About

I use this site to chronicle my life and interests, like open source, travel and cooking. I hail from the San Francisco Bay Area and currently reside in Bonn, Germany. I’ve been a proud resident of Europe since 2014.

If you’d like to get in touch with me via email, send your message to leslie at toganlabs dot com.

If you’re looking for Leslie Hawthorn’s professional bio, one of these blurbs should do:

One Line: (29 words)

An internationally known open source strategist and community engagement expert, Leslie Hawthorn currently leads Vertical Community Engagement work in Red Hat’s Open Source Programs Office – Office of the CTO.

Short Bio: (141 words)

An internationally known open source strategist and community engagement expert, Leslie Hawthorn has spent her career creating, cultivating, and enabling open source communities. She has driven open source strategy in Fortune 10 companies, pre-IPO startups, and Foundation Boards including senior roles at Red Hat, Google, the Open Source Initiative, and Elastic. She currently leads the team responsible for vertical community strategy within Red Hat’s Open Source Program Office in the Office of the CTO.

A frequent speaker on all topics open source and digital transformation, Leslie enjoys dreaming about how open source and open standards can create citizen-centric Smart Cities. Born and raised in Silicon Valley, Leslie has called Europe since 2014 and resides in Bonn, Germany with her daughter, their two canaries, Elle and Nana, and a small cat named Fee. You can find her on LinkedIn or on Twitter.

Full bio: (165 words)

As an internationally known Developer Relations strategist and Community Management expert, Leslie Hawthorn has spent the past decade creating, cultivating, and enabling open source communities. She’s best known for creating Google Code-in, the world’s first global initiative to involve pre-university students in open source software development, launching the second-most trafficked Google Developer Blog, receiving an O’Reilly Open Source Award in 2010 for her work to grow the  Google Summer of Code program and her contributions to Humanitarian open source projects.

During her 15+ years working in the technology industry, Leslie has developed, honed and shared open source expertise spanning the Enterprise to NGOs, including senior roles at Google, Red Hat, the Open Source Initiative, the OSU Open Source Lab and several startups, including  Elastic.

Born and raised in Silicon Valley, she and her daughter now call Bonn home, though she travels worldwide to keynote about open source, and building products and teams that are built to last. You can follow her adventures on Twitter @lhawthorn.

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