[TOC Candidacy] Paula Paul

[PaulaPaul]

Affiliation: Greyshore

Bio: Paula (LinkedIn, GitHub) has grown as a software engineer and technologist since her career began programming for IBM in the early 1980's. She moved from mainframes, to AIX and Posix, to Windows desktops, servers and databases, to Open Source, cloud adoption, infrastructure as code, and more to come. She is passionate about serving, and growing, the Open Source community.

Context and goals for self-nomination: Paula formerly served as a Field CTO with NearForm and, along with her engineering team, championed NearForm's Linux Foundation and Gates Foundation relationships. She is the owner and Distinguished Engineer with Greyshore Associates, a board member with the OpenJS Foundation and participates in the OpenJS Foundation's Cross Project Council and other working groups. Paula belongs to FINOS / Legend in GitLab and the FINOS organization in GitHub as a maintainer of the FINOS Accessibility Theme Builder Project. Paula enjoys speaking about foundation work at conferences around the globe on behalf of their Linux Foundation work to raise awareness of open source, and grow the community.

In addition, Paula has spoken in the Open Source track of the Grace Hopper Celebration, and served on committees for the Grace Hopper Celebration's Open Source Day multiple times; she served as Co-Chair for this years OSD hackathon. Paula's team won an award at the FINOS GAAD hackathon for their work on Discover's Accessibility Theme Builder, and hosted the Accessibility Theme Builder as a step towards that project's hosting with FINOS. Her team served as mentors for the Theme Builder and other open source projects during the Grace Hopper OSD event.

Paula is a champion for diversity and inclusion through her Linux Foundation work and hopes to bridge her Linux Foundation contributions to more hackathons and project sponsorships with the AnitaB.org and Gates Foundations. Paula's team is actively supporting the Mojaloop Foundation and their work on Inclusive, Equitable Financial Services For All, and hopes to bridge this work to FINOS for cross-foundation collaboration.

[ColinEberhardt]

As the current TOC chair, I just want to say thank you for taking the time to put yourself forward as a candidate. 🙏

[Neetuj]

Impressive!

[PaulaPaul]

Hello! @ColinEberhardt I would like to re-open my application for TOC membership and am grateful for your consideration.

Since my earlier application I have been active as a maintainer of the FINOS a11y theme builder project, chairing the community outreach work, establishing FINOS LF Badging for the project, supporting a formal LF mentorship program for the project (I am a LF Mentor), and building the contributor community for the project.

In addition I'm honored to serve with Rita Chaturvedi and Sergio Bettencourt as a co-chair for the FINOS DEI SIG, and am active as a FINOS ambassador. I worked with Lise Nobel to submit a FINOS abstract for the Grace Hopper Celebration's Open Source Day, and we've been accepted. This will be a great opportunity to showcase all the FINOS projects to thousands of diverse attendees.

I'm also excited to add that my talk on whether we have finally found a 'silver bullet' for software engineering productivity in the age of AI was accepted for OSFF in London!

I would be thrilled to serve the TOC, and have a passion for engineering productivity throughout the path to production, software supply chain security (especially in the JavaScript ecosystem), and accessibility.

Many thanks for your consideration, Paula

[ColinEberhardt]

Of course - thanks @PaulaPaul

@maoo I don't have permission to re-open, are you able to do this?

[ColinEberhardt]

@maoo my mistake, yes I do - re-opened!

[maoo]

Congratulations @PaulaPaul , you've been selected to be part of the FINOS TOC. Looking forward to meeting tomorrow for your first TOC call.