Silona Bonewald Joins IEEE SA Open as First Executive Director

PISCATAWAY, NJ, 4 March 2020 – IEEE, the world’s largest technical professional organization dedicated to advancing technology for humanity, and IEEE Standards Association (IEEE SA) today announced Silona Bonewald as Executive Director to lead IEEE SA Open, a comprehensive platform offering the open source community cost-effective options for developing and validating their projects. IEEE SA will present IEEE SA Open, now available for use by developers globally, at the SCaLE 18X open source and free software conference, 5-8 March 2020 at the Pasadena (California) Convention Center.

Bonewald joins IEEE SA Open after serving as vice president of community architecture at Hyperledger, a global open source collaborative effort hosted by The Linux Foundation, where she integrated leaders in finance, banking, Internet of Things (IoT), supply chains, and manufacturing. Other notable career accomplishments include, while with PayPal, pioneering the InnerSource process; for Siemens AG, creating a cutting-edge and Six Sigma-compliant e-commerce website; and for Ubisoft, creating an international content management system (CMS) architecture.

IEEE SA Open is intended to address common challenges faced by the open-source development community, such as lack of relevant engagement in projects, solution incompatibility, and complexity around intellectual property (IP) licensing. IEEE SA Open development projects are underway in diverse areas of technology development. IEEE SA Open provides community management, DevOps infrastructure, and governance, along with a growing set of templates and guides—thus supporting and strengthening the collaboration, growth, and sustainability of open source communities and their projects. IEEE SA Open conveys to individuals and organizations the benefits of neutral, third-party administration, and unique service add-ons utilizing the skills of more than 422,000 IEEE members in over 160 countries.

“We are excited about the expertise and experience that Silona Bonewald brings to IEEE SA Open,” said Robert S. Fish, president of IEEE SA. “Our open source environment is already empowering leading developers who want to accelerate their projects. The value of open source in innovation around the world is undeniable, and because of that we are adding this new open source offering to our proven, globally open, and transparent IEEE SA collaboration platform. Our intention is to comprehensively support mission-based and market-driven open source projects.”

Utilizing a customized offering of the proven, stable, and easy-to-use GitLab software, IEEE SA Open leverages the globally recognized expertise of IEEE in technical publishing by adding the option of supplementing technical publications with open source code that implements the published research results.

IEEE SA Open offers a variety of à la carte support services. For example, comprehensive fiscal sponsorship for mission-based humanitarian projects is available through the Collaborative Open Innovation Lab Fund (COIL), which is a joint activity of IEEE SA and the IEEE Foundation. Development, quality assurance, maintenance, and documentation support also are available. With the addition of IEEE SA Open, IEEE SA avails developers proven mechanisms throughout the lifecycle of incubating promising technologies—including research, open source, standardization, and go-to-market services.

A Natural Fit Within the IEEE SA Ecosystem

The addition of open source to the IEEE SA collaboration platform is a key milestone in the organization’s ongoing transformation and expansion into new business and industry sectors. IEEE SA Open is intended to bridge the gap between standards developers and other open technical communities to enable nimble and creative technical solutions.

“IEEE has been a trusted, globally open standards development organization for more than a century, and open source is a natural fit as a complementary or alternative platform within our ecosystem,” said Konstantinos Karachalios, managing director of IEEE SA. “Standardization continues to evolve to a point where open source development will increasingly complement and sometimes substitute for open standards development. IEEE SA is excited to empower our individual and industry participants with the opportunity to benefit from this trend and to engage diverse stakeholders in development of market-driven, bottom-up solutions and mission-based open source projects.”

Individuals can create an account and start a project or fork an existing one at no cost at IEEE SA Open. Companies and other organizations can contact IEEE SA to participate. Please visit IEEE SA Open to learn more.

To learn more about IEEE SA or about any of its many market-driven initiatives, visit us on Facebook, follow us on Twitter, connect with us on LinkedIn, or on the Beyond Standards Blog.

IEEE Standards Association (IEEE SA) is a collaborative organization where innovators raise the world’s standards for technology. IEEE SA provides a globally open, consensus-building environment and platform that empowers people to work together in the development of leading-edge, market-relevant technology standards, and industry solutions shaping a better, safer and sustainable world. For more information, visit https://standards.ieee.org.

IEEE is the world’s largest technical professional organization dedicated to advancing technology for the benefit of humanity. Through its highly cited publications, conferences, technology standards, and professional and educational activities, IEEE is the trusted voice in a wide variety of areas ranging from aerospace systems, computers, and telecommunications to biomedical engineering, electric power, and consumer electronics. Learn more at https://www.ieee.org.