Astor Nummelin Carlberg is OFE's Executive Director, responsible for the overall vision, activities of the organization and policy development. He has extensive experience of European policy making processes, communications and network-building. Astor leads conversations on Europe's digital challenges and the role of open technologies in achieving its full potential. He sits on the board of APELL, the European Open Source Business Association. Prior to OFE, Astor worked in the European Parliament and he was educated at Middlebury College, the Free University of Berlin and Solvay Business School.
Heads the Internet Economy Foundation as Managing Director. Formerly working as a journalist, business consultant and country manager at an international IT-sales network, the American has lived in Berlin since 1998. He co-founded VoIP telephony company Vortel GmbH and was long-standing Managing Director at the Berlin School of Creative Leadership.
Kurt Garloff has spent his professional life with Open Source projects. Educated as physicist (in Dortmund and Eindhoven), he has a desire to fundamentally understand things. Applying this to computers made chosing Open Source a natural consequence. In the end, the global collaboration with smart people and the contribution to democratizing a technology that's becoming more and more important became the most fascinating drivers in contributing to open source. He went from being a Linux kernel developer to someone who loves working intensely with people that do such work. From time to time, he still loves touching code himself.
Leading the growth of SUSE Labs, he had the opportunity to forge successful teams from brilliant individuals. He later complemented this with technical, strategic and business leadership functions in SUSE and received training at the Harvard Business School to hone the needed skills. Since 2011, his focus is on cloud technology and is an active particpant of the Open Infrastructure Community. As VP Engineering at Deutsche Telekom and later as chief architect of the Open Telekom Cloud, he has had leadership roles in building quite some open source cloud infrastructure.
Since early 2020, he is working with an increasing number of co-workers on defining and assembling a standardized, open, modular technology stack that enables a large number of operators to jointly provide large, federated, open cloud & container infrastructure. This is the Sovereign Cloud Stack (SCS) project of the Open Source Business Alliance. It particpates actively in Gaia-X and has received a significant grant from the German ministry for economic affairs, has already released R4 of the reference implementation in March 2023. Four public cloud providers are in production with it as of April 2023, more are upcoming.
Michael Plagge joined the Eclipse Foundation in 2021 and is now working as VP Ecosystem Development.
In a previous life he started his career as software developer in the area of automotive software before he changed to the dark side of business development.
Here he held various business development positions in companies like Elektrobit, Alibaba and Alibaba Cloud and spent 3 years as General Manager Elektrobit Automotive (Shanghai) Ltd. in China.
Markus Spiekermann is Head of Department "Data Business" at the Fraunhofer Institute for Software and Systems Engineering in Dortmund, Germany. His main research focuses on the economic and engineering perspectives of data spaces. Since 2016, he is involved in various dataspace initiatives like IDSA, Gaia-X, the DSSC and a large number of domain driven initiatives that aim on building and running dataspaces. He also leads the Eclipse Dataspace Component (EDC) project, which provides an open-source framework and flexible architecture for service providers to implements their dataspace components and commercial offerings on a production-ready basis.
The Fraunhofer Institute for Software and Systems Engineering ISST is one of the 74 research institutes of the Fraunhofer Gesellschaft, located in Dortmund (Germany). Founded in 1992, Fraunhofer ISST has focused on software development and system technologies with special expertise in the field of dataspace technologies and corresponding business models.
Since early 2020, he is working with an increasing number of co-workers on defining and assembling a standardized, open, modular technology stack that enables a large number of operators to jointly provide large, federated, open cloud & container infrastructure. This is the Sovereign Cloud Stack (SCS) project of the Open Source Business Alliance. It particpates actively in Gaia-X and has received a significant grant from the German ministry for economic affairs, has already released R4 of the reference implementation in March 2023. Four public cloud providers are in production with it as of April 2023, more are upcoming.
Gaël Blondelle joined the Eclipse Foundation in 2013 and now serves as Chief Membership Officer. He has been involved in the open source arena for more than 18 years in a number of key roles.
Gaël co-founded an open source start-up and worked as its Chief Technology Officer. Gaël then worked in business development for an open source systems integration company and managed highly strategic research IT projects aiming to create open source ecosystems for major industrial players. Gaël joined the Eclipse Foundation to pursue his goal of helping more companies work in open source, and to grow open, innovative and collaborative ecosystems for mission-critical applications.
Mark Reeve has been working on technology and infrastructure for the past 18 years. After deploying Datacenters and Data Rooms in over 89 countries, he has been working on defining the strategy, adoption path and reference architecture patterns for hybrid and multi cloud deployments, leveraging both open and proprietary technologies.
Thomas Weber is Chief Product Owner for the West European Region at Huawei Technologies. He is responsible for planning new services for the Public Cloud platforms of Huawei, incorporating customer requirements, and coordinating with the R&D side of Huawei to provide these new services. He also provides technical support for large companies, e.g. to integrate existing systems, infrastructure and business processes and to enable the introduction of public, private and hybrid cloud architectures. Thomas is addressing many technologic fields at Huawei such as Big Data and AI, Quantum Computing and high performance computing.
Emma Wehrwein is Project Manager Digital Business Models at eco - Association for the Internet Industry. She holds a master's degree of Science and worked as IT Project Manager within the chemical industry for many years before joining eco. Since 2020 she is heading the Project Management Office for the German Gaia-X Federation Services initiative and is active as Ambassador for Gaia-X via Events and Social Media.
Alban Schmutz is currently Independent Board of CISPE (Cloud Infrastructure Services Providers in Europe), and was one of its co-founder and Chairman (2016-2022).
Within CISPE, Alban actively participated to deliver the first Cloud infrastructure GDPR Code of Conduct validated by the European Data Protection Board (CISPE Data Protection Code of Conduct), the 10 Principles for Fair Software Licensing for Cloud users developed with CIO associations or the SWIPO Code for Portability of infrastructure in the Cloud. In addition, Alban has been the co-founder of the Climate Neutral Data Centre Pact, which engaged the Cloud and Data Centre industry towards climate neutrality by 2030 in collaboration with the European Commission.
Alban has been one of the co-founders of Gaia-X, former Member of the Board and co-Chair Policy Rules Committee.
He served for 10 years as Senior Vice-President, Business Dev. & Public Affairs at OVHcloud (2012-2022).
Alban started several companies in the Open Sources services and High Performance Computing, and served in various Boards of research institutes, engineering schools or competitiveness clusters. He hold Master’s degrees in Telecommuncation, Political Sciences and Entrepreneurship.