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Continuous Delivery Foundation Announces New Technical Oversight Committee Members

By June 23, 2021Announcement, Blog

The Continuous Delivery Foundation (CDF) is thrilled to announce 7 new members who will be joining Dan Lorenc and Fatih Degirmenci as part of the Technical Oversight Committee(TOC), the community responsible for the overall technical vision of CDF and cross-collaboration of projects.

Here are the new TOC members:

  • Garima Bajpai
  • Jithin Emmanuel 
  • Andrea Frittoli
  • Jason Hall
  • Melissa McKay
  • Oleg Nenashev
  • Steve Taylor 

We ran an election to fill Technical Oversight Committee (TOC) seats. Of these, four are project seats open to representatives of CDF projects and two general seats are open to any individual. The representatives will start their term on July 1, 2021. 

Project Seats

For this year’s election, we have had 4 nominations for the 4 project seats, so it was an uncontested election. The 4 candidates will be awarded the positions by acclamation. 

Congratulations to the following representatives:

  • Andrea Frittoli (Tekton)
  • Jithin Emmanuel (Screwdriver.cd)
  • Oleg Nenashev (Jenkins)
  • Steve Taylor (Ortelius)

General Seats

Three of the TOC seats are elected by the CDF Governing Board. This year they decided to allocate one of those seats to the chair of the Ambassador group. We are thrilled to also share that Garima Bajpai will be the new chair of the CDF Ambassadors and will take on one of the TOC seats. 

For the remaining 2 seats, we ran an election and received 7 candidate nominations for the 2 general TOC seats. The Governing Board voted between May 28 and June 11 and elected 2 representatives. 

Congratulations to:

  • Jason Hall
  • Melissa McKay

(Note: Garima Bajpai also tied with Melissa McKay though as Garima had already accepted the TOC seat for Ambassador chair, the elected TOC seat was awarded to Melissa.)

Thank you to the candidates for stepping forward to serve the community in this way. For more about our new representatives please see their nomination statements below.  

Representative Statements

Garima Bajpai

Garima Bajpai (Founder – Canada, DevOps Community of Practice)

Garima is a founding CDF Ambassador, a member of the cdCon planning committee, and the Rewards and Recognition Program Chair for Ortelius. She has written various blog posts and was a CDF podcast and event speaker. She’s also heavily involved in DevOps Communities and mentors women in tech.

Jithin Emmanuel (Screwdriver.cd)

Jithin Emmanuel is a Senior Manager for Software Development at Verizon Media. Jithin is the product & development owner for Screwdriver. He has been involved with CDF since the day Screwdriver joins, and is fully committed to the success of the Screwdriver community.

Andrea Frittoli (Tekton)

Andrea is a software engineer and developer advocate at IBM. He is passionate about open-source, to which he has contributed for the past ten years. He’s a strong advocate for transparency and vendor neutrality in open-source.

Andrea is an elected member of the Tekton Governing Board. He’s been an active contributor to the Tekton project since its early days. Andrea serves as co-chair of the Event SIG and contributes to the Interoperability SIG.

Andrea believes that the CDF is serving a key role in bringing the CD development and user communities together, creating forums for constructive and vendor-neutral discussion. He would be honoured to serve as a member of the TOC, and contribute to promoting interoperability in the DevOps ecosystem.

Jason Hall

Jason Hall (Red Hat)

I helped co-found the Tekton project and navigated its extraction from the Knative Build and Build Pipelines projects. I’ve presented at KubeCon about Tekton internals with Christie Wilson, and am currently contributing to Shipwright, built on Tekton.

Melissa McKay

Melissa McKay (JFrog)

Given her 20 plus years of development and DevOps experience, Melissa is an ideal candidate to participate in the CDF TOC. She will be able to shed light on the latest industry trends, build strong connections for the growth of present and future CDF projects, and provide feedback from the developer and DevOps end users who work daily with CDF projects including Jenkins, Tekton, Spinnaker, Ortelius, and Screwdriver.

Oleg Nenashev

Oleg Nenashev (Jenkins)

I’ve been elected to the Continuous Delivery Foundation Technical Oversight Committee. Effective July 1st, I will be representing the Jenkins project there. Thanks to all community members for their support!

My main responsibility will be to facilitate technical programs among the CDF, its member companies and projects: Jenkins project, Tekton, Spinnaker, Jenkins X, Ortelius, Screwdriver and other members yet to join. I will help all the projects to grow their community and improve governance processes. Another priority will be interoperability between projects so that the end users can easily combine them for their software delivery needs. I will work with the CDF special interest groups to define a public technical roadmap, including but not limited to interoperability and security.

I will also facilitate collaboration with CDF end users, and other open software and hardware organizations, e.g. The Linux Foundation, CNCF [Cloud Native Computing Foundation], RISC-V International, Inclusive Naming Initiative, TODO (OSPO) Group, OpenSSF, Open Source Design, etc.

Looking forward to this new role and to working with all TOC participants! Thanks to CloudBees for backing it with working time. And kudos to all contributors!

Steve Taylor

Steve Taylor (Ortelius)

Steve has a unique background that allows him to see across multiple CD disciplines. He is active on both CNCF and CDF SIGs giving him a complete picture of both the challenges and future direction of the CD pipeline. Steve has demonstrated his commitment to the CDF and would be an excellent addition to the CDF TOC Board.