, Community Led Stage
In blockchain, proof of work shows that real effort was done. In your career, open source is your proof of work: a public, verifiable record of how you solve problems, respond to code review and collaborate with others.
That record matters more than ever. AI can now write code and generate pull requests, so what makes a developer worth hiring, promoting or trusting with critical systems? And in Web3, where many teams are distributed and hiring is global, contributions often matter more than a CV.
This panel brings together maintainers, contributors and people who hire engineers to share real stories and practical advice:
What employers look for now: which skills have gained value, and which have lost it.
Standing out: building a visible track record without green-square farming or AI-generated PRs.
Using AI well: making it your advantage rather than a replacement for understanding.
Where open source leads: paths into Web3 and decentralized teams, and growing from contributor to maintainer and leader.
Mario Behling is a technologist and entrepreneur with over two decades of experience in open source development and digital innovation. He is the co-founder of FOSSASIA, the open source community in Asia, which plays a key role in advancing the FOSS movement across the region. Mario has launched numerous open source initiatives and companies spanning software and hardware, and continues to promote open technologies through education, community building, and enterprise solutions. He is the CEO of OpnTec, a German open source company focused on sustainable tech, and advises international organizations including the UNESCO on digital transformation strategies. He also served as a board member of the Open Source Business Alliance Germany, supporting open source adoption across public and private sectors.
Rushabh Mehta is the founder and CEO of Frappe, the company behind Frappe Framework and ERPNext, which he began building in 2005 for his family business. After a failed first startup, he rebooted in 2008 and has been building ever since. He also founded the school Learners Collective. A lifelong Mumbaikar and avid fiction reader, he loves debating philosophy, history and economics.
Francesco Andreoli leads developer relations at MetaMask and has been in Ethereum since 2016. He works at the layer where wallets, smart accounts, and AI agents meet, and builds open-source agent tooling under andreolf to test his own arguments.
Tomasz K. Stańczak is the founder of Complete Robot, an AI-native company accelerating data centre and energy infrastructure buildout. Established through the HF0 residency in San Francisco, the company brings together land, power and project delivery, combining AI and robotics with experienced engineers and operators.
He is also the founder of Nethermind, an Ethereum core development and infrastructure company behind one of the protocol’s leading execution client teams— and previously served as Co-Executive Director of the Ethereum Foundation.