Max Spevack

max {at} spevack.org | gpg key | website

Red Hat

Reporting to Michael Cunningham, I am responsible for ensuring that the free software community is an equal partner in the creation of Red Hat's products, including the Fedora Project.

My job is to define and execute Red Hat's global community development strategy. I manage a global team and budget, including Red Hat employees and community volunteers.

The overall goal is to leverage the talent and abilities of the free software community worldwide as a force multiplier for the goals of Red Hat. It is my responsibility to ensure that the team has specific goals and success metrics, and that our budget and resources are properly planned, allocated, and tracked.

In addition to my managerial duties, I lead all of Fedora and Red Hat's community efforts in EMEA. I also have leadership roles in various sub-sections of the Fedora Project.

I frequently blog about my work, and I also give public talks and speeches. I have been a keynote speaker in the open source track at the inaugural Athens Digital Week. I was interviewed in advance of my speech at FOSDEM 2009. I have also participated in a podcast about open source community management.

As of May 2008, I have relocated to Amsterdam.

Reporting to Red Hat's CEO (Matthew Szulik), I was ultimately accountable for all aspects of the Fedora Project.

The Fedora Project is a collaboration between Red Hat and the free software community. Its flagship project is the , which is used on millions of computers worldwide. Fedora also serves as Red Hat's open research and development lab, and is the upstream for Red Hat Enterprise Linux and many other Linux distributions.

My job included chairing the Fedora Project Board, which is Fedora's executive committee. This Board determines the overall direction of the Fedora Project and provides guidance, leadership, and resources to a wide variety of sub-projects.

Additionally, I was responsible for day to day general management of the Fedora Project, including both Red Hat employees and community volunteers. This required both individual and team-based leadership in various areas, such as:

• Community building and community relations.
• Engineering, quality assurance, and production operations.
• Marketing and brand strategy.
• Internal and external communications, including all press inquiries and other public-relations issues.
• Legal and financial issues, including budgets and staffing.
• Long-term strategy, vision, and competitive analysis.

A major part of this job was public communication. I conducted interviews with LWN, Slashdot, and Newsforge. I was twice a guest on the Linux Link Tech Show. I blogged (and still do), and I gave interviews to various other websites and contributed articles to Red Hat Magazine.

I spoke about the Fedora Project at many events, including keynotes at FUDCon and Ohio Linux Fest. I also spoke at LinuxTag, FOSDEM, Software Freedom Day, and the Red Hat Summit. Additionally, I gave talks at NC State University and the Shodor Education Foundation.

As a member of the Red Hat Network (RHN) group, I had a variety of leadership, QA, and engineering responsibilities.

• Team lead of the QA group, with decision-making authority over scheduling, task delegation, priorities, etc.
• Responsible for QA lifecycle for every RHN Satellite, RHN Hosted, and RHN Proxy release.
• Lead designer and developer of in-house automated test harness, written in Python and designed such that the test cases are kept entirely separate from the execution engine.
• Responsiblity for the QA of RHN's Solaris support, up2date, and firstboot functionality.
• Significant role in improving and documenting bug verification, QA, and release engineering processes.
• Worked with QA team to create and execute a regression testplan where none existed previously.

In addition to my primary job responsibilities, I was part of "Brave New World" -- Red Hat's company-wide leadership development program from May 2005 - April 2006.

• Team leader/manager of a group tasked with revamping Red Hat's performance management system. The team conducted significant research both inside and outside of Red Hat, analyzed data, built a set of recommendations, and presented those recommendations to the CEO and top-level executive staff.
• Specifically, my time was spent creating a vision for the project and inspiring the team to work toward it, setting milestones and tasks, watching the schedule, revising the plans and strategies as necessary, managing conflict, and maintaining the group's morale and direction.

VeriSign

As a member of the Security Services group, I worked on the XML Trust Services project -- a "Trust Gateway" designed to protect web traffic according to configurable policies.

• Responsible for white and black box testing of GUI console, security features, encryption, and SSL.
• Designed a test plan and test matrix, working closely with developers and the engineering manager.
• QA lead for performance and load testing, including the implementation of a multithreaded Java client used for testing.
• Maintained and extended an automated test suite with over 430 testcases used to verify nightly builds.

I was also on the QA team for the Unified Authentication service, a single, integrated platform for provisioning and managing all types of two-factor authentication credentials.

• Responsible for testing of certificate provisioning and usage functionality.
• Created testplans and performed many cycles of feature testing, smoke testing, and regression testing.
• Primary responsibility for testing the interaction of the service with Microsoft products, including Windows 2003 encrypted file system technology, as well as encryption/signing of documents/email.

Education

BS Computer Science, Stanford University, 2002.