Zaheda Bhorat is the head of open source strategy at AWS, where she also leads the open source program office. A computer scientist, Zaheda is a long-time active contributor to open source and open standards communities. Previously, Zaheda shaped the first-ever open source program office at Google, launched successful programs including Google Summer of Code, and represented Google on many industry standards executive boards across multiple technologies; served as a senior technology advisor for the Office of the CTO at the UK Government Digital Service, where she co-led the open standards policy, in use by the UK government on open document formats; and was responsible for OpenOffice.org, and later NetBeans.org, at Sun Microsystems, where she built a thriving global volunteer community and delivered the first user version, OpenOffice 1.0. Zaheda is passionate about education, open source, and the positive impact of collaboration for social good. She serves on the board of directors of the Mifos Initiative, an open source effort that is positioning financial institutions to become digitally connected providers of financial services to the poor, and speaks internationally on topics related to open source.
Zaheda's passion is to empower users with emerging and open technologies to improve their daily lives. To do so, she leverages her deep experience in building and managing disruptive online services with innovative, and collaborative tools, techniques and communities.