Derek Zimmer – President and Executive Director

Derek is a privacy activist, hacker and mathematician. He started his first business in 2000, selling hand-designed PCs to gamers, engineers, and businesses. In 2012 Derek helped found VikingVPN, a VPN service focused on speed, security, and privacy in response to the increasing problems with surveillance on the internet by marketing entities. The May 2013 disclosures by Edward Snowden motivated him to work in the privacy and infosec full-time, and to focus his work on countermeasures against advanced persistent threats.

He has personally funded the entirety of the startup costs for OSTIF. He believes in the merits of the open source movement and wants to design systems to help open source infrastructure to thrive. The ultimate goal of OSTIF is to help open source software and hardware to be a trusted de-facto standard for computing.

In his free time, Derek enjoys nature, relaxing on a nice patio, reading, cooking, dining at new restaurants, travel, art, music, movies, theater and all forms of digital entertainment.

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Amir Montazery – Managing Director

Amir Montazery is the Managing Director and Cofounder of Open Source Technology Improvement Fund, Inc (OSTIF). Amir comes from a background in Finance, IT and Internal Auditing, applying years of experience to help develop OSTIF’s processes and partnerships. Furthermore, Amir is responsible for negotiating and organizing over 12,000 hours of security-focused work for organizations like Google and Amazon Web Services along with groups like Mozilla Foundation and Open Source Security Foundation (OpenSSF).

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Helen Woeste – Project Facilitation and Communications Manager

Helen is a Hoosier who spent her youth in West Lafayette and then Bloomington, Indiana, spending time in the latter earning her undergraduate degree in History from Indiana University. A month after graduation she moved to Chicago where she worked in hospitality and food service management, running a variety of enterprises from bakeries to high-end restaurants to a pasta food truck. In 2023, she transitioned into open source by accepting a position with OSTIF. She is grateful for the opportunity to work with a global community that prioritizes sharing free knowledge for the greater good. In her free time she enjoys developing recipes, reading non-fiction books, and long walks by Lake Michigan.

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Steve Donley – Community Manager

Steve grew up in south central Ohio. Raised by phone circuit designers, he learned different types of tech first hand. Currently employed as a technician for a major industrial manufacturer, he observes both sides of privacy issues, learns about and tests new forms of identity tracking.

Seeing the outrageous volume of information stored has shown him the need for OSTIF as a way for companies to secure all private information they collect. Doing so will help protect corporations large and small by protecting the privacy of citizens of the world.

Steve enjoys caring for and breeding assorted exotic animals, 3D printing, playing assorted virtual and tabletop games and keeping up with friends.

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OSTIF Advisory Council

Our advisory council is a group of volunteers who offer advice in their fields of expertise to OSTIF. Their experience and wide field of knowledge help us manage our organization, problem solve, and advance our goals. These volunteers get monthly updates of OSTIF activity and offer their advice and opinions for management to consider when big decisions are being made about the organizations direction or actions.

Each advisory council member is listed below, showing their name and field of expertise or other organizations that they are members of that bring relevant experience to the council.

 

 

NAME	POSITION	COMPANY/ORGANIZATION
Mike Dolan	VP of Strategic Programs	Linux Foundation
Leslie Hawthorn	Sr. Principal Technical Program Manager	Red Hat
Alon Swartz	Co-Founder	Turnkey Linux
Mario Heiderich	Director	Cure53
Abraham Aranguren	Managing Director	7A Security
Marita Markkula	Community Manager	F-Secure
Carrotcypher	Community Manager	Wireleap
Matt Caswell	Programmer and Researcher	OpenSSL
Samuli Seppänen	Community Manager	The OpenVPN Project
Daniel Davis	Community Manager	DuckDuckGo
Joeseph Soria	Chief Executive Officer	Flashrouters.net
Christel Dahlskjaer	Open Source Lead	London Trust Media
Markus Vervier	Chief Executive Officer	X41 D-sec
Fred Raynal	Chief Executive Officer	Quarkslab
JP Aumasson	Chief Security Officer	Kudelski Security
Daniel Guido	Chief Executive Officer	Trail of Bits
Sarang Noether	Programmer and Researcher	Monero Research Lab
Mounir Idrassi	Technical Lead	Veracrypt