Steering Committee Members

Curt Pederson has served as the Vice Provost for Information Services and Chief Information Officer for Oregon State University (OSU) since 1997. In 2004 the responsibilities of Chief Information Officer for the Oregon University System (OUS) were added.

Despite resource restraints, both OSU and OUS have successfully reorganized, improved and expanded many services and continued to support sound information technology infrastructure in support of research, teaching, and learning.

Curt has supported the open source movement through the Open Source Lab and GOSCON, both focal points for collaboration and innovation. The Lab has grown rapidly and currently hosts many of the world’s largest open source projects. GOSCON has become the pre-eminent international government open source conference.

Before joining Oregon’s higher education community, Curt served as Oregon’s first state Chief Information Officer and as Associate Director for the Washington State Department of Labor and Industries and in a variety of positions for Snohomish County PUD, the 12th largest publicly owned electric utility in the United States.

Andy Stein is Director of Information Technology at the City of Newport News, Virginia. Using Open Source as a best practice model for collaborative software development, the City of Newport News is engaged in shared projects with other localities. The City of Newport News has developed a strategy to replace legacy applications through a collaborative ecosystem with public entities and through public-private partnerships.

In addition to his current work in Government, Andy’s professional background includes management and operation of large scaleable computing environments at Capital One, as well as work in application development, relational database and systems architecture in IBM’s consulting practice. Andy designed and implemented the RISC chip on the IBM team in the mid 1980’s.

Most recently, the city's Open eGov application suite won a prestigious innovation award for local government.

Navica's founder and CEO, Bernard Golden, is a recognized authority on open source software. Called “a renowned open source expert” (IT Business Edge) and “an open source guru” (SearchCRM.com), he is regularly featured in magazines like Computerworld, InformationWeek, and Inc. His blog “The Open Source” is one of the most popular features of CIO Magazine's website. He is a frequent speaker at industry conferences like LinuxWorld, the Open Source Business Conference, and the Red Hat Summit. He is the author of “Succeeding with Open Source,” (Addison-Wesley, 2005, published in four languages), which was described as containing “some of the most valuable, practical advice I have seen on how to transform use of open source software from an accidental process into a powerful strategy for gaining an edge on the competition” (Terry Bollinger, IT Analyst, The MITRE Corporation, and author of “Use of FOSS in the United States Department of Defense”).

Shay Dakan has provided effective leadership and administrative services to the University since 1996. Her expertise has been instrumental with strategic and tactical planning; financial, technical, and usage forecasting, engineering, and all necessary operations requirements for maintaining the integrity of both voice and data networks.

As current Director of OSU Network Services, Shay administers the following work units: Telecommunications, Network Engineering, Inter-institutional Converged Exchange Network Operations Center (iNOC), and the Open Source Laboratory. Together, these teams provide a wide range of network and computing services to the entire OSU community, both on-campus and at off-site locations.

Mr. Ben Berry serves as ODOT’s Chief Information Officer providing overall leadership, planning, development, and delivery of information technology services for ODOT and several other non-transportation organizations. As CIO for one of the largest state agencies and Chair of the State’s CIO Council, Mr. Berry supports Intelligent Transportation Systems, e-Government and major systems change and is responsible for systems supporting highways, bridges, rail service, right-of-way determinations, DMV and Motor Carrier Commercial Trucking inspections and licensing throughout the state. He is the former Chief Technology Officer of Providence Health System Oregon supporting a Service Area of 7 hospitals and 33 clinics. Mr. Berry has held executive and management positions in industries such as State and Local government, healthcare, telecommunications, aerospace/defense and airport transportation.

He received his M.B.A. from UCLA and a B.S. in Life Science - Biotechnology from the University of Portland. He has 25+ years in computer software program management and operations, computer applications development and design, and systems development for public and private sectors both in the U.S.A. and the Middle-East. In addition, he has facilitated business process improvement for the automotive, aerospace, healthcare industries and is the Winner of the Public Sector 2007 Oregon IT Executive of the Year, as chosen by the Society of Information Management (SIM).

Bob DeVyldere leads the award winning Information Services group at the Oregon Water Resources Department. During the past 15 years Bob has been responsible for strategically delivering high quality and quantities of information to both internal and external customers. An early adopter of Open Source and Internet tool sets, he has directed an organization that leads all Western States in delivering water resource information to customers. He is active in several statewide groups developing data standards for Geographic Information Systems that encourages data sharing between State, Local and Federal agencies. He has also led other state agencies in developing their long term information management strategies and currently serves as Chair of the Sate CIO Council's Open Source Community of Practice.

Mr. DeVyldere received a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science from Willamette University and is a certified Oregon Project Manager.