InnerSource Commons is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization governed by a set of corporate bylaws. The Board of Directors sets the policy and appoints officers that set and execute policy. The Board is elected by the Membership on a yearly basis. InnerSource Commons is incorporated in the US. As the community grows, we anticipate to found sister organizations in the European Union, Latin America, and other parts of the world.
Here is our current Board of Directors, including the official roles they have been elected to fulfill.
Addie Cobb is a strategic communications leader with nearly 20 years of experience in AI, open source, and InnerSource. As a Communications Strategist and Executive Coach, she has successfully elevated reputations on a global scale by fostering collaboration and simplifying complexity. Addie specializes in making technical concepts accessible, driving innovation, and empowering organizations to harness InnerSource principles for enhanced software development and cross-functional collaboration. Passionate about community-building, she actively contributes to the InnerSource Commons Foundation, shaping best practices that bridge open source methodologies with proprietary development. Recognized for her ability to craft compelling narratives, she brings visionary thinking and a results-driven approach to every endeavor.
Micaela Eller is an Associate Director at EY, where she leads InnerSource enablement strategy and champions collaborative ways of working at the intersection of technology, community, and enterprise transformation. Prior to joining EY, she spent more than nine years at IBM advancing Agile, InnerSource, and open collaboration practices across global engineering organizations. Micaela is excited to join the InnerSource Commons Foundation Board of Directors and honored to serve as the Foundation’s newly elected President. Anchored by a servant leadership mindset and human-centered view of innovation, she is focused on enabling and growing the global InnerSource Commons community of practitioners by creating spaces where people can share knowledge, build trust, learn from one another, and apply InnerSource as a practical path to meaningful organizational impact. Looking ahead, she hopes to help expand the Foundation’s global reach, strengthen connections across the practitioner ecosystem, and support the next generation of InnerSource leaders as they bring open collaboration practices to their teams and organizations.
Shane Coughlan is Global Ambassador for OIN 2.0 at Open Invention Network, working to expand its patent non-aggression community. He brings executive-level experience from the Linux Foundation, where he spent seven years as General Manager of the OpenChain Project, leading the development of ISO/IEC 5230 and ISO/IEC 18974, the international standards for open source license compliance and security assurance. Shane also founded the European Legal Network, the largest professional community for open source legal practitioners, and has served on the board and general assembly of OpenForum Europe for over a decade. He is also the founder of OpenDawn Studio, and co-founded the International Free and Open Source Software Law Review. Shane has made significant contributions to the InnerSource community, and throughout his career has built frameworks that bring organizations together across sectors. He holds an MA in International Studies from the University of Birmingham.
Jeff Bailey is a Principal Software Engineer at Nike. He has been an active member of the InnerSource Commons community since 2021 and became a formal member in 2024. Jeff is a Trusted Committer and a member of the InnerSource Program Office Working Group (ISPO WG), where he contributes to shaping best practices and enabling organizational scale. He is passionate about driving InnerSource and Open Source communities of practice to power global platform engineering efforts, and has played a key role in scaling these efforts at Nike. Jeff focuses on fostering collaboration, reducing organizational friction, and creating sustainable software systems that enable teams to share, contribute, and innovate more effectively.
Aaron Williamson is an independent attorney who has advised clients on open source software matters for over 17 years. Aaron counsels clients on technology transactions and IP matters, including open source licensing, compliance, and community relations. He serves as outside general counsel to a number of open source- and technology-focused nonprofit organizations, advising organizations on all manner of legal issues, including corporate and regulatory compliance, contracts, and intellectual property. He has previously represented open source developers in litigation to enforce the terms of open source licenses. He now counsels clients on restorative approaches to conflict resolution. Before launching his own practice, Aaron served as general counsel to the Fintech Open Source Foundation (FINOS), a nonprofit foundation promoting open source collaboration in the financial services industry. He has also previously worked at IEEE, the Software Freedom Law Center, and in private practice.
Georg Grütter is an InnerSource evangelist and Developer Advocate at Robert Bosch. He co-founded and led the first InnerSource community at Bosch in 2009 and also co-founded the InnerSource Commons Foundation in 2020. Previously, he held various positions and roles at Robert Bosch, Line Information, the Zurich System House, and DaimlerChrysler. Georg is passionate about sharing his enthusiasm for InnerSource and loves to inspire developers and companies to engage with InnerSource.
Guilherme Dellagustin is InnerSource Officer at SAP, where he drives InnerSource adoption through presentations, event organization, mentoring, and leading by example. He has been with SAP since 2010, working as a developer and senior developer on payroll solutions across Latin America and Europe before taking on the InnerSource Officer role, and has been promoting InnerSource at SAP and across the industry since 2019. In his own words, promoting InnerSource is how he spreads the culture and values of open source. Guilherme organized the European leg of the InnerSource Summit 2025, is a consistent presence in the InnerSource Program Office Working Group (ISPO WG) and the LATAM community, and has given several presentations on InnerSource practice. He holds a degree in physics from the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul.
Isabel Drost-Fromm is Open Source Strategist at Europace AG Germany. She`s a member of the Apache Software Foundation, co-founder of Apache Mahout and mentored several incubating projects. Isabel is interested in all things FOSS, search and text mining with a decent machine learning background. True to the nature of people living in Berlin she loves having friends fly in for a brief visit - as a result she co-founded and is still one of the creative heads behind Berlin Buzzwords, a tech conference on all things search, scale and storage.
The following Officers do not sit on the Board of Directors.
Russ Rutledge is the Executive Director of the InnerSource Commons Foundation. He previously served as Senior Director of InnerSource and Collaboration at WellSky, where he led a transformational change towards broad and pervasive InnerSource as the normal way that work gets done. Before that, Russ founded and led the Developer Collaboration effort at Nike. Russ's drive and passion is to enable all software engineers to achieve incredible technical and business throughput via quality tooling and streamlined work process.
Tom Sadler is a Principal Software Engineer for BBC iPlayer and Sounds, working in the connected TV space and focusing on cross-team collaboration, including InnerSource. Tom has been involved with InnerSource Commons since 2019, speaking at multiple community events. He is a Trusted Committer on the InnerSource Learning Path project, and the Lead on publishing the Learning Path to innersourcecommons.org.
These fine people have served on our Board in previous years and we are listing them here to show our gratitude for their work. Thank you for your dedication to InnerSource and your active support of the InnerSource Commons Foundation!
Silona Bonewald is the Executive Director for IEEE SA OPEN, a comprehensive platform offering the open source community cost-effective options for developing and validating their projects. Previously she was vice president of community architecture at Hyperledger, a global open source collaborative effort hosted by The Linux Foundation, where she integrated leaders in finance, banking, Internet of Things (IoT), supply chains, and manufacturing. Other notable career accomplishments include, while with PayPal, pioneering the InnerSource process; for Siemens AG, creating a cutting-edge and Six Sigma-compliant e-commerce website; and for Ubisoft, creating an international content management system (CMS) architecture.
Maximilian Capraro is a researcher and doctoral candidate at the Open Source Research Group at Friedrich-Alexander-University Erlangen-Nürnberg. He worked on inner source in research projects with a variety of companies including Black Duck Software, Continental, and multiple Siemens business units. He developed the patch-flow measurement method (for measuring software development collaboration) and the first classification framework for inner source projects and programs. His research interests the quantification of software development collaboration, inner source governance including legal and taxation aspects, and many other things around inner source, open source, and software engineering.
Matthew Cobby is the AI Network Lead at the Commonwealth Bank of Australia (CBA), where is exploring the intersection of Generative AI and InnerSource. For most of his career, Matt Cobby’s mission has been to improve the daily lives of software engineering teams, wrangling people and technology to build highly effective teams through better developer experiences. Previously a founder of an AI startup, he’s also a veteran of consulting with Deloitte where he was a Director of Engineering advising CTO/CIOs. At National Australia Bank he ran a large-scale InnerSource program and led the Cloud Guild program, successfully training more than 7,000 staff in cloud technologies. Matt has a passion for mentoring engineers towards engineering excellence and is an active supporter of technical and local communities. Matt serves on the board as Secretary and is a Member of the InnerSource Commons.
Cristina Coffey is a multidisciplinary leader with a background in software development, product strategy, marketing and organizational design. Her work spans startups, foundations, and enterprise settings, where she has applied principles of InnerSource, design thinking, and open collaboration to drive meaningful change. Cristina previously supported the InnerSource Commons as Head of Operations, contributing to community engagement, governance, and cross-organizational coordination. Cristina currently brings her expertise to the technology and energy sectors, most recently as Chief Strategy Officer at EpiSensor, where she worked across product, marketing, and organizational strategy. With a foundation in software development, a Research Master’s in Engineering, and a passion for inclusive, cross-functional collaboration, she brings a human-centred approach to systems thinking and sustainable innovation.
Danese Cooper is the founder of InnerSource Commons. She is a long term open source advocate, having previously served as the Head of open source software at PayPal, CTO of the Wikimedia Foundation, Chief Open Source Evangelist for Sun, and Senior Director of open source strategies for Intel. Danese was also the inaugural chairperson of the Node.js Foundation. She concentrates on creating healthy open source communities and has served on the Boards of the Drupal Association, the Open Source Initiative and the Open Source Hardware Association. She has also advised Mozilla and the Apache Software Foundation. Danese runs a successful open source consultancy that counts the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the SETI Institute, Harris, and Numenta as clients. She has been known to knit through meetings.
With over 25 years' experience in the technology industry, Clare Dillon is currently a researcher with Lero, the Science Foundation Ireland's Research Centre for Software, where she focuses on InnerSource. Clare also works with CURIOSS, a global community for university and research institution OSPOs (Open Source Program Offices). Clare has been participating in the InnerSource Commons community since 2019. From 2021-2023, Clare served as the inaugural Executive Director of the InnerSource Commons Foundation. Previously, Clare was a member of the Microsoft Ireland Leadership Team for eight years; heading up their Developer Evangelism Group. Clare is also a certified coach and frequently speaks at international conferences and corporate events on topics relating to open collaboration and the future of work.
Jacob Green, the founder of Mosslabs.io, is an open source artist, strategist & systems builder working to expand the impact and application of Open Source in society globally. Hailing from Baltimore, passionate about open source in cities & universities, and working to connect institutions via open source. Prior to Mosslabs.io, Jacob was Director of Strategic Initiatives at LTNGlobal, building a unique global video transport network from the ground up and from first principles.
Yuki Hattori is a Senior Architect at GitHub, where he drives GitHub adoption across global organizations. As a leader in the global InnerSource movement, Yuki provided strategic direction and leadership for the foundation while expanding InnerSource methodology worldwide. He has coordinated local community leaders and fostered downstream adoption of InnerSource practices, successfully expanding the approach to companies and countries globally. Yuki also serves as a technical advisor for the Information Technology Promotion Agency (IPA), a Japanese government organization, where he contributes to the operational implementation of open source strategies at the national level in Japan.
Daniel Izquierdo Cortázar is a researcher and one of the founders of Bitergia, a company that provides open source business intelligence services based on development analytics risk management and software production indicators at scale. Currently the Chief Executive Officer at Bitergia, he is focused on the quality of the data; research of new metrics, analysis; and studies of interest for Bitergia customers via data mining and processing. Daniel holds a PhD in free software engineering from the Universidad Rey Juan Carlos in Madrid, where he focused on the analysis of buggy developer activity patterns in the Mozilla Community. Daniel serves on the Board and is a Member of the InnerSource Commons, the CHAOSS community and the Apereo Foundation.
Klaas-Jan Stol is a lecturer with University College Cork, Ireland, a Funded Investigator with Lero, the Science Foundation Ireland Research Centre for Software, and a Scientific Advisor with SINTEF, Norway. As an academic, he conducts research on contemporary software development approaches, as well as human and organizational aspects. He has long had an interest in InnerSource, and has published several papers on the topic. Klaas holds a PhD from the University of Limerick.
Katie Schueths leads the InnerSource program at Analog Devices Inc (ADI). She is building an InnerSource framework at ADI to help improve collaboration, code reuse, and documentation across their engineering organization. Previously, she started the InnerSource program at Indeed. She is part of the InnerSource Commons Marketing Group, helping to plan monthly community calls and events. In her free time, Katie enjoys running operational logistics for volunteer-led community arts events.
Over his 15 years journey in software development, Sebastian Spier has worked as an individual contributor, agile coach, team lead, product owner, engineering manager, and director of engineering. No matter the role or team; effective cross-team collaboration has been key to getting things done at organizations of any size. For Sebastian, InnerSource is more than just a concept – it's a powerful enabler and a transformative teaching tool for fostering collaboration across teams. He firmly believes that it holds the key to empowering organizations to deliver exceptional value to their customers, cultivating a workforce that is not only more content but also highly engaged. In his vision, InnerSource is a pathway towards a more connected company. As a member of the InnerSource Commons Foundation, Sebastian maintains the collection of InnerSource Patterns. He is always looking for ways to support others to use the patterns in their organizations and to share their own experiences in the form of patterns.
Dmitry is an experienced engineering manager in the retail industry, known for his proficiency in leveraging technology to drive innovation and efficiency. Dmitry strongly advocates for InnerSource as the industrial standard of software development, and has led the number of teams in using this approach to continuously improve their practices.
Jerry Tan is a Senior Open Source Expert and currently serves as the Executive Deputy Secretary-General of the China Open Source Promotion Union. He has over 20 years of open source work experience at companies such as Sun, Baidu, and Tencent. Since 2018, Jerry has been promoting the spread and adoption of InnerSource in China. He has successfully organized numerous offline InnerSource events and initiated the Chinese InnerSource community, which boasts over 50 members, including renowned Chinese enterprises such as Huawei, Tencent, and Baidu. Jerry is passionate about sharing his knowledge and contributing to the growth of the InnerSource community.
Johannes is a co-creator of the InnerSource Commons Learning Path and has worked on introducing InnerSource to HERE Technologies, a leading digital map and location company. Currently he offers coaching and consulting on Engineering Productivity, Open Source and InnerSource Strategy and OSPO topics as well as cloud solution architecture. He also works as a lecturer and delivers technical training on the topics mentioned above. He presents his work and thoughts at industry conferences like the FOSDEM or the InnerSource Commons Summit and has been active in Open Source communities for a long time. With a background in both computer science and sociology of organizations he has a unique perspective on software engineering organizations. In past roles, he has also worked on introducing Continuous Integration and Delivery to large research institutions, in DevOps roles for very large cloud based platforms and developed software within the Telco domain.
All of Cedric’s work, personal and professional, has been guided by my desire to improve people's lives - mostly through technology. The possibilities that can be unlocked with software and hardware systems are literally limitless. Each of his engagements has been given me the opportunity to work on that in new ways, some more technology-focused, and some more focused directly on customers. All of them have given him a deep appreciation for the responsibility of technologists to always make sure that what we build makes things better for anyone involved.
Tim is a Distinguished Member of Technical Staff and the Product Manager for Nokia Continuous Delivery in Nokia Cloud and Network Services. Over his twenty-plus year career in telecommunications, Tim has held roles in innovation, software testing, system engineering, architecture, and procurement. He served six years on the Alcatel-Lucent FOSS Executive Committee. Tim has experience creating grass roots communities within the company and outside of it; he is a volunteer co-Municipal Liaison for National Novel Writing Month.