Meet Your 2026 NAF Advisory Board
We just wrapped this year's Advisory Board (AB) selection process, and the results are in.
The AB is the amazing group of volunteers who keep AutoCon’s content caliber so high. And they do it by reading every talk and workshop submission, pushing back on weak proposals, and making sure the agenda stays practitioner-first, vendor-neutral, and community-responsive. Twelve people sit on the AB at any given time, each serving a two-year term. This year, six seats were up: current members could reapply for one more year, and everyone else applied fresh. Every candidate submitted a short written or video essay on why they wanted to serve, what they'd bring to the table, and whether they could really commit the time and energy required. Scott and I read every single one before picking the roster below.
What were we looking for? A few things. A primary factor is maintaining diversity of background and perspective; a mix of practitioners, vendors, and consultants, from different regions of the world and different corners of the industry. We also want real expertise, grounded in actual hands-on experience, not just opinions. Active participation in the community is another metric; plenty of this crew have spoken at an AutoCon, proctored a workshop, or are the ones driving the best threads in the NAF Slack. And, “last but not least” – we demand independence of thought: people who are creative, curious, and maybe even a little iconoclastic (skeptical, shrewd, and setting trends as often as following them).
Six are returning. Six are brand new. Say hello to your 2026 NAF Advisory Board.
Returning Members
Ivana Duvnjak — Senior Director of Network Automation Strategy & Technology at Nokia. 15+ years deep in IP and optical automation, helping operators worldwide figure out what "autonomous network" actually means in production. Brings the service-provider vendor lens, and a returning voice who already knows how NAF runs.
Shannon Byrnes — Senior NetDevOps Engineer at Internet2. A former sysadmin who went rogue into network automation, now building it for the US research-and-education network. Brings the R&E/university perspective that most vendor-focused conferences never touch.
Eric Chou — Host of the Network Automation Nerds podcast and author of Mastering Python Networking and the AI Networking Cookbook. 20 years running some of the largest networks in the industry at Amazon and Microsoft before going independent. Brings community-builder energy and a direct line to thousands of practitioners learning automation for the first time.
Claudia de Luna — Advanced Technical Consultant at EIA (Enterprise Infrastructure Acceleration). A NASA JPL alum turned independent automation consultant, helping Fortune 100 companies modernize networks at speed. Brings the boots-on-the-ground consulting view, and one of the sharpest, most opinionated voices in the NAF Slack.
Joan Garcia — Director of Network Platforms and Solutions Architecture at Colt Technology Services. Built Colt's automation and orchestration stack from the ground up to power its NaaS business. Brings the global telco/CSP perspective, at serious scale.
Peter Sprygada — Chief Architect roles at Itential and Red Hat Ansible (employee #7, no less), now lead network architect and network software developer at Datum. Been automating networks since before it had a name, with the scars to prove it. Brings decades of "built the tool everyone else is using" credibility.
New Members
Bart Dorlandt — Owner of Dream Networking and Automation, and a CCIE. 20 years across ISP and enterprise networking, most recently deep in BGP monitoring (BMP) at ISP scale. Brings a "process over tools" philosophy and a knack for mentoring the next generation of automation engineers.
Jessica Garrison — Global X-Domain Architect at HPE Juniper Networking. Self-described Network Automation Evangelist who's spent 20+ years supporting, designing, or building with or on Automation Products and the NOSs they work with. Brings the vendor-enablement lens and genuine enthusiasm for getting engineers unstuck.
Jeff McAdams — Senior Network Engineer at Denovo. 30+ years in IT spanning network engineering, systems engineering, and automation across SaaS, cloud, service provider, and enterprise environments. Brings a veteran practitioner's grounding to keep the board honest about what actually ships.
Alex Henthorn-Iwane — SVP of Marketing at Gluware, with stops at ThousandEyes, Sinefa, Kentik, and PacketFabric along the way. A familiar face at AutoCon and ONUG who's spent his career making complex automation and observability stories land with practitioners. Brings marketing chops and a real feel for what content resonates with this audience.
Justin Ryburn — Field CTO at Kentik, and author of Day One: Deploying BGP FlowSpec. 25 years in ops, engineering, and pre-sales across service providers and vendors such asJuniper, Savvis, Nortel, XO. Brings deep observability and network-monitoring expertise to the table.
John Howard — Head of Network Infrastructure at Proton (yes, that Proton: ProtonMail and ProtonVPN). A champion of the Network Reliability Engineering mindset: treat the network as a set of services, not a pile of vendor boxes, and automate everything you can. Brings a webscale, privacy-first operator's perspective that's rare in this industry.
Now We Get to Work
That's your board: practitioners from research networks, telcos, and webscalers; vendor voices from across the automation and observability landscape; and a couple of independent consultants who've seen it all. Thank you to everyone who applied (the response rate makes this a genuinely hard call every year) and congratulations to this fantastic crew!
We've got work to do. The AutoCon 6 Call for Speakers and Call for Workshops are both open now, with submissions due 21 August 2026. As soon as that deadline hits, this board starts reading, ranking, and picking what makes the stage in Tucson this November. If you've got real, hands-on, production experience to share — no marketecture, no product pitches — now's the ti.
Submit your talk idea · Submit your workshop idea
See you in Tucson!
