I'm running for the .NET Foundation Board

I'm on the ballot for the 2026 .NET Foundation Board election.

Voting opens to .NET Foundation members on June 6 and closes June 19. Results are announced June 20. Three board seats are open.

For me, this is a continuation of work I have been doing for years. I have spent a long time at the intersection of open source and the Microsoft ecosystem. WSL community at Whitewater Foundry. Ubuntu WSL adoption at Canonical. Windows containers on Rancher at SUSE. AI/ML community work at Determined AI / HPE, talking about running it on WSL and Azure. Now post-EOL support for .NET at HeroDevs, alongside Microsoft, Canonical, Red Hat, and IBM in the .NET Security Group. Six Microsoft MVP awards along the way. Arm Ambassador too, FWIW.

What the Foundation is recruiting for

The Foundation was direct in its nomination call about the skills it's recruiting for this cycle: sales, business development, partnerships, marketing, community growth, nonprofit governance. The board has strong engineering representation already. The cycle this year is about adding operators alongside them. People who can help broaden the sponsor base, run partnerships, build the next chapter of foundation visibility, and do the durable work that keeps a nonprofit running well over time.

Why an independent .NET matters

.NET matters. It is one of the largest open source ecosystems in the world. Like any open source ecosystem at scale, its long-term health depends on being multi-vendor: projects, vendors, and contributors building on it independently of any single benefactor. .NET is starting to get there. Uno Platform and Avalonia for cross-platform UI. MonoGame for games. HeroDevs for post-EOL support. Each is a vote of confidence in .NET as an independent, open source platform. An independent, sustainable .NET Foundation is the goal. Good for .NET. Good for Microsoft. Good for users. Good for open source.

What I bring

I am an attorney. Sorry. My legal background spans federal work (clerking at the USDA), state work (Staff Counsel to the Georgia State Senate Judiciary Committee), and local government (Muscogee-Columbus County Parks and Recreation Board, where I served first as a district representative and later as elected Chair). I currently represent Georgia nonprofits pro bono through the Pro Bono Partnership of Atlanta and serve as a Cooperating Attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation. I would not be the board attorney. But I have thought a lot about how institutions are structured. That is part of what I bring.

I have spent a lot of my career on partnerships. At Whitewater Foundry, I created Pengwin, the first Linux distribution built for WSL, and structured a partnership with Red Hat to produce Pengwin Enterprise and Fedora Remix for WSL, a spin of Fedora for WSL long before Red Hat finally embraced WSL.

At Canonical, I helped grow Ubuntu on WSL from 40,000 to 100,000 weekly installs and built working relationships with teams across Microsoft (Azure, GitHub, .NET, Edge), Nvidia, Unity, Uno Platform, and OEM partners HP and Lenovo. At HeroDevs, I drove the first post-EOL .NET support to market and helped land the company's seat in the .NET Security Group alongside Microsoft, Canonical, Red Hat, and IBM.

The craft is the same across all of them. Understand what each side actually needs. Structure something that delivers on both. Credibility with stakeholders. It is patient, slow, diplomatic work. But it compounds.

What I bring to the .NET board: partnership development across the Microsoft and open source line, sponsorship and go-to-market experience, community building and communications, and nonprofit and public board governance literacy. I have spent years in the .NET and WSL communities, from WSLConf to Pro Windows Subsystem for Linux to writing about .NET security and CVE research. The through-line is sustainable open source.

A note on disclosure. My current role is at HeroDevs, which became a .NET Foundation sponsor in January 2026.

Vote

If you're a .NET Foundation member, vote. Vote for me, vote for someone else. Vote.