For over 20 years, Nicole has applied her aptitude in storytelling to the technology industry—helping shine a light on the importance of the work of her engineering colleagues in a way that delivers true business value. She dove into the world of open source at Intel over eight years ago, and quickly became a strong advocate—across Linux, cloud/virtualization (Kubernetes, OpenStack, KVM, Xen), IoT (Yocto Project), Android, web technologies (HTML5), and more.

She is passionate about cultivating inclusive communities that welcome diverse perspectives and invite intelligent, thoughtful debate to benefit us all. As a member of the Governing Board of the Linux Foundation’s CHAOSS project and an active contributor to the project's Diversity & Inclusion Workgroup, she is helping establish a consistent, cross-community definition and metrics for diversity. She serves on the Advisory Board for CodeChix, blogs for the Women Who Code Portland organization, and participates in speed mentoring workshops across open source communities. She is a also a frequent moderator, speaker and writer in the areas of diversity and mentorship.

Nicole has held senior marketing positions in both software and hardware at companies such as Intel and Tektronix. She graduated from the University of Oregon’s School of Journalism, and holds a Master of Business Administration degree from Marylhurst University, with an emphasis in Marketing.