Our team
Sebastian Dziallas
Sebastian is the team’s travel agent and complex logistics ninja. On the education side of the house, he coordinates events for the Teaching Open Source community; on the technical side, he wrangles chaos into products as a release engineer. During the school year, he can be found at Olin College designing his own degree program in FOSS.
Harish Pillay
Harish has been with Red Hat Asia Pacific since 2003. He brings a breadth of experience to the community team, having previously served Red Hat as Chief Technology Architect, in ISV management and as part of the Red Hat University and sales training team. Prior to joining Red Hat, Harish was the co-founder of an open source consultancy, training and services company.
Ryan Rix
Ryan is a student and geek—a coder and maker, perpetually searching for knowledge. Apart from his unnofficial duties of burning his hands soldering, playing with Nerf guns or developing for the KDE project, Ryan works on the education side of the team, running Fedora’s participation in the Google Summer of Code and working with the Teaching Open Source community.
Karsten Wade
Since 2000, Karsten has been teaching and living the open source way, and helps with various community activities in projects Red Hat is involved in. He is a 15-year IT industry veteran and has worked most sides of common business equations as an IS manager, professional services consultant, technical writer and developer advocate. Karsten lives in his hometown of Santa Cruz, California, with his wife and two daughters on their small urban farm, where they focus on nourishing traditions and sustainable community living.
Ian Weller
Ian does programming and keeps servers from catching on fire for the team. He claims to understand Python programming, web development and Linux system administration, while attempting to get a degree from the University of Kansas. He inconvenienced a large amount of electrons to build what you’re reading now.
Team alumni
Mel Chua
Mel is a hacker—of hardware, software, education systems and FOSS communities, depending on the hour—who spent her days at Red Hat teaching professors how to teach open source. She is currently pursuing a PhD in engineering education at Purdue University and is contagiously enthusiastic about everything.
Max Spevack
Max was the team’s co-founder, leader, budget wrangler and adult supervision. He was at Red Hat for seven years, and worked in the community realm for six years. In addition to being a former Fedora Project Leader, Max has experience in engineering, quality assurance, public speaking and ping pong. He is currently a manager for Amazon Web Services’ Kernel and Operating Systems group.
- Some icons by Yusuke Kamiyamane, licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license.
- Photo of Harish Pillay is thought to be a Red Hat press photo.
- Photo of Ryan Rix by María ‘tatica’ Leandro, licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 license.
- Photo of Karsten Wade by Malakai Wade, licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 license.
- Photo of Ian Weller by Kelsey Rankin, licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 license.
- Photo of Mel Chua by Michael Maloney, used with permission.
- Photo of Greg DeKoenigsberg by Máirín Duffy, licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 license.
- Photo of Max Spevack by Francesco Crippa, licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 license.
