.NET Foundation Campaign: Jeff Strauss

Who is Jeff?

Hi, everyone, I'm Jeff!

For over a decade, I have been a passionate developer community advocate. I am a Director of KCDC, a 2200-person multi-platform and interdisciplinary conference serving attendees and speakers from around the world. Previously, I was a board member of the Dev Up Conference and the St. Louis .NET User Group.

I own the dev-organizers Slack workspace that currently welcomes over 300 event and meetup organizers on six continents to collaborate and improve our overall industry and communities. I am an admin for the midwest-speakers Slack workspace, which provides a shared feedback loop, abstract reviews, event information, and mentorship for current and aspiring technology speakers.

I co-founded #MetaConference as a think tank for event and meetup organizers to engage in facilitated face-to-face conversation, covering topics that impact all of of our communities. And most recently, I worked with the .NET Foundation's leadership to organize Dev Around The Sun, a 24-hour global virtual developer event and fundraiser for COVID-19 relief.

During this same time, I have been a regular speaker and keynote presenter on topics covering .NET, Azure, JavaScript, open source software, and business. I am a Microsoft MVP and an ASP Insider.

For my day job, I'm a Cloud Application Architect at World Wide Technology in St. Louis, Missouri, USA. While our team is a multicloud consulting group, my practice is heavily focused on Azure and its partners in the Microsoft ecosystem.

Why am I running?

Those who know me well will know that, to me, Community Is Everything. All of us survive, evolve, and thrive only when we work together and raise each other up. For that reason, I am a strong believer in the .NET Foundation and its mission. This is not because of its focus on any one technology, but rather because of the impact our Foundation can have for the empowerment of all developers and the betterment of the entire software industry.

To say that the year 2020 has given us all time and cause for reflection would be a gross understatement. As somebody who has worked hard to promote software communities for many years—and who has been fortunate to have built trusting relationships with a great many dedicated community leaders—I have seen and heard the impact up-close and through their eyes. Things are changing; people are anxious and uncertain. But there is still a lot we can do to help maintain a strong and healthy developer community, even now while we remain physically distant from each other.

I want to offer my experience and to be a part of the recovery and resurgence of our community as we fight through these challenging times and come out the other side. I believe in the .NET Foundation and I believe in our developer community. And I would be honored to have the opportunity to serve.

What are my goals for the .NET Foundation?

There are three different areas where I can have an impact as a Board Member of the Foundation.

  1. Increased Community Support. The Foundation can leverage my long history as a community organizer to improve our outreach and marketing efforts, while increasing our capacity to assist other leaders to get their own initiatives off the ground. Beyond events like KCDC and Dev Around The Sun, I have also served at various times in an advisory capacity for new events still in their nascent stages. I want to see the Foundation increasingly reengage with the developer community such that we are seen more universally as a source of leadership, support, expertise, and inclusion.

  2. Project Support and Continuity. I am a (non-practicing) attorney with an interest in intellectual property and a track record of educating development and IT professionals about the creation, use, participation, and licensing of free and open source software. I'd like to find additional ways that our Foundation can improve our work in supporting and ensuring the continuity of important projects in the Microsoft ecosystem and beyond, giving a sense of confidence and security to OSS authors, their contributors, and consumers.

  3. Educating Enterprise on FOSS. I believe the Foundation should also play a role in guiding major organizations in their interactions with the FOSS community. Notwithstanding the growing ubiquity of open source, I see too many executive leaders struggle with how to embrace the resources available to them and how to define appropriate and productive policies. With my combined experiences in business, finance, law, and technology, I am comfortable and effective sitting down with these individuals and helping them navigate these waters. As an independent organization, the Foundation has an opportunity to show leadership in empowering a strong partnership between the open source community and the public and private sectors.

Contacts

If you have questions about my candidacy or objectives for the .NET Foundation—or if you just want to say "HI!"—please don't hesitate to reach out to me: