Leslie Hawthorn
Community Action & Impact, Red Hat

An internationally known community manager, speaker and author, Leslie Hawthorn has over 10 years experience in high tech project management, marketing and public relations. In March 2012 she joined Red Hat, Inc., where she is responsible for Community Action & Impact on the company’s Open Source and Standards team. Prior to Red Hat, she served as Outreach Manager at Oregon State University’s Open Source Lab and as a Program Manager for Google’s Open Source Team, where she managed the Google Summer of Code Program, created the contest now known as Google Code In and launched the company’s Open Source Developer Blog.

When not focusing on all things open source and community at Red Hat, Leslie is in the “save the world business” and works on side projects that make the world a better place. She was recently invited to be a member of ConvergeUS’ 2012 Council of Innovation Advisers, a mentor for The Outercurve Foundation and a Scout for Mozilla’s WebFWD program. She also serves as a Board Member/Advisor to the following organizations: CASH Music, the Humanitarian FOSS Project, the Sahana Software Foundation and the Technology Innovation Management Review.

Leslie lives in Portland, Oregon, U.S.A. with her two cats. She enjoys organic gardening, cooking for her four housemates and working on the occasional craft project. She harkens back to her days at U.C. Berkeley now and again by indulging in an evening’s read of Medieval English Literature (but you can keep your Geoffrey Chaucer; William Langland for the win!). You can follow her adventures on Twitter or her blog at http://hawthornlandings.org