Speaker - Hugh Blemings

Hugh has had a long standing association with Free and Open Source Software, Open Hardware and, in particular, Linux and POWER/PowerPC. His career has spanned everything from Linux kernel development to engineering team management, electronics design to technical program management at the likes of IBM, Canonical, OpenPOWER Foundation and AWS. As a participant in the open technical commons, he has served in a voluntary capacity on the Council of Linux Australia in various roles including President, and is a former member of the Linux Foundation’s Technical Advisory Board. As Executive Director of the OpenPOWER Foundation he guided the opening of the POWER Instruction Set Architecture (ISA), a move that ensured choice in the open high performance microprocessor space. Of late Hugh returned to his professional passion - people management - as an Engineering Director leading Grafana Labs’ APAC Databases team, a great bunch of folk working on some equally great software. Outside the FOSS/technical world Hugh is involved in various musical endeavours in and around his home in regional Victoria. This latter recently involved playing the role of a somewhat forgetful theatre cat…