Governance

Anni Lai is the Head of Futurewei Open Source Operations and Marketing. She drives Futurewei’s open source governance, process, compliance, training, project alignment, and ecosystem building. Anni has a long history of serving on various open source foundation boards such as LF CNCF, LF OCI, LF Edge, and OpenStack Foundation, and is currently on the LF AI & Data,  Open Metaverse Foundation, LF Europe Advisory boards, and Kaiyuanshe.org Advisory Committee. Anni has been instrumental in growing various open source projects and building ecosystems in the areas of Cloud Native, Edge, AI, and Metaverse.

Prior to Futurewei, Anni worked at companies such as Oracle, Salesforce.com, Savvis (acquired by Centurylink), Fast Search and Transfer (acquired by Microsoft), and Sun Microsystems (acquired by Oracle) in the areas of product mgt/marketing, technology evangelism/developer relations, partner strategy/recruitment/mgt, and enterprise business development & consulting.

Anni firmly believes in creating great technology via open innovation and collaboration with the global community. She has traveled to 30+ countries, and 5 continents as a technology evangelist, consultant, strategist, and executive. Beyond professional commitments, Anni was able to utilize her community-building skills from Open Source to serve her local community as a trustee at the Santa Cruz Museum of Art and History for 3 years.

Anni holds an MS & a BA degree in Computer Science and is currently working in Silicon Valley, USA. Anni has completed NACD (National Association of Corporate Directors) Director Professionalism Training.

Dr. Brad Topol is an IBM Distinguished Engineer and Director of AI and Cloud Open Technologies who also serves as IBM’s Chief Developer Advocate.  In his current role, he leads the global IBM team developing open source technologies and working in open communities.  He has overall responsibility for IBM’s open source strategy, upstream development, community building, education, and client initiatives. He leads a development team with responsibility for contributing to and improving several AI and cloud-native open source technologies including PyTorch, KubeFlow, KServe/ModelMesh, Ray, Kubernetes, Tekton, OpenTelemetry, and Operator Framework. He also serves as a LF AI & Data Governing Board Member, and as a CNCF alternate Governing Board Member. He is a co-author of Hybrid Cloud Apps with OpenShift and Kubernetes, a book published by O’Reilly Media in 2021.  In addition, he is a co-author of Kubernetes in the Enterprise, a book published by O’Reilly Media in 2018. He received a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the Georgia Institute of Technology in 1998.

FrenchBen is an open source enthusiast with a proven track record of contributions to cloud-native projects and enterprise-grade infrastructure solutions. He currently works as Director of Engineering at NVIDIA, focusing on AI&ML Platforms. Prior to this, FrenchBen  was a Sr Engineering Manager at Apple, focusing on containerization technologies and cloud platforms.

Lisa is an engineering, product, and advocacy expert in open source data infrastructure and DataOps fields. She was previously known for her early evangelism work of Apache Gravitino and activity within the Apache Iceberg REST catalog space. Lisa serves on the LF AI & Data Governing Board, formerly led the Open Platform for Enterprise AI’s (OPEA) Developer Experience Working Group, and leads the Continuous Delivery Foundation’s (CDF) DataOps Initiative. 

Lisa is also a Google Women Techmakers Ambassador, a founder and 3x chair of the Vancouver Datajam, and former lead maintainer of the BiocSwirl project. She is also a Terry Fox Gold Medal award recipient (2021) and Linux Foundation LiFT recipient for Women in Open Source (2021).

Before joining Databricks in Staff Developer Relations in July 2025, she worked as Product Manager – Al/ML Product, Partnerships, & Developer Relations at Datastrato. Prior to that, she was Technical Reviewer at Packt.

Wei Meng, Director of Standard and Open Source Planning at ZTE. He is based in Nanjing, China. He has led technical pre-research of ZTE on artificial intelligence since 2016. He is committed to the research of “AI in 5G” and has been elected as the chairman of ITU-T FG-ML5G WG3 (Working Group of Architecture of Machine Learning in future network at ITU-T) in 2018. Most recently, he was elected as a vice chairman of general WG at AIIA (Artificial Intelligence Industry Alliance). In these roles, he has chaired and organized multiple conferences in AI and 5G fields. Mr. Wei Meng is the author of several standards at IETF and ITU-T on AI/NFV and has been granted more than 20 China and international patents.

Anni Lai is the Head of Futurewei Open Source Operations and Marketing. She drives Futurewei’s open source governance, process, compliance, training, project alignment, and ecosystem building. Anni has a long history of serving on various open source foundation boards such as LF CNCF, LF OCI, LF Edge, and OpenStack Foundation, and is currently on the LF AI & Data,  Open Metaverse Foundation, LF Europe Advisory boards, and Kaiyuanshe.org Advisory Committee. Anni has been instrumental in growing various open source projects and building ecosystems in the areas of Cloud Native, Edge, AI, and Metaverse.

Prior to Futurewei, Anni worked at companies such as Oracle, Salesforce.com, Savvis (acquired by Centurylink), Fast Search and Transfer (acquired by Microsoft), and Sun Microsystems (acquired by Oracle) in the areas of product mgt/marketing, technology evangelism/developer relations, partner strategy/recruitment/mgt, and enterprise business development & consulting.

Anni firmly believes in creating great technology via open innovation and collaboration with the global community. She has traveled to 30+ countries, and 5 continents as a technology evangelist, consultant, strategist, and executive. Beyond professional commitments, Anni was able to utilize her community-building skills from Open Source to serve her local community as a trustee at the Santa Cruz Museum of Art and History for 3 years.

Anni holds an MS & a BA degree in Computer Science and is currently working in Silicon Valley, USA. Anni has completed NACD (National Association of Corporate Directors) Director Professionalism Training.

Arnaud has over 25 years of experience in standards and open source development, contributing as a staff member of standards development organizations (SDOs) such as W3C and the X Consortium and as a representative for IBM. His work has encompassed all aspects of the open technology development process, including technical, strategic, political, and legal domains. Arnaud served as editor for several key web standards, including HTML4 and DOM, and participated in the development of XML. His involvement in open source projects includes work on Xerces, the Apache XML parser. Arnaud’s contributions to open source date back to 1990 with the release of the XPM library, which is still in use today. He is currently focusing on Open Source Security with the OpenSSF and AI.

Specialties: Open standards, open source, HTML, XML, RDF, Linked Data, Web services technology, software engineering, blockchain, security.