Silona is a technology leader with 20+ years of experience in blockchain governance, standards development, and community building. She coined the terms “Citability” and “Codeathon,” now featured in dictionaries and Wikipedia.

As former Executive Director of IEEE SA OPEN, she launched the first cloud-based open source platform for standards development. At Hyperledger (Linux Foundation), she centralized 15 blockchain projects and expanded global community participation. At PayPal, she pioneered InnerSource methodologies, training over 1,400 employees and co-authoring “Understanding the InnerSource Checklist” with O’Reilly Media.

Silona has presented to the UN General Assembly and Democratic National Convention on blockchain, crypto, and AI governance. She currently contributes to the OSPO Alliance Good Governance Initiative, serves on the InnerSource Commons Foundation as an officially appointed InnerSource “Hero,” and is developing CitableAI concepts for AI transparency.

An international keynote speaker at 30+ conferences including FOSDEM, SXSW, and GitHub Universe, she specializes in coalition building across standards bodies to create sustainable governance patterns for emerging technologies—particularly relevant for building non-governmental sources of digital trust.

Based in Austin, Texas, USA and Nelson, New Zealand