2025 Technical Council Election

2025 Technical Council Election

The FOLIO Technical Council's charter is to maintain the community’s technical policies, best practices, infrastructure, and monitor the operational health of the FOLIO project. It will also track and report Technical Debt and facilitate architectural decisions as needed by the community. It operates with close collaboration with the Community and Product Councils. 

Seats on the Technical Council are available to Members of the FOLIO community, in accordance with the FOLIO Governance Model. Member is defined as an individual who is an employee or a sponsored contractor of a Member Organization. Individuals will be elected to seats for two year terms. Shorter terms may be required for the initial transition period or to fill seats that become vacant between elections.

The Technical Council will be seeking nominees who have one or more of the following:

  • Strong collaboration skills, able to drive decisions that champion the interests of the community and project

  • Deep understanding of software development processes and technologies required for a modern services oriented application

  • Familiarity with agile software development methodologies.

  • Knowledge of DevOps and Quality tools and processes

  • Experience with FOLIO’s code-base, technologies and development processes

  • Frequent contributor to FOLIO’s code-base

  • Experience with Folio system operations

  • Experience managing technology, technical debt, and competing priorities

  • Participating in and/or managing open community governance

  • Knowledge of library management systems and library workflows

  • Experience with leading development or other technical teams

See also FOLIO Governance Model Election Process, previous elections and the Technical Council Membership History.

The current members are:

  • @Jenn Colt - Cornell University (Co-chair)

  • @Florian Gleixner - BVB

  • @Marc Johnson - Knowledge Integration (Backup CC/PC liaison) - Not eligible for re-election

  • @Ingolf Kuss - HBZ

  • @Julian Ladisch - GBV/VZG

  • @Maccabee Levine - Lehigh University (CC liaison)

  • @Craig McNally  - EBSCO (Co-chair) - Not eligible for re-election

  • @Tod Olson - University of Chicago (PC liaison) - Not eligible for re-election

  • @Kevin Day - Texas A&M University

  • @Jakub Skoczen - Index Data - Not eligible for re-election

  • @Joshua Greben - Stanford University

There are 5 open seats on the Technical Council for 2-year terms starting July 2025. Technical Council members currently serving a term that ends June 2025 may stand for re-election if they have not occupied a seat for 2 consecutive terms.

Dates

Nominations will be collected until June 13th, 2025 via the nomination form here

Successful candidates will join the council on July 1, 2025

Nominees

THANK YOU to all of the nominees for their interest in helping FOLIO become its best.

The following individuals have been nominated:

Name

Institution

Candidate Statement

Olamide Kolawole

EBSCO Information Services

With three years of hands-on FOLIO expertise, I'm eager to guide the platform's technical evolution and elevate both the software and its community. My contributions span critical areas including Inventory, Search, Data Import and Enhanced Consortia Support, where I've driven significant developments and improvements.

Wayne Schneider

Index Data

As the FOLIO project continues to grow and evolve, community participation in technical decision-making and clear communication about technical issues remain critical to the project's sustainability. As a member of the TC, I would work to maintain the high technical standards of the project and advocate for the concerns of independent hosting providers and developers.

I've been an active community participant since 2016, working on the DevOps team, and as a participant in several SIGs. At Index Data, I work with our team to provide hosting, consulting, and development services for a number of FOLIO libraries, giving me a broad perspective on the needs of the community. Thank you for your consideration.

Shelley Doljack

Stanford Libraries

I am a Software Engineer at Stanford University Libraries. Since 2021, I helped migrate our data to FOLIO, develop our deployment strategy for self-hosting FOLIO in Kubernetes, troubleshoot and fix data inconsistency issues, develop our upgrade strategies, design and develop workflow integrations using Airflow, dive into various modules’ logs and code to understand root cause, and analyze SQL queries to improve efficiency with database indexes. I am a member of the SysOps SIG and am tech-leading an effort to create an anonymized dataset for better QA. I would appreciate the opportunity to collaborate with the community to help shape the future of library technology. Vote for me for Technical Council!

Viachaslau Khandramai

EPAM Systems, Inc.

I have been actively contributing to the FOLIO since 2018, steadily progressing from a developer role to that of a team leader/solution architect. Over the years, I have been deeply involved in the design and implementation of architectural solutions for some of the most critical features. My long-term involvement has given me insights not only into the technical aspects of the FOLIO but also into its operational challenges and opportunities for innovation. I continuously look for ways to improve the project and actively contribute ideas for its future evolution. I am confident that my participation on the Technical Council would bring value not only through deep technical knowledge, but also through my commitment to FOLIO’s mission.

Christie Thomas

University of Chicago Library

At the University of Chicago, I head the Data Management Services unit and contribute to building data pipelines, automating workflows, and developing SQL reports. I also played a key role in migrating our bibliographic, holdings, and item data to FOLIO. As a member of the FOLIO community since 2016, I actively participate in the Metadata Management, Data Import, and Reporting SIGs, and various working groups. Before our migration to FOLIO in 2022, I was engaged in the OLE community, collaborating on the design and development of the data import tool. My extensive knowledge of FOLIO’s application and data model, combined with my community involvement, would enable me to bring valuable perspective and experience to the Technical Council.

Jeff Gerhard

Library of Congress

For three years, I served as the Library of Congress team lead for the data migration from legacy systems to FOLIO. At the same time, I was one of the LC implementation leads, working closely with both our vendor and internal developers to replace the sprawling ecosystem of integrations, workflows, and bespoke tools that were built around the legacy ILS over the course of 25 years. In this role, I gained a deep understanding of FOLIO data architecture and familiarity with the FOLIO codebase and development process. I proposed technical approaches in FOLIO to meeting LC needs, and learned firsthand the challenges involved in making changes to FOLIO, with barriers including convoluted technical interdependencies, difficulties with prioritization in a community-centered open-source environment, and practical limits on developer time and resources.

In my library career, I have developed significant expertise at identifying solutions to large-scale technical challenges. I’ve progressively increased my fluency with library technologies, including writing code and contributing to complex, multi-person development projects. In an academic library, I worked as a cataloger and as a digital initiatives librarian, and assisted with a commercial LSP implementation and migration. At the Library of Congress I’ve worked as a metadata librarian and Head of Metadata Services. I’ve worked in four or five different ILS/LSP systems (depending on what counts) and many other library software systems. I’m fluent in Python and can fake it pretty well when it comes to working with AWS, CI/CD, agile development processes, and contemporary developer trends.

I currently supervise a team of highly-skilled librarians who utilize DevOps tools and contemporary software development practices in multiple systems. Our team has been working extensively with FOLIO APIs in order to build tools that complement FOLIO, and we have frequent conversations about FOLIO’s strengths and flaws, as well as the difficulties that we have in imagining a mechanism for us to contribute directly to the FOLIO codebase. (Government bureaucracy and policy rules are an added barrier.) We also have a lot of ideas about the natural boundaries of a modern LSP, and what tools should really be part of rather than adjacent to FOLIO. I would love to be a conduit for the ideas coming out of the Library of Congress, working with the Technical Council to identify or build channels for future collaboration.

During the FOLIO implementation phase for the Library of Congress, we were not able to dedicate as much time for working closely with the community as we intended. I attended some SIG meetings and followed many Slack conversations. I’m looking forward to collaborating much more closely with the FOLIO community in the future, whether or not I am elected to the Technical Council.

Elected Members

The following people have been elected to serve 2-year terms from July 1, 2025 through June 30, 2027:

  • Shelley Doljack - Stanford Libraries

  • Jeff Gerhard - Library of Congress

  • Christie Thomas - University of Chicago

  • Wayne Schneider - Index Data

  • Olamide Kolawole - EBSCO Information Services