LibrePlanet — Speakers

Keynote speakers

Benjamin Mako Hill

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.

Photo of Benjamin Mako Hill by Ilona Idlis CC-BY 4.0 US

Deb Nicholson

Deb Nicholson is a free software policy expert and a passionate community advocate. She is the Community Outreach Director for the Open Invention Network, the world's largest patent non-aggression community, which serves GNU, the kernel Linux, Android, and other key free software projects.

She won the O’Reilly Open Source Award for her work with GNU MediaGoblin and OpenHatch. She is a founding organizer of the Seattle GNU/Linux Conference, an annual event dedicated to surfacing new voices and welcoming new people to the free software community. She also serves on the Software Freedom Conservancy's Evaluation Committee, which acts as a curator for new member projects. She lives with her husband and her lucky black cat in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Photo of Deb Nicholson by Misty Smith CC-BY-NC-SA 2.0

Richard Stallman

Richard Stallman founded the free software movement in 1983 when he announced he would develop the GNU operating system, a Unix-like operating system meant to consist entirely of free software. He has been the GNU project's leader ever since. In October 1985 he started the Free Software Foundation.

Since the mid-1990s, Stallman 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 programs that are components of GNU, including the original Emacs, the GNU Compiler Collection, the GNU symbolic debugger (gdb), GNU Emacs, and various others.

Photo of Richard Stallman by Kori Feener CC-BY-SA

Seth David Schoen

Seth Schoen has served for sixteen years as the first-ever Staff Technologist at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, helping to inspire the creation of similar positions at other NGOs and government agencies. Seth has sought to inform EFF's litigation, policy, and activist work with technical expertise, and has researched topics including ISPs' interference with user communications, as well as computer memory and laser printer forensics. He created the LNX-BBC live CD. He has testified before the US Copyright Office, US Sentencing Commission, Federal Trade Commission, and several courts, and has been invited to speak in twelve countries. He is one of the original technical contributors to the Let's Encrypt certificate authority project.

Photo of Seth David Schoen by Electronic Frontier Foundation CC-BY 3.0 US

Speakers

D. Joe Anderson

D. Joe Anderson holds a PhD in chemistry, has worked in academic IT for for nearly 20 years, and is an adjunct professor in the Free and Open Source Software and Free Culture Minor at the Rochester Institute of Technology.

Isabela Bagueros

Isabela Bagueros is the project manager and UX team lead at Tor.

Mad Ball

Mad Price Ball is Executive Director of the Open Humans Foundation and co-founder of Open Humans. Ball's work is funded by a Shuttleworth Foundation Fellowship, which supports their vision for applying free principles to change how we share and study human health data. Ball combines advocacy and technology to explore new, participant-centered approaches for health data sharing, research, and citizen science. Their work is multifaceted: they collaborate with diverse research teams and citizen scientists, perform outreach through writing and speaking, and oversee Open Humans technical development and operations.

Lothar Becker

Lothar is a long time member of The Document Foundation and in charge of chairing the certification committee for LibreOffice. In his professional life, he is the managing director of a software and service company for free software, mainly on the desktop. He and his company were the first OpenOffice.org migration and service partner in Europe with SUN, and he personally has a long track record in migration projects from proprietary to free office suites, and in training for all aspects of it.

Walter Bender

Liz Barry

Organizer, director of community development, and co-founder of Public Lab. My role bridges place-based community organizing and internet-mediated peer production. Check out the highlights of our community's development at https://publiclab.org/wiki/community-development. For my emphasis on culture instead of rules, Will Ward has called me The Enforcer of Norms. Because the acronym for "have you considered sharing back?" (HYCSB) is not so catchy, other members of Public Lab have created these graphics at https://www.dropbox.com/sh/5u2lhrfdw0daemh/AAC5v1ekZGWiWgDL6z50zWnKa?dl=0 to save me from repeating myself. Fair enough. Feel free to edit my impromptu Talk page at https://publiclab.org/wiki/liz-publiclab, find me on twitter @lizbarry, or check out my web 1.0 homepage at https://publiclab.org/profile/lizbarry.net.

Matt Bernius

Matt is an anthropologist who has been collaborating with Mozilla's Open Source Student Network to research the current state of FLOSS on college campuses. In addition to his research in free software communities, Matt has planned and executed national and international research projects for a range of clients including Autodesk, Boeing, Google, Honeywell, and PricewaterhouseCoopers. Prior to starting his own practice, Matt worked with Effective, an experience design firm. He also spent time as a visiting professor at the Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT), and was co-director of RIT's Open Publishing Lab, a free software research lab. Matt holds a Master's degree in the Social Sciences from University of Chicago, and a Bachelor's degree in New Media Publishing from RIT.

Wendy Bolm

Wendy Bolm is the COO of CommitChange, and is an activist, writer, and nerd who is passionate about connecting nonprofits with the tools they need to survive an ever-changing technological landscape. Before working for CommitChange, Wendy worked for nonprofits for more than a decade in Florida and New Orleans.

Bob Call

Robert Call was the co-founder of LibreWRT, and is the Lead Developer of the libreCMC project. When he is not hacking on libreCMC, he spends most of his time breaking things, working on other free culture works, and advising companies about what is libre software and what is not. Most of his work revolves around embedded devices and federated services.

Tom Callaway

Tom Callaway works on the Open Source and Standards Team in the CTO Office at Red Hat. He has worked full time on promoting free software in Academic communities for the past four years, and has been at Red Hat since 2001.

Shaun Carland

Shaun is a software engineer and activist living in Somerville. Coming from an environmental activist background, he is interested the role that free software can play in protecting democratic institutions and increasing civic participation. In moments of not coding, Shaun enjoys playing piano, rock climbing, and exploring the world.

Sudarshan Chawathe

Sudarshan Chawathe ("Chaw") is Associate Professor of Computer Science, and Co-operating Associate Professor of Climate Change Institute, at the University of Maine. He earned his B.Tech. in Computer Science and Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur, and his MS and PhD in Computer Science from Stanford University. His research interests center on data management in general, with applications to climate studies and intelligent transportation systems in particular. He has been using almost exclusively free software since the early 1990s, for both professional and personal needs. He is working toward being able to delete that "almost."

der.hans

der.hans is a free software community veteran, presenter, and author. He is the founder of the Free Software Stammtisch, BoF organizer for the Southern California Linux Expo (SCaLE), and chairman of the Phoenix Linux User Group (PLUG).

As a technology and entrepreneurial veteran, his roles have included director of engineering, engineering manager, IS manager, system administrator, community college instructor, developer, and DBA.

Cecilia Donnelly

Cecilia Donnelly is a senior consultant who has been working on free software process, software development, and project management at Open Tech Strategies since 2014. She focuses her work on how governments and non-technical organizations can be involved in free software. Cecilia lives in Minneapolis.

Máirín Duffy

Máirín Duffy is a principal interaction designer at Red Hat, and team lead of Fedora's design team. A recipient of the 2016 O'Reilly Open Source Award, she has over a decade of expertise in user experience and design in FLOSS communities. Máirín uses a 100% FLOSS design workflow, free formats, and free licenses in her work.

Luis Falcón

Luis Falcón, M.D., B.Sc., holds a degree in Computer Science and Mathematics from the California State University (USA) and in Medicine from IUCS, Buenos Aires (Argentina). Dr. Falcón is a social, animal rights, and free software activist. He is the founder of GNU Solidario, a nonprofit organization that delivers Health and Education with free software. He is the author of GNU Health, the award winning Free/Libre Health and Hospital Information System. He currently lives in the Canary Islands, Spain.

Jeremiah Foster

Jeremiah C. Foster is a free software user who works with software for cars. Father to Hannah, husband to Annika, he lives in Northwestern Connecticut.

Nathan Freitas

Nathan Freitas of Guardian Project

Morgan Gangwere

Morgan Gangwere is a student at the University of New Mexico, studying communications. He learned to mumble with computers at a young age, cutting his teeth on Linux, UNIX, and even the occasional homebrew OS. His contributions to free software have included OpenKeychain, LibraryBox, and others. His research has focused on how free software organizations communicate, and how their communications are seen by outsiders. He's given talks at IGNITE conferences as well.

Mike Gerwitz

Mike Gerwitz is a free software hacker and activist with a focus on user privacy and security. He holds various volunteer roles within GNU, including software evaluation and administrative duties. Mike spends most of his free time with his wife and two sons; his remaining free time is spent primarily on hacking, research, volunteer work, and activism.

Denver Gingerich

Denver is the founder and lead developer of JMP, a free software chat gateway that lets you text and call people using a real phone number without a phone, part of the Soprani.ca family of projects. Denver also works part-time managing the technical side of Software Freedom Conservancy's license compliance work, triaging new reports and verifying complete corresponding sources. He previously wrote free software magnetic stripe reader firmware and desktop tools, and has patches accepted into GNU wdiff, Wine, and the kernel named Linux. He has given talks at CopyCamp Toronto, FOSSLC's Summercamp, the Open Video Conference, LinuxCon North America, Texas Linux Fest, DebConf, and Radical Networks.

Morane Gruenpeter

After several years as a professional harpist, Morane found a new career path in software engineering. Morane joined the Software Heritage team as an intern in 2017 while finishing a Master's degree in Computer Science at University Pierre et Marie Curie. After a successful internship, she continues her research on the software metadata challenge by building the Semantic Web of FLOSS projects.

Madeline Hagen

Madeline Hagen is a sophomore Physics major and Computational Science minor at Siena College. She is a project leader for Urban Scholars, teaching students about computer hardware and software. Madeline is also involved in a particle physics analysis at Siena focusing on decays of the top quark.

Stephen Jacobs

Stephen Jacobs is the Director of the Laboratory for Technological Literacy, and a Professor for the Free and Open Source Software and Free Culture Minor at the Rochester Institute of Technology.

Marc Jones

Marc Jones is an attorney and compliance engineer at CivicActions, a software development firm focused on bringing agile and free software best practices to governments and nonprofits. He has previously worked as a Assistant Director of a Information Technology department at the University of Connecticut, was a Systems Architect, and started his legal career at the Software Freedom Law Center.

Roan Kattouw

Roan has contributed to MediaWiki for over 10 years, and works as a software engineer at the Wikimedia Foundation. In his spare time, he serves on the Technical Advisory Committee for San Francisco's Open Source Voting System project.

Spencer Krum

Spencer Krum is a developer advocate at IBM. He writes Python applications to analyze esports, and deploys them on kubernetes. Before that, he administered the development infrastructure for OpenStack, and wrote a book on Puppet. He lives and works in Minneapolis. He likes cheeseburgers and tennis.

Bradley Kuhn

Bradley M. Kuhn is the Distinguished Technologist at Software Freedom Conservancy, on the FSF Board of Directors, and editor-in-chief of copyleft.org. Kuhn began his work in the software freedom movement as a volunteer in 1992, as a contributor to various free software projects. Kuhn's nonprofit career began in 2000 at FSF. As FSF's Executive Director from 2001-2005, Kuhn led GPL enforcement, launched its Associate Member program, and invented the Affero GPL. Kuhn was appointed President of Conservancy in April 2006, was Conservancy's primary volunteer from 2006-2010, and has been a full-time staffer since 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 also has received an O'Reilly Open Source Award, in recognition for his lifelong policy work on copyleft licensing.

Bassam Kurdali

Bassam is a 3D generalist filmmaker whose 2006 short, Elephants Dream, was the first "free 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. Bassam is continuing to pursue a model of production that invests in commonwealth. They teach, write and lecture around the world on open production and free software techniques. Raised in Damascus, Bassam trained in the United States as an electrical and software engineer.

Michael Kwet

Michael Kwet is lead researcher and co-founder of Yale Privacy Lab, as well as a Visiting Fellow of the Information Society Project at Yale Law School. He is a PhD candidate at Rhodes University in Grahamstown, South Africa. His research provides the first look at South Africa's transition to e-education, as well as the influence of the United States on South Africa's digital development.

Chris Lamb

Currently the Debian Project Leader, Chris is a freelance computer programmer, author of dozens of free projects, and contributor to hundreds of others. Chris has been an official Debian Developer since 2008, and is currently highly active in the Reproducible Builds project, for which he has been awarded a grant from the Linux Foundation's Core Infrastructure Initiative. In his spare time, he is an avid classical musician, reader, and Ironman triathlete. Chris has spoken at numerous conferences, including LinuxCon China, HKOSCon, linux.conf.au, DjangoCon Europe, OSCAL, multiple DebConfs, Software Freedom Kosovo, foss-north, and FOSS'ASIA.

Morgan Lemmer-Webber

Morgan is a PhD Candidate in the department of Art History at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. Her dissertation focuses on the real and symbolic associations between women and textile production in the Roman Empire. She has been the lead developer for the Digital Humanities project "A colonial merchant: The ledger of William Ramsay" since 2015. She has recently developed materials for and co-taught a series of workshops to teach basic programming skills to humanities majors using Racket and Scribble. (Copyright © 2016 Alex Leme. Photo licensed under CC BY 4.0.)

Dana Lewis

After building her own DIY “artificial pancreas,” Dana Lewis helped found the open source artificial pancreas movement known as "OpenAPS, making safe and effective artificial pancreas technology available (sooner) for people with diabetes around the world. She is also a Principal Investigator for a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation funded grant project to work to scale patient-led innovation and scientific discovery in more patient communities.

Gina Likins

Gina Likins has a long history with and interest in education, having taught both high school biology and environmental science. She has also taught intro to Web technology classes to students ranging from seventh graders to adult learners. She is currently a member of Red Hat's University Outreach team, which exists to help universities incorporate free software into their curriculum. She has spent the past three years working with instructors who are interested in FLOSS; speaking to classes and groups about the importance of FLOSS in education; and developing curricular materials for instructors who want to incorporate FLOSS into their classes.

Aaron Luna

Aaron Luna is an IT Engineer, free software advocate, and GNU/Linux user, and is the official ambassador of openSUSE in Mexico. He is a Professor of Information Technology by vocation of the Subsystem of Technological Universities and Polytechnic Universities of the Secretariat of Public Education of Mexico. He is the founder of the openSUSE Mexico community, and coordinator of the Development Center of Technological Innovation of Free Software, Labsol - State of Mexico (Free Software Lab). He is also a speaker at free software events.

Patrick Masson

Patrick Masson is currently the General Manager at the Open Source Initiative, and an Adjunct Professor at the University at Albany, teaching Open Source Principles and Practices. Patrick also serves on his local school district's Board of Education.

Dr. Michele McColgan

Dr. Michele McColgan is an Asst. Professor of Physics and Astronomy at Siena College. She is the founder of Siena's STEM Enrichment Program and summer STEM Camps, as well as the Director of the Urban Scholars program where hands-on, project-based activities, and gaming teach real-world science and math to middle school students.

Nick Mathewson

Nick Mathewson is one of the founders of the Tor Project.

Neil McGovern

A long-term contributor to free software, Neil McGovern has held posts on the boards of Software in the Public Interest, Open Rights Group and served a term as the Debian Project Leader. Neil currently works as the Executive Director of the GNOME Foundation.

Micky Metts

Micky Metts is an owner of Agaric, a worker-owned technology cooperative. Activist Hacker – Industry Organizer – Public Speaker – Connector – Advisor and Visionary. Micky is a member of the MayFirst People Link Leadership Committee, and is a liaison between the Solidarity Economy Network (SEN) and The United States Federation of Worker Cooperatives (USFWC), with an intention to bring communities together. Micky is also a founding member of a cohort that is building a New Boston Public High School based in cooperative learning - BoCoLab. She is a member of FSF.org and Drupal.org, a community based on free software. She is a published author contributing to the book Ours to Hack and to Own, one of the top technology books of 2017 in Wired magazine. Micky grew up in Weston, CT, and now lives in Boston, MA.

(To the extent possible under law, Micky Metts has waived all copyright and related or neighboring rights to Micky Metts - FreeScholar.)

Kristopher Navratil

Kristopher Navratil is a Technology Educator at Maple Hill Middle School in Castleton On Hudson, NY. He is also the creator of the "Open Source Computer Club," as well as the "Maker Club" in his school.

Sean O'Brien

Sean O'Brien is a cybersecurity researcher at Yale Privacy Lab and board member of makerspace MakeHaven. He has set up FreedomBox for both organizations. Sean is a free software activist and digital security trainer, facilitating "Citizen FOSS: What Snowden Knew" and "Cyber Freedom & Security" at Yale Law School. He is a proud resident of New Haven, Connecticut, where he lives with a phenomenal wife on a growing urban homestead.

Eric Schultz

Eric Schultz is Lead Developer at CommitChange and committer to Houdini Project. Prior to joining CommitChange, he was the Community Manager at prpl Foundation, with a particular focus on building the OpenWrt community, where he served on the FCC committee regulating Wifi. Eric also worked as Developer Advocate at Outercurve Foundation, where he managed and supported the foundation's 25 free software projects. 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, politics, sports, and his Yorkie, Penelope.

Brett Smith

Brett Smith is the Director of Strategic Initiatives at Software Freedom Conservancy. He works on a variety of the organization’s programs, including project membership, outreach, and non-profit accounting. Over the years he’s held a variety of advocacy and technical roles in free software. In the past he’s been a developer and product manager at free software bioinformatics startup Curoverse; a system administration at the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C); and a license compliance engineer at the Free Software Foundation.

Connor Solver

Chris Thompson

Chris Thompson is a member of Agaric, and has worked in a variety of technical leadership roles for over the past two decades (and some), after first discovering his talent for programming while hacking BASIC programs at the age of 12. He returned to programming as a career -- his first programming position utilizing Visual Basic -- where he proved himself capable of tackling some of the most challenging obstacles. While Chris has spent more than a little time writing high-performance stored procedures for large databases, he also feels right at home in the Web world, whether the server runs in Zend(PHP), OpenJava, or Mono(C#/.Net), and the client uses Angular.JS, Knockout.JS, or raw JavaScript.

(To the extent possible under law, Micky Metts has waived all copyright and related or neighboring rights to Wolcen.)

David Thompson

David Thompson is a professional software developer from Massachusetts with years of experience in Web development and DevOps. He is a GNU Guix core developer and an occasional GNU Guile contributor, and maintains several of his own free software projects.

Kat Thornton

Kat Thornton is a Postdoctoral Fellow supported by the Council on Library and Information Resources, working as a digital conservator in the Digital Preservation department of Yale University Libraries for a two-year term. Kat has been a volunteer contributor to the Wikidata project since 2013.

Devin Ulibarri

Devin Ulibarri, one of the main developers and visionaries for the visual programming language Music Blocks, is teaching "Learn Music and Coding" classes at both the YMCA Malden and YWCA Malden as part of projects supported by the Malden Cultural Council and the City of Boston. He is co-founder of Free Computer Labs, an organization that brings free software to the community in the form of free computers to schools that need them, as well as classes in everyday free software computing for adults. Devin is a professional musician, chairing the guitar department for the Preparatory School and School of Continuing Education at New England Conservatory.

Luis Villa

Luis is an attorney, programmer, and entrepreneur who has been involved in free software his entire career. He is currently the co-founder of Tidelift. Previous roles include Senior Director of Community Engagement at the Wikimedia Foundation; legal fellow at Mozilla, where he led the drafting of version 2.0 of the Mozilla Public License; and associate at Greenberg Traurig, where he represented Google in the Google-Oracle case. Before practicing law, he was the bugmaster and a board member of the GNOME Foundation, and worked at Ximian. He also briefly maintained a GPL-licensed Lego Mindstorms operating system.

Mariah Villarreal

Mariah started her career as an informal educator, community organizer, and researcher over five years ago within the maker education, free software, and experiential learning communities. She is passionate about supporting and developing inclusive learning environments which respect each learner's agency, especially for at-risk and underserved youth. She has served as the Libre Learn Lab Director since its founding in 2014. Mariah holds a BA in International Relations with a focus on social justice and development from St. Mary's University in her hometown, San Antonio, Texas. As an active advocate for experiential learning, Mariah has a deep appreciation for Apprentice Learning's mission to prepare youth for their futures and to nurture their dreams.

Jeffrey Warren

The creator of GrassrootsMapping.org and co-founder and Research Director for Public Lab, Jeffrey Warren designs mapping and civic science tools, and professionally flies balloons and kites. Notable software he has created include the vector-mapping framework Cartagen and orthorectification tool MapKnitter, as well as open spectral database and toolkit Spectral Workbench.

He served from 2015-2017 as Vice President of the board of the Open Source Hardware Association, is on the board of alternative education program Parts and Crafts in Somerville MA, and is an advocate free software, hardware, and data. He co-founded Vestal Design, a graphic/interaction design firm in 2004, and directed the Cut&Paste Labs project, a year-long series of workshops on open source tools and Web design in 2006-7 with Lima designer Diego Rotalde.

Jeff holds an MS from MIT and a BA in Architecture from Yale University, and spent much of that time working with artist/technologist Natalie Jeremijenko, building robotic dogs and stuff. To find out more, visit Unterbahn.com.

Christopher Lemmer Webber

Christopher Lemmer Webber is co-editor of the ActivityPub specification, co-founder of GNU MediaGoblin, and co-chair of the Social Community Group. They have had a long history in free software and free culture advocacy, working at organizations such as Creative Commons and the Participatory Culture Foundation and volunteering on many projects, including GNU projects such as Guile and Guix.

Sharon Woods

Sharon Woods is the General Counsel for the Defense Digital Service (DDS) at the US Department of Defense (DoD). The mission of DDS, whose Director reports to the Secretary of Defense, is to transform the way the DoD builds, buys, and deploys digital services and supporting technologies. Ms. Woods provides legal counsel and bureaucracy hacking expertise for a team of private sector technologists turned federal employees, working on high impact challenges at the Pentagon. Prior to joining DoD, she was an acquisition attorney for the US Department of the Navy, specializing in information technology acquisitions. She holds a law degree from the Washington College of Law at American University, and bachelors from Johns Hopkins University. She is an avid chess player and Star Trek fan, and relaxes to heavy metal.

Stefano Zacchiroli

Stefano Zacchiroli is Associate Professor of Computer Science at University Paris Diderot, on leave at Inria. His research interests span formal methods, software preservation, and free software engineering. He is co-founder and current CTO of the Software Heritage project. He is an official member of the Debian Project since 2001, where he was elected to serve as Debian Project Leader for 3 terms in a row over the period 2010-2013. He is a former Board Director of the Open Source Initiative (OSI) and recipient of the 2015 O'Reilly Open Source Award.

Alick Tao Zhao

Alick is a PhD student in Computer Engineering at Texas A&M University. He started to use GNU/Linux in 2009, and has been a free software contributor/advocate shortly after. He started to use LaTeX around 2010, and has presented about it on several occasions. He authors the beamerthemetamu package, and contributed to the ThuThesis package on CTAN. (Copyright © 2018 Tao Zhao. Photo licensed under CC BY 4.0.)

Steph Whited

Steph Whited is the communications director at Tor.

Gunnar Wolf

Gunnar is a free software enthusiast, user, advocate and developer, for over twenty years. He is a Debian Developer since 2003, and founder of several free software conferences and events in Mexico and Latin America. He is an academic at the Economics Research Institute, UNAM, and a professor at the Engineering Faculty, UNAM.

Marina Zhurakhinskaya

Marina Zhurakhinskaya is a Senior Outreach Specialist focused on free software 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; 449 people have so far participated in the program's paid remote internships. Prior to her diversity outreach role, Marina worked on community engagement and on software development for GNOME. She served as a board member at the GNOME Foundation, and at the Ada Initiative. Marina is a recipient of a Silver Stevie award in the "Women Helping Women" category, an O'Reilly Open Source Award, and 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.

Program Speakers