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Emma Irwin

AI Governance | Open Ecosystems

LinkedIn

Summary

Governance leader with 15+ years of experience designing and operationalizing governance frameworks at the intersection of technology and human agency. Proven track record translating policy into practice through tooling, education, measurement, and enforcement.

I have a long, and proven track record translating policy into practice through tooling, education, measurement, and enforcement. A significant amount of my work continues on in standards, events and policy in place across the industry. These map directly onto the operational demands of AI governance: accountability, oversight, risk management, and policy at scale.

Currently serving as Chair of the CHAOSS AI Alignment Working Group and pursuing the AI Governance Professional (AIGP) certification (expected September 2026), with a focus on applying established governance principles to responsible AI.

Core Competencies

AI Governance & Responsible AI: Metrics frameworks for community-aligned training and community-governed use (CHAOSS AI Alignment Working Group). Responsible AI education for engineering audiences. AIGP certification in progress (EU AI Act, NIST AI RMF, ISO/IEC 42001, AI impact assessment, bias mitigation).

Ethics Policy: Translating community-identified harm into implemented organizational policy. Trans families policy and benefits (Microsoft GLEAM ERG). Diversity and inclusion strategy for open source, grounded in original research across 240+ projects and extended into industry standards as codes of conduct and community health metrics.

Policy Design & Standards Setting: Organizational policy authorship, code of conduct and participation standards, industry standards contribution through CHAOSS.

Trust, Safety & Incident Response: Enforcement framework design covering reporting, investigation, and consequence. Escalation management processes spanning multiple organizations and response teams.

Platform, Compliance & Risk: Governance and security across 10,000+ repositories, open source use, release, and contribution policy, supply chain risk assessment, funding and investment program design.

Operationalizing Policy: Policy embedded through tooling and platform controls, mandatory training at 100,000+ engineer scale, champion networks for distribution and feedback, measurement frameworks.

Technical: LLMs (Claude, OLMo, Mistral), Hugging Face ecosystem, Model Context Protocol (certified; built and deployed a production MCP server), GitHub platform administration, Python, SQL.

Professional Experience

Founder & Principal Consultant

Open Practice Consulting | June 2025 to Present

  • Chair, CHAOSS AI Alignment Working Group. Leading development of the first metrics frameworks for how AI systems align with the values, norms, and safety needs of technical communities. Announcing metrics for community-aligned training and community-governed use at FOSSY, August 2026.
  • Contracted with the Internet Society to modernize Code of Conduct and related policy as well as activation of incident response for their global community: stakeholder research, enforcement design, and communications strategy, delivered through playbooks, training curriculum, and facilitated workshops.
  • Founded Open Source Wishlist, a platform matching maintainers to targeted interventions with built-in metrics and impact measurement.
  • Advising organizations on AI governance, community governance, and sustainability.

Principal Technical Program Manager, Open Source Programs Office

Microsoft | October 2020 to June 2025

  • Co-owned, within Microsoft's OSPO, the organizational policy set governing how engineering uses, releases, and contributes to open source, including its implementation in tooling and platform controls across GitHub.
  • Established governance, compliance, and security frameworks across 10,000+ GitHub repositories, coordinating legal, finance, security, and engineering.
  • Rolled out mandatory open source policy training to 100,000+ engineers with CVP sign-off.
  • Founded and led the Open Source Champions network: 100+ employees embedded across engineering orgs, serving as the distribution channel for policy rollout and the feedback channel back into it.
  • Built "Community 911," a cross-company escalation management process spanning multiple organizations and response teams.
  • Ran the FOSS Fund across four years and 200+ funded projects, pairing participatory nomination with data-driven selection criteria and risk analysis.
  • Co-designed and applied GitHub's Open Source Security Fund to Microsoft dependencies, achieving 70% security improvements across funded projects.
  • Implemented a sustainability framework supporting 175 solo-maintainer projects, assessing supply chain risk exposure and matching interventions to it.
  • Created a teaching playbook on open source AI, helping engineers understand the terminology of openness as applied to AI.
  • Policy Lead, GLEAM ERG. Drove trans families policy and benefits change on behalf of the LGBTQIA+ employee community, taking community-identified needs through organizational decision-making into implemented policy and benefits programs.

Staff Program Manager, Open Innovation

Mozilla | February 2015 to October 2020

  • Co-created Mozilla's diversity and inclusion strategy for open source, grounded in original research across 240+ open source projects. Outputs became durable industry governance artifacts, including code of conduct standards adoption and metrics extended into CHAOSS.
  • Designed the Community Participation Guidelines enforcement framework, covering reporting, investigation, and consequence.
  • Defined and implemented Code of Conduct policy and versioning requirements across Mozilla's GitHub organization, delivered in partnership with engineering.
  • Conducted community research and delivered recommendations for Common Voice, an open voice dataset built through global volunteer contribution.
  • Helped design the application and onboarding processes for MOSS (Mozilla Open Source Support) and served on its selection committee.
  • Served on the Mozilla Reps Council, a governing body for a global volunteer program: participation rules, escalations, and membership decisions across distributed, multilingual membership.

Developer Community Manager

Benetech | February 2014 to February 2015

  • Led SocialCoding4Good, matching skilled technical contributors to humanitarian open source projects through corporate partnerships.

Senior Developer / Systems Analyst

Royal Roads University | November 2008 to February 2013

  • Built and deployed institutional learning (LMS) and web platforms (CMS) serving 4,000+ learners.

Policy & Advisory

  • Adviser, United Nations Roundtable on Metrics for Digital Safety in Online Spaces (2020)
  • Co-lead, CHAOSS Safety Metrics Framework (2022)
  • Member, Government of Canada Open Data Stakeholder Forum (2023-2024)
  • Ghostwriter on digital sovereignty in higher education for British Columbia's Minister of Post-Secondary Education and Future Skills
  • Contributor, CHAOSS Project (2017 to Present), working on safety metrics, AI alignment, and governance standards for technical communities

Speaking & Publications

Long-time speaker, facilitator, event organizer.

Next up: FOSSY 2026: launching CHAOSS AI Alignment for OSS metrics for community-aligned training and community-governed use.

Writing at sunnydeveloper.com:

Education & Certifications

  • AIGP, Artificial Intelligence Governance Professional, IAPP (in progress, September 2026)
  • Model Context Protocol Certification, Hugging Face
  • CDI Programmer Analyst Diploma, with honours.
Licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0