Allison is an open source/hardware developer and strategist. She is co-chair of the Microarchitecture Side Channels working group at RISC-V International, chair of the board at the Software Freedom Conservancy, board member at the Open Infrastructure Foundation, and board member at Open Usage Commons.

At various points in the past she has served as president and board member of the Open Source Initiative, president and board member of the Perl Foundation, board member of the Python Software Foundation, chair of the board at the Parrot Foundation, chief architect of the Parrot virtual machine, Conference Chair of OSCON at O’Reilly Media, Technical Architect of Ubuntu at Canonical, Distinguished Technologist at Hewlett Packard, Distinguished Engineer at SUSE, and Principal Engineer at Rivos. She collaborates in the Debian and RISC-V projects.