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Candidates For The Board
Find out more about the Board Candidates
Before making your vote on OpaVote, you can find out more about the candidates for this years .NET Foundations Board of Director Elections on this page.
There are a lot of fantastic candidates from you to chose from. Read their profiles, watch their candacy videos and learn more about them.
Mitchel Sellers
Why are you interested in serving on the .NET Foundation board?
I believe that there is a lot more that the .NET Foundation can do to help not only open source, but speakers. As an active participant in all things .NET Foundation I experience the trials and tribulations associated and I feel that my past experience with other organizations I can help improve things for everyone.
What ideas do you have for expanding and growing the .NET community?
We have to find ways to be more consistent, efficient, and clear with regards to what we CAN or cannot do. Communication and support for projects has been fragmented and inconsistent, which hurts trust. We have to establish a manner to treat ALL equally and set expectations, this will improve the reputation and help attract more by finding VALUE in what is offered.
What do you believe are the biggest challenges facing the .NET community right now, and how do you think the .NET Foundation can help address them?
Support of open source projects continue to be a real struggle. Project leaders still don't have clear channels to get help, those that need help don't get it quickly, or sometimes things get lost in the "queue". All of these point to "what is the benefit' of the .NET Foundation and shakes the stability of .NET Open Source as a whole. I believe we need to continue to look at onboarding, support, and ENRICHMENT of the projects that are in the foundation and ensure that we are providing consistent support, proper communication, and clear expectations on all sides. If these expectations are not met, we should have a process to resolve those discrepancies.
Is there anything else you'd like to share with us about your candidacy for the board?
I have campaigned in the past, I STILL believe that I would be a good fit. I'm doing this to benefit the community, not for a resume builder or anything like that. I'm ready to dive in and help make a real impact.
Aneesh Gopalakrishnan
Why are you interested in serving on the .NET Foundation board?
I spearheaded the funding campaign for OpenJC in 2016. I also run a large startup community in NYC with about 12k members.
What ideas do you have for expanding and growing the .NET community?
We could put our global presence of meetup organizers to work to spread DNF popularity.
What do you believe are the biggest challenges facing the .NET community right now, and how do you think the .NET Foundation can help address them?
The biggest of them all could very well be .NET is associated with the stigma of anti-opensource. DNF is the cure for that.
Is there anything else you'd like to share with us about your candidacy for the board?
I believe I would be a good fit for DNF. Having built one of the largest startup community in New York, I believe I could get more done to promote DNF by being on the board than volunteering.
Tony Qu
Why are you interested in serving on the .NET Foundation board?
Bring .NET Foundation to Asia
What ideas do you have for expanding and growing the .NET community?
To be short, we need more channels to promote .NET and more open source mature products incubated from DNF. And Asia may be a good experimental area for this.
What do you believe are the biggest challenges facing the .NET community right now, and how do you think the .NET Foundation can help address them?
We need more showcase and mature open source products to show .NET is powerful enough to compete with other language
Is there anything else you'd like to share with us about your candidacy for the board?
I have been active in .NET community in China for many years. I becomes an open source community observer in the past five years and understand how other community such as CNCF, Apache foundation work here. I do see many good experience from them. But I need a place to make this kind of experience happen in .NET community. I think DNF is the good candidate for this.
Fahad Bin Ashiq
Why are you interested in serving on the .NET Foundation board?
Being in tech communities for last 5 years and working as a full time software engineer( working mainly on .NET technologies) I am thinking to building a Local .NET community which can help us to aware that what .NET is bringing changings in tech industry by having some strong foundation to build enterprise software's. In local ecosystem of tech people starting learning fancy frameworks like (MERN, MEAN & MEVM) but not knowing the power and features of .NET brings with updates of frameworks and version ( i.e. .NET core, .NET 7, Xamarin, MAUI etc.
What ideas do you have for expanding and growing the .NET community?
By having some introductory around .NET community and .NET foundation session online and onsite to let people know what kind of career's choices one should have after getting into .NET ecosystem what kind of areas to work and practice and share while learning Microsoft technologies specially .NET technology. By sharing career paths, Roadmaps and related content related path you can build a healthy community of thought provokers, thinkers and community contributors.
What do you believe are the biggest challenges facing the .NET community right now, and how do you think the .NET Foundation can help address them?
I think .NET kind of considering to learn it for legacy systems which is totally false I guess to have some trendy things to incorporate with .NET technologies one can totally learn and practice it from scratch and having said that if one can convince and can learn it build it for some latest software's everyone can second this thing that .NET is not only for legacy system to build and learn from but for the systems which builds on latest architectures .NET can a play a vital part for them too.
Is there anything else you'd like to share with us about your candidacy for the board?
As a Microsoft Certified Trainer ( MCT ), If I get this position I can surely say this my contribution to make Microsoft technologies for local community to make it learnable, accessible and content friendly to have some ease of access for learning, sharing, practicing and sharing comes to true I can play my best part to create a healthy community of .NET builders who share common goal to learn, share and grow.
Tony Champion
Why are you interested in serving on the .NET Foundation board?
Having spent my career working in and serving the .NET community, I hope to continue serving the community at a higher level.
What ideas do you have for expanding and growing the .NET community?
I would like the see the community to expand by going more niche. In a post-pandemic world virtual events have become much more accepted (although I am a big proponent of in-person events). This opens up the possibility for creating niche user groups. An example "Native applications using AI". Smaller groups that are more focused to help grow the community as a whole.
What do you believe are the biggest challenges facing the .NET community right now, and how do you think the .NET Foundation can help address them?
I feel the .NET community continues to struggle with it's past of being a closed ecosystem. There needs to be continued work to position .NET as a leader in the open-source community from the developer's perspective.
Is there anything else you'd like to share with us about your candidacy for the board?
Having recently completed my term as president at my children's PTA, I am looking forward to next opportunity to giving back to my community. While joining the board is the goal of this candidacy, I hope that I'm able to serve the Foundation in what ever capacity that is needed.
Kevin Griffin
Why are you interested in serving on the .NET Foundation board?
.NET and the .NET community have been a major part of my career, and I owe a lot to it for my livelihood. I have a vested interest in it sticking around for another 20 years.
What ideas do you have for expanding and growing the .NET community?
I'm curious about stealing ideas from up and coming communities, like Laravel. We see PHP basically reinventing itself as the "cool, new thing" and .NET is objectively a better platform. How do we copy or emulate what those communities are doing?
What do you believe are the biggest challenges facing the .NET community right now, and how do you think the .NET Foundation can help address them?
.NET is still very much seen as "evil" Microsoft from over 10 years ago. I'm still meeting folks that don't realize that .NET works better cross-platform than most other languages or platforms. Maybe we don't need to change hearts or minds, but we can at least do a better job of showing people their thoughts about .NET are outdated.
Is there anything else you'd like to share with us about your candidacy for the board?
I've worked on boards in the past, especially technology-based ones.
Glenn Watson
Why are you interested in serving on the .NET Foundation board?
The board has traditionally has had its issues, been getting better but needs to do more for the open source community in general
What ideas do you have for expanding and growing the .NET community?
Focus on how to give value to the projects. First is reforming trust in the community. Increasing communication, but also making processes we do opt-in or very transparent. Eg more scripts available to maintainers to adopt new technologies we introduce such as CLI bot to make it transparent to the them so not to increase their workload or such
What do you believe are the biggest challenges facing the .NET community right now, and how do you think the .NET Foundation can help address them?
Transparency amongst the board and the community, been getting better but not perfect. We should be creating processes that make our upgrade processes more transparent to the community while also making it easier for adoption.
Is there anything else you'd like to share with us about your candidacy for the board?
Left Blank
Jorge Levy
Why are you interested in serving on the .NET Foundation board?
I have been a community leader in Latin America of different groups for several years. I want to serve on the board to continue my community work and give an opportunity to the great community that we have in Latin America.
What ideas do you have for expanding and growing the .NET community?
My main objective for this year is to show the potential of Latam beyond the language barrier, giving visibility to the great job we have been doing in the last years.
What do you believe are the biggest challenges facing the .NET community right now, and how do you think the .NET Foundation can help address them?
Breaking down the barriers of language, race and region making the .NET Foundation a place to share without these limitations.
Is there anything else you'd like to share with us about your candidacy for the board?
Would like to thank for the possibility on showing how great we are in Latam. Thank you.