LFN MAC Chair Election 2018

Owned by Lisa Caywood
Last updated: Feb 07, 2018
4 min read

Dates to Remember

  1. Poll published on Thursday, Feb 1.

  2. Poll closes 9am Pacific on Thursday, Feb 8. (There is a typo on the poll page.)

  3. Results published on Friday, Feb 9 and communicated to LFN Governing Board.

  4. New chair will prepare for Feb 14 GB meeting.

Role of MAC Chair

The MAC Chair will represent the MAC in LFN Governing Board meetings in a non-voting capacity. S/he will communicate the Board's strategic goals and direction to the MAC, and communicate the MAC plans, activities and achievements to the Board. In addition, the Chair is expected to serve as a general resource for the MAC community, working in close partnership with LF Staff.

The Chair is an individual position, unrelated to the organization that person represents. If the individual serving as Chair leaves the MAC for any reason, a new election will be held.

Candidate Information

In alphabetical order by last name. 

  • Balaji Ethirajulu

  • Nithya Ruff

Balaji Ethirajulu

Bio

Balaji Ethirajulu, Director Product Marketing at Ericsson Silicon Valley, has over 25 years of experience in telecom industry. He has worked in Product management, technology strategy, Marketing, Engineering, and professional services. His current focus & passion is around containers, micro services architecture, Kubernetes, Management & Orchestration, NFV & SDN transformation, Analytics, open source projects - ONAP, ODL, OPNFV, FD-io and service assurance for hybrid networks.

 As a Marketing community member and chair of some of the Open source projects, he has consistently maintained neutrality, providing best practices, innovation, community building and marketing strategies to various open source projects.

  • Organized several Open source mini summits including speeches & panels, produced content for the open source website, and created yearly marketing plans including strategy & budget.

  • Presented monthly marketing activities and plans to the Board.

  • As a spokesperson, promoted the Opensource projects in industry analysts briefing and media interviews. Contributed content for several PR’s.

  • Promoted and discussed open source projects with potential new members.

  • Managed bi-weekly marketing committee meetings & f2f meetings, worked with LF team on marketing plans, budgets, events, PR’s, and other promotions.

  • Collaborated with various Linux Foundation teams (Management, Marketing, Events, projects, and technical teams) to manage all marketing activities. Also, well-versed in LF’s bylaws, industry, and other trade practices with respect to Marketing.

Previously, Balaji worked in many technology areas including SDN, IP, Radio (3G, 4G), IMS, Mobile core, OSS, Network management and service assurance systems. He holds a Bachelor’s degree in telecommunication engineering and an MBA from university of Dallas.

2018 MAC Goals

We need to create KPI’s for each marketing objective and a time plan to achieve those objectives. We should get inputs such as marketing plans/needs from each of the projects and align at the LFN MAC level to achieve common LFN marketing goals and at the same time meet certain needs of specific projects.

One of the most important actions that marketing team can do is to increase overall LFN awareness and adoption of Open Source SW widely in the industry. As part of marketing strategy, we can bring out the key values / features of different projects under LFN and tie that with overall operator’s and industry benefits. I will work with our board, TSC and marketing teams collaboratively to achieve our marketing goals and monitor the KPI’s.

One of the key driving factors is to motivate collaboration and participation within the marketing community by giving each member or groups their own responsibility to drive parts of the marketing plan. We have done this in other projects and I will bring my experiences gained from other collaborative open source projects.  

Nithya Ruff

Bio

Nithya A. Ruff is the Senior Director for Comcast’s Open Source Practice.  She is responsible for growing Open Source culture inside of Comcast and engagement with external communities.  Prior to this, she started and grew the Western Digital’s Open Source Strategy Office. She first glimpsed the power of open source while at SGI in the 90s and has been building bridges between hardware developers and the open source community ever since. She’s also held leadership positions at Wind River (an Intel Company), Synopsys, Avaya, Tripwire and Eastman Kodak.   At Wind River, she led a team of product managers in managing a world class embedded Linux distribution and was a key member of the Yocto Project advocacy team on the board.

Nithya has been a passionate advocate and a speaker for opening doors to new people in Open Source for many years. She has also been a promoter of valuing diverse ways of contributing to open source such as in marketing, legal and community.   You can often find her on social media promoting dialogue on diversity and open source.  She has spoken at multiple conferences such as OSCON, All things Open, SCALE, Grace Hopper, OpenStack, VMWorld, OS Strategy Summit and Red Hat Summit on the business and community of open source.   In recognition of her work in open source both on the business and community side, she was named to CIO magazine’s most influential women in open source list. She was recently one of 4 people to win the 2017 OReilly Open Source Award for exceptional contribution to open source.

Nithya graduated with an MS in Computer Science from NDSU and an MBA from the University of Rochester, Simon Business School.

2018 MAC Goals

  • Clear outbound communications on the Networking Fund, its scope and charter

  • How to engage with the Networking fund for users, contributors, members

  • Articulate goals and benefits to members of the LF Networking Projects and synergies between the projects

  • Help collect and communicate use cases to show how the Networking Fund is solving real use cases.