Melbourne Beach, Florida
Deborah Bryant is an international expert in the adoption and use of open source software and open development models and its implications for public benefit.
She is senior director of Open Source and Standards at Red Hat, Inc., where she directs a team of global stewards responsible for the company’s community, research and higher education objectives.
She worked for 10 years in state government, as deputy state CIO in Oregon’s executive branch, in public office as an elected official in rural coastal Oregon and at Oregon State University building the Open Source Lab.
Bryant helped build Oregon start-ups and held senior management positions in several emerging technology areas; parallel and high-speed computing and commercialized Internet in the ‘80s, commercial wide area networks, advanced telecommunications and data/voice convergence in the ‘90s.
She serves on numerous boards with a public trust agenda and an emphasis on open source software as enabling technology. She is board adviser for the Open Source Elections Technology (OSET) Foundation and board director for Open Source Initiative (OSI), the international standards organization for open source software. She has written and contributed to numerous published studies related to open source in the public sector, adaptation of new collaborative models for economic development and the use of open source software in the U.S energy sector for cybersecurity. She received the prestigious industry Open Source Award in 2010 in recognition of her contribution to open source communities and for her pioneering advocacy of the use of open source software in the public sector.