In early August, we announced a midterm election for the AMP Advisory Committee (AC) with the goal of increasing the diversity of the AC’s membership.
Right after we announced the election, Dane Knecht of Cloudflare resigned from his position on the AC, thus freeing an extra seat, but also reducing the presence of CDNs in the committee to zero (Charles Vazac having left Akamai earlier this year). With Web Packaging being such a hot topic, not having a CDN representative onboard was—understandably—a real issue for many on the committee.
We initially wanted to add about four new members to the committee, which we increased to five following Dane’s departure. We gave ourselves a bit of leeway however, in case we couldn’t find the right people or on the contrary where overwhelmed with great candidates. Fortunately, the latter is what happened. And despite opening up two extra seats (including Dane’s), we had to reject some amazing candidates. Hopefully, they’ll apply again when we run our regular elections at the end of the year. We’ll make sure to remind them.
So, without further ado, we’d like to introduce you to the six new members of the AMP Advisory committee, in alphabetical order:
- Ali Ghassemi is passionate about the Web and started his career in 2005 finding workarounds for IE6 quirks. Ali currently works at LinkedIn Inc. on LinkedIn.com’s Web infrastructure. He was previously a tech lead in AMP working on UI components.
- Jervay Singh is a performance marketing solutions expert for a large financial services company in South Africa. He wishes to bring an emerging economies perspective to the committee, along with his passion for driving AMP takeup within the South African and African market.
- Maggie Wettergreen is a web developer and designer focused on building quality user experiences. They have developed AMP pages in multiple environments, notably WompMobile’s third-party AMP system. Maggie wants to ensure that AMP is moving consistently toward being a staple development framework.
- Melanie Sumner is a software engineer who is passionate about improving “accessibility by default” on the web. Melanie is concerned about AMP’s accessibility and intends to contribute her expertise as an engineer and advocate for an accessible, open web.
- Melissa DePuydt is a frontend engineer currently working as an engineering manager. She previously led solution architecture for clients at Arc Publishing at The Washington Post, where she became interested in build processes and practices that make AMP integration more sustainable and push news websites toward better performance.
- Ted Shuter is a product leader at Akamai, focused on making the web a faster, better place to play and work. Ted loves the concept of improving performance, but wants to make sure it is fair and balanced for all users. In particular, Ted brings the perspective of business users and the impact to Content Delivery Networks.
Hopefully, you’ll get to meet some of them at the AMP Contributor Summit in New York, which is just around the corner.
We’re very excited to welcome these new members to the AC and look forward to working together.
Posted by Tobie Langel, AMP Advisory Committee facilitator.