OPENWALLET FOUNDATION - Key Persons
Job Titles:
- Member of the Governing Board
- Global Head of Developer Relations, Google Pay and Wallet
Ola Ben Har is the global Developer Relations Lead for Payments at Google, covering a broad set of products such as Google Wallet, Google Pay and Chrome Autofill for Payments. She brings over a decade of experience in managing developer engagement programs across multiple product areas and has been instrumental in setting the vision, developer strategy and go-to-market efforts for these products. Ola Ben Har owns all open source efforts for Payments and Wallet at Google. The open source tools built by the team are used by hundreds of thousands of developers today.
Ola Ben Har is a member of the Governing Board at the OpenWallet Foundation (Linux Foundation) representing Google as a relying party, Google Wallet as well as Android and Chrome.
Job Titles:
- Executive Director
- Founder
Daniel Goldscheider is founder and Executive Director of the OpenWallet Foundation. Before that he was CEO of yes.com, an open banking scheme, and co-founded Mediaguide with the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers as well as Aureus Private Equity.
He is a Vice Chair of the Supervisory Board of Valamar Riviera d.d., Croatia's largest tourism company and served on the board of Identity Trust Management AG and the Global Footprint Network.
Job Titles:
- Member of the Governing Board
- Senior Managing Director
- Senior Managing Director, Accenture
Dave Treat is a Senior Managing Director, co-leading Accenture's Metaverse Continuum Business Group which includes its Blockchain business which he formed in 2015 and its Extended Reality business. He has also served as the Global Technology Lead for Capital Markets and has over 25 years of experience
Job Titles:
- Member of the Board
- Member of the Governing Board
- Tribe Lead Digital Identities, T - Systems / General Sponsor Representative
Dirk Backofen is the Tribe Lead Digital Identities of T-Systems International GmbH. In this role Dirk is accountable for a new Business Unit including all technologies like SSI, eID, Smart eID and OIDC. He steers technology, business and product development and the operation regarding all related ID-platforms.
Dirk also orchestrates the Telekom / T-Systems activities regarding the project "Eco-System of Digital Identities" - initiated and orchestrated by the Federal Chancellery and the former Federal Chancellor of Germany. He is also responsible for Telekom's contribution in uses cases and in EUDI compatible ID-Wallet systems for the EU-Large Scale Pilots and EU-Identities.
Dirk Backofen represents Deutsche Telekom / T-Systems as board member in the shareholder board and in the supervisory board of Verimi, an ID-Wallet focused subsidiary of T-Systems and 24 other important shareholders, among them VW, Deutsche Bank, Allianz, Mercedes-Benz, Lufthansa, Deutsche Bahn, Axel Springer and others.
In 2016 Dirk Backofen successfully established the business unit Telekom Security - a startup within the DAX company Deutsche Telekom AG. Dirk run this business until April 2020. Telekom Security with its 1,600 employees protected the employees, datacenters, and networks of the Deutsche Telekom Group against cyber-attacks and threats worldwide. The unit has used the same high professional tools to serve customers in the external market in the same Zero Outage manner as well.
Dirk Backofen has a master's degree in information technology. He studied at the Technical University of Chemnitz (Germany) and has been working for Deutsche Telekom since 1991.
Job Titles:
- Technical Advisor
- Independent Identity Architect
Torsten Lodderstedt is an independent Identity Architect with more than 15 years experience in developing and running large scale consumer identity services. During that time, he led the consumer identity team at Deutsche Telekom and afterwards was CTO & CPO of yes.com, an open banking scheme. Before that, he helped organizations in public, banking, and railway communication domains to implement highly-scalable and secure services.
Torsten is an open standards enthusiast and has contributed to a wide range of broadly adopted identity standards like OAuth and OpenID Connect as well as standards for remote electronic signing (Cloud Signature Consortium) and Open Banking. His current focus is on Decentralized Identity and Verifiable Credentials. For example, he is co-author of OpenID for Verifiable Credentials and supports the European Union's work on the eIDAS Architecture and Reference Framework.
Torsten holds a Diploma and a PhD in computer science from Dresden University of Technology and Albert Ludwig University of Freiburg, respectively.
Job Titles:
- Member of the Governing Board
- Director of Trust Services, Gen Digital
Drummond has spent a quarter-century in Internet identity, security, privacy, and trust infrastructure. He is Director of Trust Services at Gen (formerly Avast) after their acquisition of Evernym, where he was Chief Trust Officer. He is co-author of the book, Self-Sovereign Identity (Manning Publications, 2021), and co-editor of the W3C Decentralized Identifiers (DID) 1.0 specification. He is founding board member of the OpenWallet Foundation and of the Trust Over IP (ToIP) Foundation, where he serves as co-chair of the Technology Stack Working Group and the Concepts and Terminology Working Group. In 2002 he received the Digital Identity Pioneer Award from Digital ID World, and in 2013 he was cited as an OASIS Distinguished Contributor.
Hart has extensive experience in blockchain and cryptography, and previously worked in blockchain and cryptography research at Fujitsu Research where he helped lead Fujitsu's efforts in Hyperledger. Prior to Fujitsu, Hart received a Ph.D. in cryptography at Stanford under Dan Boneh, where he was a Stanford Graduate Fellow. Hart has numerous academic publications and patents in cryptography and blockchain and brings a wealth of experience in these areas to the OpenWallet Foundation.
With nearly two decades of experience in technology ecosystems, Jenn's career journey has spanned from interoperability standards, including wireless networking protocols and IoT, to her current role at the Linux Foundation since 2021 where she supports open source innovation.
In her role as a Senior Program Manager, Jenn has proven to be a valuable contributor to the operational execution within various organizations, including the OpenWallet Foundation, RISE, and previously the Open Source Security Foundation. Recognized for her operational acumen and sharp business judgment, she has succeeded in building trust and establishing productive relationships with a diverse range of stakeholders and the broader technical community.
Jenn's academic credentials include a Graduate Certificate in Business Management from Indiana University's Kelley School of Business and a BA in Communications from the University of California, Davis. Until 2015, she held a Certified Meeting Planner (CMP)® designation from the Convention Industry Council, showcasing her broad and adaptable skill set. As Jenn's focus has shifted towards operational leadership roles, her commitment to professional growth remains a key characteristic of her evolving career in the technology sector.
Job Titles:
- Member of the Governing Board
- Certification Lead at OpenID Foundation and CTO at Authlete / Associate Sponsor Representative
- Co - Chair of the Global Assured Identity Network Proof
Joseph Heenan has had a long term interest in the wallet space, and is an active participant in relevant working groups, including the OpenID Foundation working group (defining the OpenID for Verifiable Presentations and OpenID for Verifiable Credential Issuance), the IETF working groups, and the OIDF FAPI WG. He was also one of the judges for the recent EU Large Scale Pilot for Travel hackathon.
Joseph leads the Certification program at the OpenID Foundation which has certified over 2,000 implementations as conformant.
In addition, Joseph is Co-Chair of the Global Assured Identity Network Proof of concept community group which has 40+ participants.
The learnings gained from the GAIN POC will help inform the OWF approach to interoperability. Through the GAIN initiative, Joseph works with peer non-profits Open Identity Exchange, International Institute of Finance, Global Legal Entity Identifier Foundation, Secure Identity Alliance and Cloud Signature Consortium, just one example of how he works effectively with other Associate members.
More broadly Joseph has 25 years experience of mobile app development, and is a global expert in OpenBanking ecosystem deployments, which the OpenId Foundation believe are very relevant to the challenges the Open Wallet Foundation faces.
Job Titles:
- Member of the Governing Board
- Head of Digital Identity, Visa / Governing Board Chair
Marie Austenaa leads Digital Identity for Visa. She has worked in digital identity since 2014, when she led GSMA's global programme on Digital Identity for mobile operators around the world and later at Signicat - one of the leading digital identity service providers in Europe. Prior to this, Marie has held leadership roles at Telenor and Vodafone to develop new digital services. Her expertise and leadership have been instrumental in shaping the digital landscape and driving innovation in the industry. Marie currently serves as the Board Chair for the Open Wallet Foundation (Linux Foundation).
Job Titles:
- Global Developer Relations
Ola Ben Har is the global Developer Relations Lead for Payments at Google, covering a broad set of products such as Google Wallet, Google Pay and Chrome Autofill for Payments. She brings over a decade of experience in managing developer engagement programs across multiple product areas and has been instrumental in setting the vision, developer strategy and go-to-market efforts for these products. Ola Ben Har owns all open source efforts for Payments and Wallet at Google. The open source tools built by the team are used by hundreds of thousands of developers today.
Ola Ben Har is a member of the Governing Board at the OpenWallet Foundation (Linux Foundation) representing Google as a relying party, Google Wallet as well as Android and Chrome.
Job Titles:
- Government Advisory Council Secretariat - Senior Advisor
Ruth's experience over the last 17 years focuses on Internet Governance Policy (Internet Number Resources & Domain Names), Digital Identity Management, Standardization and Certification, Innovation Research & Development on Trust, Privacy, and Cybersecurity. She is skilled in Government Engagement, International Relations, Stakeholder Management, Leading Strategic Projects, and Executive Program Management.
She loves being part of the communities contributing to Internet development, promoting an open, safe, stable, human-centric Internet, and helping drive trust.
As Senior Advisor of the ICANN Governmental Advisory Committee Secretariat, she helped advance the members on DNS public policy in light of the new gTLDs.
She led multistakeholder cooperation mechanisms with the governments and main Latin America and Caribbean stakeholders towards Internet development, contributing to a smooth transition to IPv6 (LACNIC and LACTLD). She also helped the Chilean Top Level Domain to implement the Registry/Registrar model. She worked at the United States Department of Homeland & Security and European Union Innovation Programs on Cybersecurity, Trust, and Privacy.
She has been helping communities in various jurisdictions to embrace trust and compliance with identity verification and privacy standards for the US NIST 800-63 (Kantara Initiative Inc.), UK Digital Identity & Attributes Trust Framework (Kantara Initiative Ltd), and Pan-Canadian Trust Framework (DIACC).
Job Titles:
- Community Architect
- Senior Community Architect at the Hyperledger Foundation
Ry Jones is a senior community architect at the Hyperledger Foundation, an open source collaborative effort to advance cross-industry blockchain technologies¹². He has been involved in open source projects for over a decade, contributing to various initiatives such as Minifabric, a tool to set up and manage Hyperledger Fabric networks³. He is passionate about building and supporting open source communities, and sharing his knowledge and experience with others.
Job Titles:
- Architect
- Engineer
- Member of the Governing Board
- Software Architect
- Associate Director, Accenture
Tracy Kuhrt is a software architect and engineer with over 20 years of experience in the technology industry. She is currently a technical architect at Accenture, where she leads the open source practice within the Metaverse Continuum business group and helps to evaluate and architect blockchain solutions for enterprise customers.
Tracy is a highly skilled architect and engineer with a proven track record of success in leading and delivering complex software projects. She has a deep understanding of a wide range of technologies, including blockchain, decentralized identity, metaverse, open source, cloud, Kubernetes, databases, source control, and multiple operating systems. She is also a strong public speaker, collaborator, team player, and leader.
Tracy is a committed advocate for open source software and has been a frequent contributor to open source projects for many years. She is currently the chair of both the Hyperledger Foundation's Technical Oversight Committee and the OpenWallet Foundation's Technical Advisory Committee. In her previous role at the Linux Foundation, she was the Community Architect for the Hyperledger Foundation, where she was responsible for building and maintaining the Hyperledger technical community.
Tracy is a highly motivated and driven individual who is always looking for new challenges. She is passionate about using her skills and experience to make a positive impact on the world.
Job Titles:
- Member of the Governing Board
- Senior Director of Technology Strategy at Futurewei Technologies, Inc
Wenjing Chu is a Senior Director of Technology Strategy at Futurewei Technologies, Inc. He leads new technology development in the future of computing, trust, and trustworthy AI.
He is a founding board member of the OpenWallet Foundation (OWF) and its Technical Advisory Council (TAC). He is also a founding board member of the Trust of IP Foundation (ToIP). In ToIP, he is a primary author of the Trust Spanning Protocol Specification (TSP) and of the Technology Architecture Specification, while serving as Co-Chair for the Trust Spanning Protocol Task Force and for the AI and Metaverse Task Force. He also previously served in leadership roles for the Linux Foundation's Networking Foundation and the Edge Computing Foundation. Over his career, he had been an entrepreneurial and technical lead in several successful startups including Airespace, Inc. and Sentient Networks, Inc.