LibrePlanet: Conference/2012/Speakers

Who's speaking at LibrePlanet 2012?

From the Free Software Foundation

Bradley M. Kuhn

Kuhn began volunteering in the Free Software Movement in 1992, as an early adopter of the GNU/Linux operating system, and contributor to various Free Software projects. He worked during the 1990s as a system administrator and software developer for various companies, and taught high school Computer Science (using all Free Software). In 2000, he joined the FSF as an employee. From 2001 until 2005, he was FSF's executive director, where he led FSF's GPL enforcement efforts, launched the Associate Member program, and invented the Affero clause of the AGPL. In 2005, he left FSF to work as an employee of the Software Freedom Law Center. Kuhn holds a summa cum laude B.S. in Computer Science from Loyola University Maryland, and an M.S. in Computer Science from the University of Cincinnati. Kuhn is also president of the Software Freedom Conservancy.

Brett Smith

Brett works in the Licensing Compliance Lab as our compliance engineer and licensing guru. He joined the FSF in August 2006 and handled the GPLv3 process. He was introduced to free software in high school and immediately became an advocate for the idea, writing papers and giving speeches on the subject.

John Sullivan

John started working with GNU Press and the Free Software Foundation in 2003 and then became the FSF's first Campaigns Manager, working on outreach efforts like Defective by Design, BadVista, and PlayOgg. In 2011, John became the Executive Director after four years as Manager of Operations.

His background is mainly in the humanities, with an MFA in Writing and Poetics and a BA in Philosophy, but he has been spending too much time with computers and online communities since the days of the Commodore 64. He's become a dedicated GNU Emacs user after first trying it around 1996, and contributes code to several of its extensions.

Prior to the FSF, John worked as a college debate team instructor for both Harvard and Michigan State University.

Josh Gay

Josh Gay is our newest campaigns manager. He comes back to the FSF from working on free textbooks in California.

He is a programmer, activist, and community organizer whose interests revolve around technology, government, education, and computer user-freedom.

Matt Lee

Matt Lee is our campaigns manager. He was previously a GNU Webmaster, with a two-year position as the GNU Chief Webmaster.

Away from the FSF, Matt makes noises with his band, wrote the book "Exploring Freedom" and is the founder of Libre.fm, and GNU social

Ward Vandewege

Ward discovered GNU/Linux in 1995 and never looked back. He likes to do both system administration and programming work and doesn't mind wielding the occasional soldering iron. He became Chief Technology Officer at the Free Software Foundation in September 2011, and worked previously as a system administrator since 2005, and was a volunteer before that.

Non-FSF speakers

Alison Chaiken

My interest is in Event Data Recorders in cars and how they (and other proprietary software) will affect the privacy of drivers and the safety of vehicles.

I was extremely impressed by the FSF's identifying cars as an area of concern in the Holiday Gift Buying Guide, as few in our community are paying attention to vehicles yet.

Deb Nicholson (freedeb)

Deb Nicholson works at the intersection of technology and social justice. She has over fifteen years of non-profit management experience and got involved in the free software movement about six years ago. She currently splits her time between the Open Invention Network, MediaGoblin and Open Hatch. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts where she is slowly pursuing a graduate degree in Information Technology at Harvard University.

ginger coons

ginger "all-lower-case" coons is a designer, artist, sometimes-academic and all-round trouble maker. She is a member of the Libre Graphics magazine editorial team, serving as copy editor, fill writer and general editorial grunt. In addition to her activities with Libre Graphics Magazine, she gives talks and workshops introducing designers and artists. In addition to all of the above, she is a doctoral student in the Faculty of Information at the University of Toronto.

ginger has spoken (notably) at Libre Graphics Meeting 2009 in Montreal, Libre Graphics Meeting 2010 in Brussels, Make Art 2010 in Poitiers and FOSDEM 2011 in Brussels. She has lectured to students about the merits of incorporating F/LOSS into design workflows and has spoken about her own art and design work at various galleries and artist-run centres.

Joel Izlar

Joel Izlar is a graduate student at the University of Georgia's School of Social Work focusing on community empowerment, program development and non-profit management. His interests include radical social work, poverty reduction, social, economic and digital justice, community organizing, technology, art and free culture. Izlar is particularly interested in how free frameworks and technology can be used to empower communities and promote radical social change. Izlar is currently sitting board president of Free IT Athens, an Athens, Georgia based non-profit organization that seeks to provide low-cost computer equipment and services to those in need. Izlar also resides on the Whatever It Takes initiative's technology team, an intitative that aims to ensure every child in Athens-Clarke county Georgia obtains a college education. Izlar has spoken on the topics of digital justice, technology and community change, technology and community organizing, and technology and domestic violence prevention.

Rubén Rodríguez (quidam)

Rubén is a 29 year old computer engineer from Spain, founder and main developer of the Trisquel GNU/Linux project. He also started two small IT companies which are still working to offer services towards free software, and he currently works as CTO for Activity Central, helping educational free software deployments in development countries.