Hyperledger TSC candidates and thoughts on diversity

The candidates for the Hyperledger Technical Steering Committee (TSC) elections were announced today, together with everybody’s one page “pitches”, including my own:

Hyperledger Annual TSC Election Candidates (2018-2019)

There are 29 candidates for the 11 seats on the committee. All of the incumbents are standing for re-election, together with 18 challengers, including myself.

The existing committee has the following composition:

Intel – Dan Middleton, Kelly Olson and Mic Bowman
IBM – Arnaud Le Hors and Chris Ferris (Chair)
State Street – Greg Haskins and Binh Nguyen (recently ex-IBM)
Other – Jonathan Levi (Hacera), Hart Montgomery (Fujitsu), Nathan George (Evernym), Baohua Yang (Oracle)

And here are the challengers:

Bitwise IO – Shawn Amundson
Blockchain Engineering Council – Claudio Lima
CME – Stanislav Liberman
Finterra – Mostafa S. Joo
Independent – Axe Tang, Clive Boulton, Sjir Njissen
Monax – Silas Davis
Ontario Provincial Government – Steve Boyd
Oracle – Todd Little
Quantfury – Bob Summerwill
Red Hat – Mark Wagner
SANLIAN Technology – Leon Liang
SecureKey – Troy Ronda
Soramitsu – Mukhutdinov Bualt, Nikolai Iushkevich
State Street – Srinivasan “Murali” Muralidharan
T-Mobile – Chris Spanton

I really enjoyed what Silas Davis and Mark Wagner had to say. I worked with Silas on the Technology Working Group for the first few months of the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance and love what Monax have been doing to bridge the worlds. This quote from Mark also really resonated with my own motivations for standing for election:

One of the reasons that I have chosen to run for the TSC is to provide more vendor diversity on the Committee as over half of the TSC is from two companies. My time is focused in the working groups and I am currently not associated with any of the projects. Thus I try to span all the projects with equal interest

– Mark Wagner

There most certainly is an overweight representation from IBM and Intel on the TSC at the moment, and I hope that we can come out of these elections with a more diverse balance of representatives.

On the topic of diversity, as a Community Ambassador for CryptoChicks, I have to say that I am sorely disappointed to note that not a single candidate for these elections is female. The Hyperledger Governing Board has 21 members, only one of whom, Blythe Masters, the Chair, is female.

I spoke about CryptoChicks on Coindesk LIVE during Consensus 2018 in New York this year. CryptoChicks are a non-profit blockchain educational hub with a mission to grow the professional and leadership potential of women in blockchain technology through education and mentorship. I am delighted to do everything I can help in that noble mission.