Program Speakers

Edward Snowden is a former intelligence officer who served the CIA, NSA, and DIA for nearly a decade as a subject matter expert on technology and cybersecurity. In 2013, he revealed the NSA was unconstitutionally seizing the private records of billions of individuals who had not been suspected of any wrongdoing, resulting in the largest debate about reforms to US surveillance policy since 1978. Today, he works on methods of enforcing human rights through the application and development of new technologies. He joined the board of Freedom of the Press Foundation in February 2014. Photo license: Screenshot of a Citizen Four by Praxis Films and Laura Poitras, Creative Commons Attribution 3.0.

Allison's first geek career was as a research linguist in eastern Africa. But eventually her love of coding seduced her away from natural languages to artificial ones. In over 25 years as a programmer, she has developed everything from games, linguistic analysis tools, websites, and shipping fulfillment, to compilers, database replication systems, deployment automation, mobile apps, and talking smart-home appliances, worked as a language designer, project manager, conference organizer, and editor, been a board member of several free software related non-profit foundations, written three books, and founded a tech publishing company. She collaborates in the Debian, Python, and OpenStack projects, and currently works at Hewlett Packard Enterprise, leading a team of engineers focused on contributing to OpenStack and Python. Photo credit: Cjcollier, Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic License .

Karen M. Sandler is the Executive Director of the Software Freedom Conservancy. She is known for her advocacy for free software, particularly in relation to the software on medical devices. Prior to joining Conservancy, she was Executive Director of the GNOME Foundation where she now serves on the Board of Directors. Before that, she was General Counsel of the Software Freedom Law Center. Karen co-organizes Outreachy, the award winning Outreach Program for Women. She is also pro bono counsel to the Free Software Foundation, GNOME and QuestionCopyright.Org. Karen is a recipient of the O'Reilly Open Source Award and co-host of the oggcast, Free as in Freedom.

Richard is a software developer and software freedom activist. In 1983 he announced the project to develop the GNU operating system, a Unix-like operating system meant to be entirely free software, and has been the project's leader ever since. With that announcement Richard also launched the Free Software Movement. In October 1985 he started the Free Software Foundation.

Since the mid-1990s, Richard has spent most of his time in political advocacy for free software, and spreading the ethical ideas of the movement, as well as campaigning against both software patents and dangerous extension of copyright laws. Before that, Richard developed a number of widely used software components of GNU, including the original Emacs, the GNU Compiler Collection, the GNU symbolic debugger (gdb), GNU Emacs, and various other programs for the GNU operating system.

Daniel Kahn Gillmor is a technologist with the ACLU's Speech, Privacy and Technology Project, and a free software developer. He's a Free Software Foundation member, a member of Debian, a contributor to a wide range of free software projects, and a participant in protocol development standards organizations like the IETF, with an eye toward preserving and improving civil liberties and civil rights through our shared infrastructure. Photo license: Daniel Kahn Gillmor, Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

Emmanuel is a Division III student at Hampshire College, studying how technology (especially restrictive technology, like DRM) can affect how individuals share information, learn, remix content, organize, and live their everyday lives. Born and raised in western Massachusetts, they are committed to building a free society, while improving the lives of others with technology. Their latest work can be found at http://emmanuel.im/.

Sunil Mohan Adapa is a Free Software developer and an independent software consultant. He is a contributor to the FreedomBox project. In the past, he has contributed to the IndLinux project and Telugu localization. He also teaches as guest faculty at IIIT-Hyderabad. After graduating from IIIT-H in 2003, before becoming an independent consultant, he has worked at various corporates and at his own startup.

Tim 'mithro' Ansell is the founder and lead of the TimVideos.us project a group of projects which aim to drastically reduce the costs and expertise required for doing recording and live streaming of conferences, meetings and user groups (Find our more at https://code.timvideos.us).

As an FOSS geek with a hardware bent, Tim has dedicated much of his time and resources towards efforts around free hardware (including the TimVideos' HDMI2USB project - https://hdmi2usb.tv). Tim is also heavily involved in both the Python and Australian FOSS communities though starting PyCon AU and helping at many Linux.conf.au http://Linux.conf.au conferences.

Walter Bender is founder of Sugar Labs, a global project that develops educational software used by millions of children. Sugar Labs is a member project of the non-profit foundation Software Freedom Conservancy. In 2006, Bender co-founded the One Laptop per Child, a non-profit association with Nicholas Negroponte and Seymour Papert. As director of the MIT Media Laboratory from 2000 to 2006, Bender led a team of researchers in fields as varied as tangible media to affective computing to lifelong kindergarten. In 1992, Bender founded the MIT News in the Future consortium, which launched the era of digital news. Currently, he is launching a new initiative, the Miami College of Design, a new program for industrial design in the Wynwood section of Miami.

Brian is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Science and Technology Studies at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. His research examines Social Justice at the critical intersections of technology, particularly Free Software, and gender/race/class.

Mishi Choudhary is working with SFLC following the completion of her fellowship during which she earned her LLM from Columbia Law School and was a Stone Scholar. Prior to joining forces with SFLC in 2006, she practiced as a High Court and Supreme Court litigator in New Delhi.

At SFLC, Mishi is the primary legal representative of many of the world's most significant free software developers and non-profit distributors, including Debian, the Apache Software Foundation, and OpenSSL.

In 2010, she founded SFLC.in, since which time she has divided her time between New York and New Delhi. Under her direction, SFLC.in has become the premier non-profit organization representing the rights of Internet users and free software developers in India. She was one of the lead counsels in the Supreme Court of India's landmark Shreya Singhal v. Union of India judgment on internet free speech. She is a core volunteer with the SaveTheInternet.in Net Neutrality coalition that worked on the Network Neutrality campaign in India. SFLC.in recently won a victory for Software Patents and FOSS at the Indian Patent office as well. She consults regularly with the Government of India on issues of internet freedom, Free and Open Source Software, Software Patents, Privacy and Network Neutrality.

As of 2015, Mishi is the only lawyer in the world simultaneously to appear on briefs in the US and Indian Supreme Courts in the same Term. She consults with and advises established businesses and startups using free software in their products and service offerings in the US, Europe, India, China and Korea. In 2015 she was named one of the Asia Society's 21 young leaders building Asia's future.

In addition to an LLM, she has an LLB degree and a bachelors degree in political science from the University of Delhi. Mishi is a member of the Bar Council of Delhi, licensed to appear before the Supreme Court of India, all the State High Courts in India, in the State of New York, and before the Southern District of New York.

George Chriss is a technical developer who executes free software-based solutions in innovative environments, most notably launching OpenMeetings.org just prior to the first Open Video Conference in 2009. In previous years George was an Editorial Assistant for ACS Nano and provided live-streaming assistance at LibrePlanet 2013 and 2015. He's a self-described hacker on small but notable projects including book scanning, manual-entry OCR (handwritten documents), high-resolution document magnification, and DIY woodworking.

Member of Sursiendo, Comunicación y Cultura Digital working around the commons and linking activism on land and territory movements with free/libre software and culture spaces with a gender perspective. Concern about surveillance and self-defense strategies. Learning all the time.

Marianne Corvellec has been a Free Software activist with April since 2011. April is an advocacy association which has been promoting and defending Free Software in France and Europe since 1996. Marianne's focus has been on legal and institutional issues.

Passionate about distributed networks, Adrien Béraud (OpenDHT Developer and Free-Software Consultant at Savoir-faire Linux) maintains the distributed hash table OpenDHT used for Ring. For Adrien, Ring is more than a communication tool. It is based on the community. Ring belongs to it and strengthens through it.

Molly de Blanc lives in Cambridge, MA. She is the community coordinator for the Open edX Project. In addition to free software, she likes bikes, plants, and playing the bassoon.

Kevin Connor is the director of the Public Accountability Initiative (PAI), a watchdog research organization focused on corporate and government accountability. PAI conducts "power research," investigative research that brings transparency to how power relationships shape policy in the United States. PAI's research has consistently challenged the role of big money and corporate power in our democracy, garnering major media attention and prompting significant accountability measures and reforms. PAI's flagship project is LittleSis.org (the opposite of Big Brother), an online wiki database tracking information on powerful people and organizations. Kevin co-founded PAI and LittleSis.org in 2008. Prior to that, he worked as a strategic researcher at SEIU and as a freelance corporate accountability researcher. His freelance projects included an early analysis of the role played by Wall Street investment banks in causing the subprime crisis.

Scott Dexter is a Professor of Computer and Information Science at Brooklyn College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, where he has taught since 1998. He has written extensively on free software, including the book, co-authored with philosopher Samir Chopra, Decoding Liberation: The Promise of Free and Open Source Software. He is particularly interested in getting his students--of extremely diverse backgrounds--hooked on free software.

Nima Fatemi is an Iranian independent security researcher, focused on encryption, anonymity, privacy and censorship circumvention technologies. He is a core member of The Tor Project and the chief technology wizard of Library Freedom Project.

Richard Fontana is a lawyer at Red Hat. He leads support for Red Hat's engineering and research and development units and is Red Hat's lead counsel for legal issues relating to free software. Richard is also a board director of the Open Source Initiative.

Mike Gerwitz is a free software hacker and activist with a strong focus on security, privacy, and the Web. He is a volunteer for the GNU project, an evaluator for software submissions to GNU, and author of GNU ease.js.

Judy is a medical doctor and health informatician who has worked with OpenMRS from its inception. She has contributed as a developer, with over 6 implementations of OpenMRS worldwide and continues to support OpenMRS leadership regarding strategy and maintenance of partnerships.

Judy brings a fresh look into free software systems for global health, challenging us to rethink systems and organizations as social enterprises that must manage resources efficiently in order to make an impact.

Erin Glass just joined UCSD as Associate Director and Digital Humanities Coordinator of the Center for the Humanities. Prior to her move, she served as a Digital Fellow at The CUNY Graduate Center where she worked on developing software initiatives that fostered collaborative research while protecting user freedom. She is also co-founder of Social Paper, which received a NEH Digital Start-Up grant, and is currently at work on a dissertation which theorizes student writing as a site where political and technical consciousness is forged.

Shauna Gordon-McKeon is an independent researcher and developer who focuses on free technologies and communities. She runs a business, Galaxy Rise Consulting, providing web and mobile development and data science services to individuals and organizations. She can often be found using her skills as a writer, public speaker, and teacher to help free software and open science communities more accessible to newcomers.

Sumana Harihareswara, founder of Changeset Consulting, is a FLOSS software contributor, programmer and project manager with over a decade of experience in the software industry. Her past leadership in nonprofit, academia, industry, and volunteer organizations earned her an Open Source Citizen Award in 2011. She lives in New York City.

Harihareswara frequently speaks and writes about technology, FLOSS and management; she was keynote speaker at Open Source Bridge in 2012, code4lib in 2014, and Wiki Conference USA in 2014.

She was most recently Senior Technical Writer and Engineering Community Manager at the Wikimedia Foundation. She has also managed projects at Collabora, GNOME, QuestionCopyright.org, Fog Creek Software, Behavior, and Salon.com. From mid-2014 to early 2015, Harihareswara served as a member of the board of directors of the Ada Initiative. She holds an MS in Technology Management from Columbia University and and a BA in political science from the University of California, Berkeley, and participated in the Recurse Center in 2013 and 2014.

Parker Higgins is the Director of Copyright Activism at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, specializing in issues at the intersection of freedom of speech and copyright, trademark, and patent law. He previously lived and worked in Berlin, Germany.

Benjamin Mako Hill is a social scientist, technologist, and activist. In all three roles, he works to understand why some attempts at peer production — like Wikipedia and GNU/Linux — build large volunteer communities while the vast majority never attract even a second contributor. He is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication at the University of Washington. He is also a faculty affiliate at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society and an affiliate at the Institute for Quantitative Social Science — both at Harvard University. He has also been a leader, developer, and contributor to the free software community for more than a decade as part of the Debian and Ubuntu projects. He is the author of several best-selling technical books, a member of the Free Software Foundation board of directors and an advisor to the Wikimedia Foundation. Hill has a Masters degree from the MIT Media Lab and a PhD from MIT in an interdepartmental program between the Sloan School of Management and the Media Lab.

I was on the PyCon 2007 conference committee and the number one complaint in the post conference survey was that speakers did not provide presentation files. I set out to solve that problem by recording the video stream going to the projector. I later discovered how the Debian conference did their videos: they use software designed to be used by conference volunteers, and a work flow that makes the best use out of the few hours of their time. I optimized that process to manage larger events and towards getting the final videos online in under 24 hours. I created a company called NextDayVideo and have since produced over 2000 vidoes of primarily free software conferences.

Bradley M. Kuhn is the President and Distinguished Technologist at Software Freedom Conservancy, on the Board of Directors of the Free Software Foundation (FSF), and editor-in-chief of copyleft.org. Kuhn began his work in the software freedom movement as a volunteer in 1992, when he became an early adopter of the GNU/Linux operating system, and began contributing to various free software projects. He worked during the 1990s as a system administrator and software developer for various companies, and taught AP Computer Science at Walnut Hills High School in Cincinnati. Kuhn's non-profit career began in 2000, when he was hired by the FSF. As FSF's Executive Director from 2001 - 2005, Kuhn led FSF's GPL enforcement, launched its Associate Member program, and invented the Affero GPL. Kuhn was appointed President of Software Freedom Conservancy in April 2006, was Conservancy's primary volunteer from 2006 - 2010, and has been a full-time staffer since early 2011. Kuhn holds a summa cum laude B.S. in Computer Science from Loyola University in Maryland, and an M.S. in Computer Science from the University of Cincinnati. Kuhn's Master's thesis discussed methods for dynamic interoperability of free software programming languages. Kuhn received the O'Reilly Open Source Award in 2012, in recognition for his lifelong policy work on copyleft licensing. Kuhn has a blog, is on pump.io, and co-hosts the audcast, Free as in Freedom.

Bassam is a 3D animator/filmmaker whose 2006 short, Elephants Dream, was the first "open movie." It established the viability of libre tools in a production environment and set precedent by offering its source data under a permissive license for learning, remixing and re-use. His character, ManCandy, began as an easily animatable test bed for rigging experiments. Multiple iterations have been released to the public, and Bassam demonstrates him in the animated tutorial video + short, The ManCandy FAQ. Under the sign of the urchin, Bassam is continuing to pursue a model of production that invests in commonwealth. He teaches, writes and lectures around the world on free production and free software technique. Raised in Damascus, Bassam trained in the United States as an electrical and software engineer.

Jonathan has been involved with the Free Software Movement for ten years, in France and now in Canada.

Matt Lee is a free software hacker, film maker and artist living in Austin, TX.

Software engineer, leader of Hypatia Software Organization. Python developer, free software author; MIT licenses everything. FreeBSD enthusiast.

Holger Levsen is contributing to Debian since more than 10 years. He founded the DebConf videoteam and created the Debian video archive at video.debian.net, was heavily involved in Debian-Edu and has now shifted has focus on QA and lately security. He maintains piuparts.debian.org and jenkins.debian.net, and on the later he set up reproducible.debian.net which by now is not only testing Debian packages for reproducibility but also coreboot, OpenWrt, NetBSD, FreeBSD, Archlinux and soon Fedora. Photo license: Diégo Antolinos-Basso, Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

Alison Macrina is a librarian, privacy activist, and the founder and director of the Library Freedom Project. Alison is passionate about connecting surveillance issues to larger global struggles for justice, demystifying privacy and security technologies for ordinary users, and resisting an internet controlled by a handful of intelligence agencies and giant multinational corporations.

Neil McGovern is the current Debian Project Leader. He's been a board member of Software in the Public Interest, Inc and of the Open Rights Group. An advocate of digital rights, free expression, and the use of free software in general. Neil is currently the Engineering Manager for Collabora - a free software consultancy.

M. C. is the founder of Transparency Toolkit, a free software project that helps people use open data to expose surveillance and human rights abuses. He is also a Thiel Fellow and an Echoing Green Fellow. Previously, M. C. graduated from Boston University with a degree in civic technology and did research at the MIT Media Lab.

Evan Misshula is the Project Manager for the NYC Tech Talent Pipeline Residency @ Queens College, an adjunct instructor at CUNY John Jay teaching network security and a PhD candidate at the CUNY Graduate Center in Criminal Justice. He is active in numerous free software meetups in NYC. He is interested in helping marginalized groups (particularly those stigmatized by contact with the criminal justice system) use Free Software to increase social and economic mobility.

Libre Software enthusiast, believes in collaborative work and digital freedoms defense. Has worked for many years to encourage the use and appropriation of free technology tools with a digital security approach within the local community and grassroot movements. Mutual Assistance Technical Communities (CTAM) program implementation link-coordinator with HRC Frayba, an iniciative of Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung and other organizations of the Latin America region to develop and improve their technical-digital skills.

Deb Nicholson wants to make the world a better place with technology and social justice for all. After many years of local political organizing, she became an enthusiastic free software activist. She is currently the Community Outreach Director at the Open Invention Network and the Community Manager at GNU MediaGoblin. She also serves on the board at Open Hatch, aka Free Software's Welcoming Committee.

FSF Latin America board member. GNU speaker. Free Software Evangelist. Maintainer of GNU Linux-libre, and co-maintainer of the GNU Compiler Collection, GNU binutils and GNU libc. GNU tools engineer at Red Hat Brasil.

While working towards a BFA in Interrelated Media from Massachusetts College of Art, Paige developed an interest in programming and a fascination in the complexity of natural systems. After graduation, Paige worked for mesh networking startup, Open Garden which helped to map her interest in natural decentralized systems onto concepts within technology. She previously organized San Francisco's bitcoin meetup and is fascinated by the freeing potential of cryptocurrencies. She currently fills various roles at MaidSafe with a focus on community and communication.

I've been working on free software media technologies since the year 2000 when I joined the Sydney Linux User Group, implemented free software video content analysis algorithms at work, and joined Xiph to do what we called "Annodex" - annotated and searchable video. Fast forward to 2007, when I organised the first FOMS(http://www.foms-workshop.org/) and managed the team of volunteers at the Australian Linux Conference that would be the first to record and publish the conference talks using Ogg Theora (https://www.linux.org.au/conf/2007/Programme.html). I've since focused on Web standards around video. In 2007, Ogg Theora was going to be the file format for the video element on the Web - well, in the end it didn't, but it drew me in and I've not really let go since - I went from working on the video element to captions with WebVTT and am now working on WebRTC through rtc.io.

Cooper is a security researcher and programmer at EFF. He has worked on projects such as Privacy Badger, Canary Watch, Ethersheet, and analysis of state sponsored malware. He has also performed security trainings for activists, non profit workers and ordinary folks around the world. He previously worked building websites for non-profits, such as Greenpeace, Adbusters, and the Chelsea Manning Support Network. He also was a co-founder of the Hackbloc hacktivist collective. In his spare time he enjoys playing music and participating in street protests.

Trained as an engineer, Zak is an activist who cares about technology's role in shaping society and social change. As a campaigns manager for the Free Software Foundation, his goal is to creatively communicate the role of freely licensed software in moving us toward a fair and free society.

Over the past 15 years, Guillaume Roguez (Ring Development Director and Free-Software Consultantat Savoir-faire Linux) worked on different projects, like porting Blender and Python. He has also developed a deep knowledge in low-level software, multi-medias codecs, real-time constraints, and testing. Now he leads the Ring project. He is convinced that Ring is a free tool for everyone on the planet.

Enrique Rosas studied Information Science in the Polytech National Institute in Mexico, although he is an autodidact of the libre software movement. He likes history, economy and politics. He is part of the core of Mutual Assistance Tech Communities and works as project manager for the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation in Mexico.

Leah is the lead developer in the libreboot project, which implements free "boot firmware" to replace the BIOS/UEFI firmware on supported platforms. Leah is a hardcore Free Software advocate in general, and wants to bring about a world where everyone can use Free Software exclusively, for any computational tasks that they can imagine. Leah also runs a company at https://minifree.org/, selling FSF-endorsed libreboot-preinstalled systems in order to fund libreboot development.

Felipe Sanches is a software freedom activist and developer who became a libre hardware designer when co-funding Metamaquina, a Brazilian 3d printing company. Felipe has contributed to the development of graphics design, CAD and 3D modelling & printing libre software such as Inkscape, OpenSCAD, Pronterface and GNU LibreDWG. He is also a co-founder of Garoa Hacker Clube, the first brazilian hackerspace, and of PoliGNU, the Free Software Studies Group of the engineering school at University of Sao Paulo.

During the last few years, Felipe has also engaged in hardware reverse engineering and in the development of emulation drivers, being a frequent code contributor to the MAME (Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator) and MESS (Multi Emulator Super System) projects.

Eric Schultz is an independent software engineer and free software consultant. Most recently he was the Community Manager at prpl Foundation with a particular focus on building the OpenWrt community. Prior to this, Eric worked as Developer Advocate at Outercurve Foundation where he managed and supported the foundation’s 25 free software projects. Eric has collaborated with employees from dozens of companies to create free software that improves lives. He has a passion for the promise and reality of free software, with a focus on empowering individuals, particularly in marginalized groups, with more control over their everyday lives. Eric lives in Appleton, Wisconsin where outside of work he enjoys developing free software, watching the Green Bay Packers and Milwaukee Bucks, and tweeting about technology, cute animals, politics and sports.

Andrew Seeder is the Data Systems Manager at the Dudley Street Neighborhood Initiative in Roxbury, Boston. He is also a consultant for the Smart Chicago Collaborative, sits on the IT Working Group for Boston Ujima, and is a member of the young professionals committee for YMCA's Training, Inc. He helps organize cryptoparties and works with friends on the Boston Meshnet project. Tweet him at @ahseeder.

Co-founder and lead developer of LittleSis. Currently at The New York Public Library working on the Library Simplified project. Previously worked for Freelancers Union and Billionaires for Bush.

David Thompson is a professional web developer, core developer for the GNU Guix project, contributor to GNU Guile, functional programming enthusiast, and free software activist.

An accomplished musician and innovative teacher, Devin Ulibarri has authored his own guitar method book for the pre-reading level as well as co-authored the article, “Thinking Beyond the Myths and Misconceptions of Talent”, which is described by Allen Fletcher of Tanglewood Music Festival as “an immensely consequential investigation of an issue at the heart of society, and a call to effective action.” Most recently, he has collaborated with Walter Bender of Sugar Labs to design Music Blocks, a software libre tool to explore music's fundamental concepts, which they debuted at the 2016 Constructionism conference hosted in Bangkok, Thailand. Devin takes an active role as a teacher in the classroom to protect student privacy and empower students with powerful software libre tools.

Luis is an attorney and programmer. Most recently, he was the Senior Director of Community Engagement at the Wikimedia Foundation. Prior to Wikimedia, Luis worked at Greenberg-Traurig, where he represented Google in the Google-Oracle litigation, and at Mozilla, where he led the drafting of version 2.0 of the Mozilla Public License. Before practicing law, he was the bugmaster and a board member of the GNOME Foundation, and worked at Ximian.

Christopher Allan Webber is lead developer of the GNU MediaGoblin project, a longtime free culture and free software activist, hacker of various languages (especially Python and various lisps), contributor to GNU Guix, and occasional author to various goblin-themed drawings.

Marina Zhurakhinskaya is a Senior Outreach Specialist focused on community diversity and inclusion at Red Hat. She co-organizes Outreachy, a mentorship and internships program that helps people from groups underrepresented in free software get involved; 244 people have so far participated in the program's paid, remote internships. Marina is a coordinator for GNOME's participation in Google Summer of Code and a creator of GNOME's newcomers tutorial and workshop. She served as a board member at the GNOME Foundation and at the Ada Initiative. Prior to her diversity outreach and community engagement roles, Marina developed software for GNOME. Marina is a recipient of an O'Reilly Open Source Award and of a GNOME Foundation Contributor of the Year Award "the Pants". She is a co-recipient of the Free Software Foundation Award for Projects of Social Benefit on behalf of the Outreach Program for Women.

Stefano Zacchiroli is Associate Professor of Computer Science at University Paris Diderot. His research interests span formal methods and their applications to improve software quality and user experience in the context of Free Software distributions. He has been an official member of the Debian Project since 2001, taking care of many tasks from package maintenance to distribution-wide Quality Assurance. He has been elected to serve as Debian Project Leader for 3 terms in a row, over the period 2010-2013. He is a Board Director of the Open Source Initiative (OSI). He is a recipient of the 2015 O'Reilly Open Source Award.