Our Volunteer Board Of Directors
The OpenAFS Foundation is being lead by a Board of Directors, consisting of volunteers. Specific Board members also fill the roles of Executive Director (who heads the board), Secretary, and Treasurer. Any new Board members must be appointed by the existing Board.
The overview of the individual Directors on the Board below offers a brief summary of their relevant professional credentials. The individuals are listed in alphabetical order by their last names.
David Boldt (10/2014 - 4/2016)
David Boldt of the US Geological Survey (USGS) has been using AFS since 2001 as
part of a project to provide resilient web service which could survive the loss
of any single data center. A requirement was precipitated by a
hurricane-induced data center outage in Florida, which made USGS flood
information unavailable just when and where it was most needed. The USGS AFS
implementation replicates web content across data centers in Menlo Park
California, Sioux Falls South Dakota and Reston Virginia using a system of
programs which look for changes to AFS volumes and automatically vos release
on a 15 minute interval as required.
The experience of having a very small but dedicated team with a well-defined objective, trying to make use of a broad variety of tools, including AFS, engenders an appreciation for what OpenAFS provides. USGS could not have provided the same user experience with any other product. David's resume is that of a self-described technical generalist, starting as a hydrogeologist and doing a bit of system administration, programming, system architecture, project management, documentation, software training, web site production and customer support over the years. He hopes to be able to contribute back to the OpenAFS community with any and all of the skills he acquired on this career path.
David can be reached at dboldt@usgs.gov.
Dave Botsch (10/2014 - present)
Dave Botsch is employed by the Cornell NanoScale Science and Technology Facility. At the CNF, Dave manages technology solutions (including OpenAFS) for the problems and workflows of both users and staff. Also as part of his job, he works to foster collaboration among the wider Cornell IT community.
Dave has a Bachelors in Computer Science from Cornell University in Ithaca, New York.
Dave has been a member of the OpenAFS community for some time, with his involvement in the OpenAFS newsletter, previous iterations of the OpenAFS wiki, and writing the OpenAFS Tokens gui application for Linux and for Mac. Dave is looking forward to continuing to work with the OpenAFS community.
Dave can be reached at botsch@cnf.cornell.edu.
D. Brashear (09/2012 - 08/2015)
D. Brashear has been involved with OpenAFS since its inception. As a student at Carnegie Mellon in the 1990s, she took an interest in the distributed computing environment to which she'd been newly exposed, which led to the acquisition of a used Sun workstation that, in turn, resulted in her current role.
While working as a student, and then a staff member as a sysadmin and programmer for the Computing Services Division of Carnegie Mellon University, she pushed IBM Corporation regarding pieces of AFS technology that she felt were legally required to be distributed. While these pieces were eventually distributed openly, IBM ultimately chose to open source AFS completely, coincident with their end of life announcement, and she was one of the original organizers of the OpenAFS organization, as well as an OpenAFS gatekeeper and a member of the Council of Elders since the beginning.
She has worked for Carnegie Mellon University, Sine Nomine Associates, and Your File System Inc., providing OpenAFS support and development among other responsibilities. At Your File System, she currently works on distributed data sharing technology based on protocols that, to this day, are derived from the original AFS3 implementation and principles dating back to the 1980s. She believes that these principles are ahead of their time and still relevant to modern data consumers. Thus, she seeks to continue to enhance this technology in order to bring it to ever more users.
She can be reached at shadow@your-file-system.com.
Todd DeSantis (09/2012 - present)
Todd DeSantis is a Senior Systems Support Engineer for IBM Corporation. Todd has been working with AFS since he joined the Transarc Corporation in 1993 as an AFS Support Representative. Through the years Todd has expanded his role within the AFS Support Team to include support, development and management of the technical direction of the AFS Developers Team. Todd and his Team support both IBM AFS and OpenAFS platforms. He joined the OpenAFS Elders in 2005.
Todd can be reached at atd@us.ibm.com.
Thomas Keiser (09/2012 - present)
Thomas Keiser has, throughout the past eight years, been closely involved with OpenAFS development and AFS3 protocol standardization. During his tenure with Sine Nomine Associates, Thomas developed the Demand Attach File Service, a technology that: 1) reduces file server restart time by several orders of magnitude, 2) alleviates a significant bottleneck intrinsic to the wire protocol, and 3) improves the safety of file server metadata. In addition, Thomas has been a prominent contributor to the AFS3 protocol standardization process, where he authored drafts related to: low-level wire protocol primitives, historical documentation of the existing wire protocol, as well as proposed new features requiring protocol modifications.
Thomas holds a bachelors of science in computer science from Penn State University. His research and publications primarily focus on autonomous, distributed systems; distributed control; and sensor networks. While recently embarking on a new career as an Illumos kernel engineer with Nexenta Systems, Inc., Thomas remains committed to the theoretical first principles exemplified by the AFS3 protocol. He believes that — notwithstanding twenty-five subsequent years of technical innovation — the balance of management, interoperability, cache consistency, and geographic distribution features, as uniquely embodied in the AFS architecture, render AFS peerless.
Thomas can be reached at tkeiser@gmail.com.
Roman Mitz (09/2012, emeritus)
Roman Mitz, Jr., is the Senior Manager of the Systems Development group inside Computing Services at Carnegie Mellon University. His experience with AFS started in 1996 as a user, 2003 as an administrator, and he joined the OpenAFS Elders (a group informally organized to further OpenAFS) in 2010, where he is currently the treasurer. Roman received his BS in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon while working full-time as the lone IT administrator in the Center for the Neural Basis of Cognition. His lengthy experience at Carnegie Mellon as an IT professional spans a variety of departments and roles; in addition to those already mentioned, he was the Senior UNIX Systems Administrator for Electrical and Computer Engineering, Senior Research Systems Programmer for the Middleware team in Computing Services, and Server Systems Manager/Acting IT Director for the Carnegie Mellon Qatar Campus. At the Qatar campus he was instrumental in the setup and operation of its complex computing environment from its opening in 2004 to his return to the United States in 2007.
Roman can be reached at rmitz@cmu.edu.
Elisabeth Margarete Ziemer (09/2012 - present)
Elisabeth Margarete Ziemer, Ph.D., (who prefers to go by her middle name, "Margarete") is co-founder and CEO of Sine Nomine Associates, a vendor-neutral research and engineering consultancy dedicated to objectively identifying and implementing the best solution for each client. Margarete, a resident of former East Germany for twenty-five years, brings extensive international and academic experience. In addition to receiving three master’s degrees and winning prestigious scholarships by organizations such as the World Council of Churches, the Fulbright Commission, and the American Association of University Women, she earned a post-graduate degree at the University of Jena, Germany, and a Ph.D. at Princeton. Her proven track record as a professional and community leader include the founding of the International Students’ Association at her alma mater in Princeton, a Women’s Leadership Group serving the Washington, DC, metro area, mentoring in a program by Women in Technology in the capitol, and a successful East Coast animal rescue.
Margarete can be reached at emziemer@sinenomine.net.