of administrivia in my future. But I’m most looking forward to bringing my experience in both community and business to OSAS and the team, plus contributing where I’m able in areas that are especially important to me personally, such as community (of course!), education, and mentorship. This is what attracted me the most to the role. To bring my years of diverse experience to the OSAS team as a manager and at the same time reserve the opportunity as an individual contributor, which I have learned recently is part of the Red Hat culture and it certainly is reflected in what I’ve seen so far with OSAS.

Rikki: The OSAS group is relatively new. What changes would you like to see with the group?

Deb: OSAS is a great group with tremendously talented and deeply competent and committed contributors. I’m honored to be joining, and wouldn’t presume to make any changes until I’ve had a chance to spend time with the team, to gain a deep understanding of their activities, to see what the team feels could use improvement, and to see what may make sense in the future. Any changes I’d recommend ultimately would be to support the team members' ability to carry out their current project responsibilities in support of our upstream communities as well as creating easy and sustainable paths for developing and supporting new initiatives.

I’m excited about this new role, and look forward to learning from a great assemblage of community talent both within and outside OSAS.