Welcome to the New Community Team Manager

It may seem like a lot of braggadocio when we talk about the talent that comprises the Open Source and Standards team. But seriously, the list of folks we have on our team reads like an all-star list of people who have been active in the free and open source software communities: Deborah Bryant, Ruth Suehle, Jim Perrin, Rich Bowen, Leslie Hawthorn, and Bill Simpson… these are just some of the fantastic talents we have working with open source and standards communities around the world.

But when we announce that Stormy Peters is about to join our team as the Senior Manager of our Community Team… well, you can forgive us for being even more excited.

Stormy, who joins OSAS today, is heading up the Community team, where our community leads work together to grow projects like RDO, Fedora, Gluster, and oVirt (to name a few). It’s a big challenge, especially since each of these projects has a global reach, and are key upstream projects for commercial projects for Red Hat and beyond.

That’s definitely a challenge that Stormy can take on, with over 16 years of experience in the open source ecosystem.

Stormy's been involved with many aspects of open source software, ever since she founded HP’s Open Source Program office in 1999, while working on the the Common Desktop Environment team for HP-UX.

Asked about what part of open source culture appeals to her the most, she replied, “It’s like asking what’s my favorite color, when I realize I don’t have one anymore,” Stormy recently related to me. But when pressed a bit, Stormy focused on her enjoyment of understanding people and getting them to work together.

Her later work as Executive Director of the GNOME Foundation definitely honed that skill, as well as her tenures at OpenLogic, Mozilla, and--most recently--at Cloud Foundry. It also fostered other capabilities that will help in her work in OSAS--specifically, her work in getting profit-oriented organizations working smoothly with free and open source software communities. That’s a big part of the balance that OSAS works to achieve every day.

OSAS to thrilled to announce today’s start for Stormy Peters, as OSAS expands our communities via more engineering participation as well as localized meetups and events heading into 2017!