The results are in! The CHAOSS 2026 Governing Board elections have concluded, and we have some fabulous new board members.
Before we talk about the results, we’d like to thank a few people. A huge thank you to our election officers: Elizabeth Barron, Emma Irwin, and Ali Ok. They put in a lot of hard work to run our very first election while working out a few bugs in the process along the way. We’d also like to thank the outgoing board members whose terms end today: Matt Germonprez, Nicole Huesman, Daniel Izquierdo, Georg Link, Brian Proffitt, Kate Stewart, and Ildikó Váncsa. These are people who have tirelessly served the CHAOSS community, some of them since the very beginning of CHAOSS, and we are grateful for everything they have done over the years. I also wanted to thank the entire Governing Board for their patience and support throughout the process of moving to elections. Governance changes are never easy and require a lot of work, so thank you to everyone who helped as we navigated these changes.
Now on to the results! The following people have joined the board today:
- Cali Dolfi
- Santiago Dueñas (holding the GrimoireLab software seat)
- Harmony Elendu
- Divya Mohan
- Adeyinka Oresanya
- Victoria Ottah
- Peculiar C. Umeh
While most of these people wrote a detailed candidate submission, we wanted to say a few words about each of these new board members.
Cali Dolfi is a Working Group chair for both the Data Science WG and the CollectOSS-8Knot WG and has done so much to build the data science community and advance our software. She’s also driven several aspects of our CHAOSScon planning, including leading the effort to add interactive sessions for CHAOSScon 2026.
Santiago Dueñas has been a part of the CHAOSS community since before the beginning and was working on the predecessors to the GrimoireLab software at the Universidad Rey Juan Carlos in Madrid before CHAOSS was born. He’s currently the GrimoireLab lead maintainer and holds the software board seat allocated to GrimoireLab.
Harmony Elendu has been an active leader in the CHAOSS Africa chapter leading our technical writers group. He has been instrumental to creating onboarding documentation and organizing outreach initiatives that engage technical writers to learn how to contribute to open source projects through CHAOSS. He is also one of the hosts of the CHAOSSCast podcast.
Divya Mohan restarted our CHAOSS Asia chapter and has been leading that chapter. She’s really helped to build our presence in Asia by partnering with local organizations to evangelize and promote CHAOSS at events in Asia. As part of the Asia chapter, she led the creation of the open source communities database.
Adeyinka Oresanya actively leads the our DEI badging initiative advocating for open source projects and events to showcase their commitment towards diversity, equity and inclusion. She contributes through coordination of the working group, maintaining and enhancing the code that powers the entire project. She has also been a core leader in the local chapter from its onset, leading and showing up in the developers working group.
Victoria Ottah has been instrumental to our accessibility initiative in the CHAOSS project. Through her work, she has led a website audit to ensure more accessibility in the community and eventually set up our accessibility working group. She has also been an active contributor of the local CHAOSS Africa chapter, organizing outreach initiatives to include people living with disability.
Peculiar C. Umeh led the creation of the CHAOSS Education initiative from the initial idea into production where she regularly mentors new contributors making their first PRs as part of the Education WG. She also co-led the metrics redesign into a new template and was the primary author for the CHAOSS Practitioner Guide on Building Diverse Leadership.
Thank you to the entire CHAOSS community for participating in our very first CHAOSS Governing Board elections!
Photo by Dmitrii Vaccinium on Unsplash
