SIG Election

SIG 1: Network Architecture - Specifications and Requirements
SIG 2: Automation - CRDs, Operators, and Related Tooling & Reference Implementation, Packaging, Installation
SIG 3: Release - CI/CD, Test Grids, Builds, Release Machinery, Project Administration

Nomination Starts - August 4th, 2022

Nomination Ends - August 23th, 2022

SIG 1: Network Architecture - Specifications and Requirements - Call for Chair nomination - Restricted to Telecom

S.No	Name	BIO	Email address	Company	Contribution plan
1	Sana Tariq	Sana is a principal technology architect leading the architecture and long-term roadmap of E2E Service Orchestration for supporting 5G/edge services over a hybrid telco cloud. She has been leading initiatives to improve cloud-native adoption through DevOps, open source solutions, and implementing organization-wide automation principles, automation CoE, and an API program. She has been involved in leading industry initiatives on making telco automation agile and cloud-native, founding partner of TELUS OSPO, project Nephio and leading industry efforts around cloud-native automation. She is actively working and leading various efforts with Linux Foundation, ATIS, and supporting research across North American universities. Sana Tariq is Ph.D. in Computer Science majoring in optical communications, cloud computing, and software-defined networking (Fulbright scholarship and CREOL fellowship awards) Sana has given many presentations on service orchestration, cloud-native transformation, open source adoption and telco transformation at the edge of 5G. One of recent blogs published at Nephio website: https://nephio.org/on-the-road-to-public-cloud-5g-networks/	sana.tariq@telus.com	TELUS Canada	Having worked with many orchestration platforms across the industry (ONAP, OSM, and most vendors' solutions) over the last six years, I want Nephio's roadmap to drive simplicity, agility, vendor-neutral automation that can deliver the promise of cloudification. Nephio community has to influence ecosystem standards, open source projects, and network function vendors to this cloud-native vision. We need to build a strong foundation for faster, easier network functions onboarding and runtime management to accelerate services delivery timelines, a need to support the 5G vision. We need to approach automation as bottom-up and solve the immediate challenges and complexities first. To ensure this open source projects gets successful, we must focus on smaller targets, run in DevOps cycles and be pragmatic. Identify the use-cases that apply to the largest number of services providers' requirements in 2023+ (targeting greenfield 5G/IoT/.. that requires massive roll-outs) Define a functional roadmap for Nephio that helps deliver production-ready increments of the project for faster adoption across major service providers Aim to simplify the use/adoption of Nephio and development of Operators, CRDs (template sharing, GUI improvements, partial parsers, etc.) Ensure Nephio can support automation of network functions, and services and is capable of integrating over standards based interfaces to ecosystem components following ETSI, 3GPP and ORAN interfaces. Ensure Nephio's adoption across all NFs vendors, Public Cloud providers through service provider's joint collaboration Ensure community members participation and joint voice is reflected in requirements and roadmap.
2	Padma Sudarsan	Padma Sudarsan is a Bell Labs Fellow and has 25+ years of experience in telecommunication industry with roles that have spanned various domains including customer and industry strategy, open and inner source projects, research, product management and architecture. As part of Nokia Bell Labs, more recently, Padma led topics related to end-to-end 5G architecture and technology insertion supporting the CTO and head of business groups by analyzing the selection and evolution of architecture and future proof solution enabling brownfield and greenfield deployments. Led architecture transformation towards building a Cloud-Native RAN. She has played an active role in shaping and driving several topics in International Wireless Standards (3GPP, ETSI, TMF, SCF, BBF, O-RAN). Currently, in VMware, Padma is setting architectural direction and telco transformation towards cloud-based deployment by understanding customer requirements, key market and technology trends and to providing the best and most cost-effective end-to-end solution. She is active in O-RAN WGs topics for cloud Orchestration, Management, LCM, SMO architecture and RAN intelligence aligning with industry and internal VMware strategy.	psudarsan@vmware.com	VMware	For the telco applications (especially the RAN) a move toward cloud-based deployments requires an architecture transformation and careful analysis of the latency sensitive requirements necessary to deliver performance. In addition, the vertical and horizontal disaggregation of the network functions introduces complexity and requires an automated, programmable, intelligent orchestration and lifecycle management architecture framework to realize the advantages of cloud-based deployments. Over the years, having worked on e2e solutions, openness with programmability and automation are key to enable multi-vendor, multi-cloud orchestration. Instead of being just yet another open source, Nephio architecture and requirements should leverage existing industry standards/fora/open source (ETSI, O-RAN, 3GPP, ONAP, Anuket etc.) and enable synergetic implementation for a simple, fast, easier onboarding and life cycle management that can be adopted by the industry. Pure cloud based/cloud native networks will take time to realize, this means that there will be a significant amount of time where hybrid networks (a mix of physical, virtual, cloud and cloud native networks) will be prevalent in most operators. While cloud “container” based deployments are rapidly evolving, brownfield deployments with a mix of classical, VM based, container on bare metal, container on VM combinations will continue to exist for many years to come. The mains goals for SIG 1 would be to: Define e2e scenarios and associated workflows for LCM of telco applications leveraging work in other standards, fora. This should include sunny day and rainy-day scenarios and information model. RAN application deployment at the edge and far edge which are resource constrained and latency sensitive need careful architecture considerations and identify/recommend choice of design. Define requirements and architecture to enable multi-cloud deployments supporting public, private and hybrid mix Enable “container” based deployments and brownfield deployments with a mix of classical, VM based, container on bare metal, container on VM combinations Clear definition of packaging for ease of multi-vendor application deployment. Leverage work in other standards bodies as applicable. Recommendation for choice of leveraging other open-source modules. Automation of LCM of infra, platform assets, services, applications. Selection and evolution of key architectural direction and helping identify future proof solution while leveraging synergies with existing mechanisms. Foster and encourage open discussions/technical debates. Ensure collaboration within the Nephio community and across external/relevant standards/for a/open source to avoid fragmentation.

SIG 2: Automation - CRDs, Operators, and Related Tooling & Reference Implementation, Packaging, Installation - Call for Vice Chair Nomination - Member with s/w development experience

S.No	Name	BIO	EMail address	Company	Contribution plan
1	Tal Liron	Tal is a senior principal software engineer in Red Hat’s Telco Solutions team, where he works with partners and customers to integrate network function workloads into the cloud native stack. In other words: the Nephio scope. He was the liaison to the ONAP project, where he focused on service orchestration and Kubernetes, and is in the core group at OASIS drafting the TOSCA 2.0 specification. In his Telco Solutions role he has initiated several projects and PoCs that align with Nephio's goals, including multusctl, Candice, Knap, Puccini, Turandot, Khutulun, Reposure, and CNCK. Before Red Hat he worked at Cloudify, specifically on OPEN-O (subsumed into ONAP) and the now-retired AriaTosca project. He has given many public presentations on the topic of cloud native, declarative, intent-driven, policy-oriented orchestration in telco. Evangelist? Prophet? Broken record? Time will tell!	tliron@redhat.com	Red Hat	I intend to steer us towards the “Unix philosophy”: Nephio as a collection of focused tools (operators) that solve one problem well. The advantage of the operator pattern in declarative orchestration, on which I have worked and written extensively, is that operators can be chained together to form comprehensive solutions, which we know will differ between vendors. Our reference implementation should reflect this differentiation and encourage innovation at its integration points rather than locking us down with too much opinion. CRDs will be tricky, requiring a careful balance between abstraction and actual features, all within the confines of Kubernetes’s extensible ecosystem. I’ve seen many modeling efforts in telco fail due to designed-by-committee bloat, shortsightedness, and/or irrelevancy. I hope to lead from experience and help us keep our eyes on the ball: delivering CNFs on Kubernetes, rather than defining them. In particular we need to solve the “bifurcation” problem of vertically integrated CNFs. Which operators will run on the management cluster and which on the workload cluster? How will our packaging, CRD design, and tooling reflect and connect the two paths? Presentation on this topic is forthcoming. Another topic I want to focus on is networking orchestration, what I call "Multus, part 2". How do we manage Multus at scale without requiring CNFs to package complete CNI configs? Some words I live by: The best technology is often the most familiar, not the suddenly popular. User experience is a starting point, not an afterthought. Documentation is as important as code. I’ll do my best to foster a welcoming, open, and diverse development community where everyone feels safe and valued.
2	Wim Henderickx	Wim is head of technology and architecture in Nokia’s IP division, where he works with partners and customers to provide consultancy advise in IP technology, Cloud and Automation. He has over 25 years of experience in the telco and enterprise communication and networking industry and is a regular speaker at technical conferences all over the world. He is driving the automation strategy within Nokia for the IP division where he developed a prototype that is aligned with the Nephio vision. A reference open source project he initiated is [containerlab](https://containerlab.dev) where multiple vendors have been integrated and collaborated. Wim holds a Bachelor’s degree in Industrial Engineering, Data Communication and a Masters degree in Economy and is a Bellabs Fellow	wim.henderickx@nokia.com	Nokia	Given I developed a similar vision as Nephio, my motivation to apply for this role is to make the Nephio project successful. I am a big believer in the cloud native operation and the goals the Nephio project is aiming for. I want to do this on one hand by leveraging my knowledge of the Telco world, but also from the knowledge I gained when building a prototype that leverage CRDs to automate various parts of the telco’s infrastructure. On top I intend to help organize the project and build an open community. I have experience in operating large multi-national and multi-cultural teams that operate on common goals, set milestones and drive towards success. I am known to be open and approachable to get the best way forward for the community and the project.

SIG 3: Release - CI/CD, Test Grids, Builds, Release Machinery, Project Administration - Call for Vice Chair nomination - - Member with s/w development experience

S.No	Name	BIO	EMail address	Company	Contribution plan
1	Tina Tsou (Deactivated)	Tina Tsou is an innovator and a visionary with far-reaching accomplishments within the technical engineering realm. As Arm’s Enterprise Architect, Tina serves in the highly visible Technical Lead role for the Enterprise Open Source Enablement team, where she analyzes, designs, and implements robust strategies to establish first tier status for Arm’s architecture within open source communities and projects. Tina also serves as Arm’s Edge Computing Team Lead. As the company’s open source thought leader, she builds powerful partnerships with and influences open source communities in support of multiple architectures. Tina previously served as the Digital Domain Expert (Connectivity) for Philips Lighting, where she implemented NB-IoT in an outdoor carrier project with China Mobile and Huawei. She released Bluetooth + ZigBee combo chip architecture and delivered a connectivity hardware/software platform (ZigBee 3.0, Wi-Fi). The China and United States Patent and Trademark Offices have granted Tina 100+ patents. She earned her Bachelor of Computer Science degree from Xi’an University of Architecture and Technologies, and currently studies in Stanford University Graduate Business School. Tina was the first woman to chair an Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) working group from a Chinese business enterprise and was the youngest Asian rapporteur in ITU Telecommunication Standardization Sector (ITU-T) history. She currently serves as Board Chair of LF Edge, and previously served as Chair of the Akraino Technical Steering Committee.	tina.tsou@arm.com	Arm	People: bring in developers and interested people to contribute on the release work. Architecture: leverage LF experience, to build CI/CD, Test Grids, and Builds. Routine: build roadmap, milestones, requirements, for Release Machinery. Culture: provide project administration for release planning.