2020 CNCF TOC Election Guide

The Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) is having its annual Technical Oversight Committee (TOC) elections. With an existing member up for re-election and new people running it can be useful to know who the people are and what they have done.

If you’re not familiar with these elections, there are 3 different bodies who elect members to the TOC. The Governing Board, the End User group, and the project maintainers. If you want to know which group appointed a member, it is listed on the TOC GitHub page.

Disclaimer: In full disclosure, I am running for the TOC. I was curious about the information and am providing references for you to look for yourself. Hopefully the information and references is useful. Any bias is unintentional.

Candidates

The candidates are broken down into two groups. One for those being elected by the Governing Board and End Users and one for those being elected by the graduated and incubating projects. From there they are in alphabetical order by last name. They are broken into groups like this because of the information I have directly available.

Liz Rice, the incumbant running, has more information available due to the work she has performed on the TOC. This can be found in public meetings (though details on all of them may not have been captured) and participation in votes who details is available on the TOC mailing list.

The TOC is expanding from 9 to 11 members. The two additional people are being selected by the End User members and the non-sandbox project maintainers.

In each section the number of people nominated and the number of people deemed qualified are listed. This is because the CNCF charter provides for a qualification process in 6(e)ii.

The location where the nominees is based is listed to help us consider geographic diversity. The members of the TOC who are not up for election and will continue on the TOC are in Silicon Valley (3 members), Greater Seattle Area (2 members), and Atlanta Georgia (1 member).

Interesting Tidbit: 9 of those who are running are in Silicon Valley. London has 3 people running and Seattle has 2.

Note, if there are any errors in the candidate information please let me know and I’ll correct it. Also, if there is additional information for a candidate I’m happy to add it.

Update: upon request the company people work for has been added to their section.

Governing Board and End User Members

In this election the Governing Board is electing 3 people and the End User community is electing 1 person.. The Governing Board initially nominated 17 people and the End Users 4 people for a total of 21. Of these 19 were deemed qualified by the Governing Board and TOC.

Saad Ali

You can find him online at: Twitter | GitHub | LinkedIn
Location: San Francisco Bay Area (Silicon Valley)
Works at: Google

Erin Boyd

You can find her online at: Twitter | GitHub | LinkedIn
Location: Montana
Works at: Red Hat

Lee Calcote

You can find him online at: Talks | Blog | Twitter | GitHub | LinkedIn
Location: Austin, Texas
Works at: SolarWinds

Alex Chircop

You can find him online at: Twitter | GitHub | LinkedIn
Location: London, United Kingdom
Works at: StorageOS

Katie Gamanji

You can find her online at: Twitter | GitHub | LinkedIn
Location: London, United Kingdom
Works at: Condé Nast International

Michael Hausenblas

You can find him online at: Website | Twitter | GitHub | LinkedIn
Location: Ireland
Works at: Amazon Web Services

Zhengyu He

You can find him online at: LinkedIn
Location: Hangzhou, China
Works at: Ant Financial

Quinton Hoole

Quinton is a former member of the TOC. The TOC elects two of their own members and Quinton previously served in one of those positions.

You can find him online at: Twitter | GitHub | LinkedIn
Location: San Francisco Bay Area (Silicon Valley)
Works at: Facebook

Metrics of his time on the TOC:

  • Elected: March 2018 (1 year term)
  • Meetings attended in term: 9 (of 9 with records) times
  • TOC mailing list history: here

Frederick Kautz

You can find him online at: Twitter | GitHub | LinkedIn
Location: Palo Alto, California (Silicon Valley)
Works at: doc.ai

Wei Lai

You can find him online at: Website | GitHub | LinkedIn
Location: Beijing, China
Works at: DiDi

Vallery Lancey

You can find her online at: Website | Twitter | GitHub | LinkedIn
Location: San Francisco Bay Area (Silicon Valley)
Works at: Lyft

Sheng Liang

You can find him online at: Wikipedia | Twitter | LinkedIn
Location: San Francisco Bay Area (Silicon Valley)
Works at: Rancher Labs

Bryan Liles

You can find him online at: Website | Twitter | GitHub | LinkedIn
Location: Baltimore, Maryland
Works at: VMware

Haifeng Liu

You can find him online at: LinkedIn
Location: Beijing, China
Works at: JD.com

Kris Nova

Update: Kris shared a writeup (found here) with the Governing Board.

You can find her online at: Website | Twitter | GitHub | LinkedIn
Location: San Francisco Bay Area (Silicon Valley)
Works at: Sysdig

Alena Prokharchyk

You can find her online at: Twitter | GitHub | LinkedIn
Location: Mountain View, California (Silicon Valley)
Works at: Apple

Liz Rice

Liz is the current chair of the TOC and did not join the TOC until last March. She currently works at Aqua Security. She has had a shorter set of meetings, by 2 months, from the other incumbents. Prior to her time on the TOC she served as a co-chair of KubeCon & CloudNativeCon. She was selected by the Governing Board.

You can find her online at: Website | Twitter | GitHub | LinkedIn
Location: Enfield, Greater London, United Kingdom
Works at: Aqua Security

Metrics of her past year on the TOC:

  • Elected: March 2019
  • Meetings attended in past year: 13 (of 15 with records) times / 3 times in the past quarter
  • TOC mailing list history: here
  • Votes participated in past year: 16 (only missed 1 vote during her time on the TOC and gave a non-binding vote for the one more opportunity the others had in the term)
  • Sandbox projects sponsored in past year: 4

Brian Scott

You can find him online at: Twitter | GitHub | LinkedIn
Location: Los Angeles, California
Works at: The Walt Disney Company

Ed Warnicke

You can find him online at: Twitter | GitHub | LinkedIn
Location: Austin, Texas
Works at: Cisco Systems

Project Maintainers

This is the first election where the project maintainers can elect one of their own as a TOC member. This is limited to the stable and incubating projects and the process is documented in the CNCF Foundation GitHub repository. The maintainers are electing 1 person. The maintainers initially nominated 8 people of which all 8 were voted as qualified.

John Belamaric

He is a maintainer of the CoreDNS project.

You can find him online at: Twitter | GitHub | LinkedIn
Location: Sunnyvale (Silicon Valley)
Works at: Google

Justin Cormack

He is a maintainer of the Notary project.

You can find him online at: Website | Twitter | GitHub | LinkedIn
Location: Cambridge, United Kingdom
Works at: Docker

Matt Farina

He is a maintainer of the Helm project.

You can find him online at: Website | Twitter | GitHub | LinkedIn
Location: Metro Detroit, Michigan
Works at: Samsung SDS

Richard Hartmann

He is a maintainer of the Prometheus project.

You can find him online at: Twitter | GitHub | LinkedIn
Location: Munich, Bavaria, Germany
Works at: Grafana

Torin Sandall

He is a maintainer of the Open Policy Agent (OPA) project.

You can find him online at: Twitter | GitHub | LinkedIn
Location: New York
Works at: Styra

Eduardo Silva

He is a maintainer of the Fluentd project.

You can find him online at: Website | Twitter | GitHub | LinkedIn
Location: Costa Rica
Works at: Arm

Sugu Sougoumarane

He is a maintainer of the Vitess project.

You can find him online at: Website | Twitter | GitHub | LinkedIn
Location: San Francisco Bay Area (Silicon Valley)
Works at: PlanetScale

Liu Tang

He is a maintainer of the TiKV project. In the election listing he’s listed as Liu Tang while on the TiKV website he’s listed with the name Siddon Tang.

You can find him online at: GitHub
Works at: PingCAP

Note, I was not able to locate more references. If there is more information I can add please let me know.