Dawn Foster is Director of Open Source Community Strategy at VMware. She has over 20 years of experience in business and technology with expertise in open source software, community building, community management, market research, strategic planning, management, and more. She is passionate about bringing people together through a combination of online communities and real-world events. She has experience building new communities and managing existing communities with a particular emphasis on developer and open source communities.

Prior to joining Pivotal, Dawn’s most recent positions included Consultant at The Scale Factory, Director of Community at Puppet, and Community Lead within Intel’s Open Source Technology Center. She has also worked at Jive Software, Compiere, and The Timken Company in positions ranging from Unix system administrator to market researcher to community manager to open source strategist. Dawn holds a PhD from the University of Greenwich, an MBA from Ashland University, and a Bachelor’s Degree in Computer Science from Kent State University.

In her spare time, Dawn contributes to a number of technology projects and events. She is on the Governing Board for the Linux Foundation’s CHAOSS project and is a maintainer for several working groups within this project. She is on the Board of Advisors for Bitergia, an open source software development analytics company. She has been on the organizing team for community events, such as Devopsdays London, Devopsdays Portland, Monitorama, and Configuration Management Camp. She was a co-founder and board member of Legion of Tech, a non-profit chartered with organizing free events for the Portland, Oregon technology community. As part of her work with Legion of Tech, Dawn was an organizer for Portland BarCamp, Ignite Portland and other events. She was also a co-founder and community evangelist for the location-based startup, Shizzow.

Dawn has been a regular contributor to The New Stack, Linux.com, GigaOM’s WebWorkerDaily, and other blogs. She is the author of the books, What Dawn Eats: Vegan Food That Isn’t Weird and Companies and Communities: Participating without being sleazy.