Leadership
The Foundation is stewarded by a Board of Directors and a set of working-group Chairs elected across member categories. Governance is deliberately neutral — no single company holds a critical path.
The composition of the Board reflects the Foundation’s operating philosophy: seats are allocated across member categories — silicon, operators, utilities, data centers, integrators, software, and individual contributors — so that no single company, industry, or region holds a decisive majority.
Working-group Chairs are elected by contributors and serve on renewable terms, with contribution and implementation experience as the primary selection criteria.
Livia Rosu
Livia Rosu serves as President and Board Director of the RELISAV ConnectedEdge Foundation, representing MaxLinear. She brings extensive leadership experience in the wired connectivity and broadband industry, spanning standards development, ecosystem building, and the advancement of interoperable home and access networking.
Tom Barnett
Tom Barnett is part of the original team to form Lumen Technologies and currently serves as Director of Strategic Innovation. Tom leads innovation-centered projects across Lumen to envision, develop, and incubate disruptive technology and product offerings by acting as the entrepreneur-in-residence. His team focuses on identifying and leveraging disruptive technologies and product offerings by scouting universities, the technical marketplace, accelerators, venture capital groups, as well as adjacent and non-traditional industries. He holds over 30 patents and participates on various accelerators assisting startups in navigating regulatory and governance challenges found in larger corporations. Tom retired from the military at the rank of Colonel following multiple deployments during his 34 years of service in the US Army. He held command and staff positions ranging from Battery to Multinational level and became one of the first Space Operations Officers in the US Army.
Paul Arola
Paul Arola serves as Secretary and Board Director of the RELISAV ConnectedEdge Foundation, representing TELUS Communications. He brings deep operator-side experience in connectivity and in-home networking to the Foundation's governance, helping ensure that its open engineering work translates into deployable, operator-grade outcomes.
Quentin Cellarius
Quentin Cellarius is a highly respected telecommunications manager with many years of experience in the connectivity world, having worked across many sides of the industry - including US and Asian vendors, several ISPs, and multiple continents. He is currently at the Telenet Group in Belgium, as part of Liberty Global, and has been Product Owner of CPE Engineering for several years. He holds two joint patents on smart Wi-Fi, and he was instrumental in leading Telenet to successfully launch new in-home connectivity services using a range of wired technologies, continuing to expand into new connectivity innovations.
Bruno Banelli
Bruno Banelli is a technology architect, open source advocate, and cybersecurity standardization expert based in Zagreb, Croatia. He currently serves as Emerging Technologies Architect at Sartura, an embedded Linux development and integration company focused on network edge, CPE, and SMB networking solutions built on Linux-based platforms including Gentoo, Yocto, and OpenWrt. He is a creator of an ISO 19790 compliant cryptographic module, has been developing network devices for ISO CC compliance, and is leading the first open source Ethernet switch development at Novarq. He chaired NetDev 0x19 in Zagreb in March 2025 and is an active contributor to European cybersecurity standardization as Rapporteur for ETSI work item EN 304 627, which develops essential cybersecurity requirements and assessment criteria for routers, internet-connected modems, and switches under the EU Cyber Resilience Act (CRA). A frequent speaker at international open source and networking events - including the Linux Foundation's ONE Summit, the Open Compute Project Global Summit, the Embedded Linux Conference, DORS/CLUC, DevFest, and CEE Peering Days - Bruno's work sits at the crossroads of open source software, computer networking, cybersecurity policy, and emerging technologies. In April 2026, Bruno was elected the first ETSI Ambassador, a role dedicated to supporting and representing the global standardization community within the European Telecommunications Standards Institute.
Luka Perkov
Luka Perkov is an entrepreneur and technology leader working at the intersection of cybersecurity, open source, telecommunications, and embedded systems. He is the founder and director of Sartura, a boutique open-source networking consultancy, and contributes to European cybersecurity standardisation through ETSI. He combines strategic leadership with hands-on technical depth and long-standing ties to industry and the open-source community.
How governance works
The Board of Directors
The Board sets strategic direction, approves the annual budget, ratifies new working groups, and is accountable for the Foundation’s long-term stewardship. Directors serve two-year terms, staggered, with nominations open to member organisations.
The Technical Steering Committee
Day-to-day technical direction sits with the Technical Steering Committee, chaired independently of the Board. The TSC approves project charters, arbitrates cross-project technical decisions, and publishes public minutes from every meeting.
Working-group Chairs
Each working group — Academy, Security, Interop, and per-track Platform groups — is chaired by an elected Chair accountable to the group’s contributors. Chairs rotate through public nomination and can be recalled by supermajority of active contributors.
Officers
The Foundation’s operational roles — Executive Director, Secretary, and Treasurer — are appointed by the Board and execute Board-set strategy. They do not hold voting seats on technical decisions.
Transparency commitments
- Public minutes. Every Board meeting and every TSC meeting publishes minutes to the site within two weeks.
- Declared interests. Every Director and Chair publishes a standing declaration of affiliations and commercial interests, updated on change.
- No paid seats. Board seats cannot be purchased. Membership dues fund the Foundation; they do not purchase governance influence.
- Term limits. No Director or Chair may serve more than three consecutive terms in the same role, ensuring fresh perspective over time.
The officers above are the Foundation's first confirmed, elected leadership team. Further Board Directors and working-group Chairs will be added as nominations close and will be announced in the Journal. Media inquiries about Board composition should be directed to press@relisav.org.
Become part of the governance
Board nominations are open to member organisations during each nomination window. Working-group Chair elections run continuously as groups form and Chairs’ terms expire. Individual contributors become eligible for Chair nomination after reaching Practitioner-tier certification (see the Academy) and contributing to at least one working group.
If you believe you or a colleague should be considered — bring it to the contact page or mention it in an active working-group session.