LibrePlanet:Conference/2013/Speakers

Plenary Speakers

Karen Sandler, GNOME Foundation

Karen M. Sandler is the Executive Director of the GNOME Foundation. She is known for her advocacy for free software, particularly for software safety on medical devices. Prior to joining GNOME, she was General Counsel of the Software Freedom Law Center. Karen continues to do pro bono legal work with SFLC and serves as an officer of the Software Freedom Conservancy. She is also pro bono General Counsel of QuestionCopyright.org and an advisor to the Ada Initiative. Before joining SFLC, Karen worked as an associate in the corporate departments of Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher LLP in New York and Clifford Chance in New York and London. Karen received her law degree from Columbia Law School in 2000, where she was a James Kent Scholar and co-founder of the Columbia Science and Technology Law Review. Karen received her bachelors degree in engineering from The Cooper Union. She is a recipient of the O'Reilly Open Source Award.

Richard Stallman, Free Software Foundation

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.

Richard pioneered the concept of copyleft, and is the main author of the GNU General Public License, the most widely used free software license.

Richard graduated from Harvard in 1974 with a BA in physics. During his college years, he also worked as a staff hacker at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Lab, learning operating system development by doing it. He wrote the first extensible Emacs text editor there in 1975. He also developed the AI technique of dependency-directed backtracking, also known as truth maintenance. In January 1984 he resigned from MIT to start the GNU project.

John Sullivan, Free Software Foundation

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.

Presenters

Denis Carikli, Replicant

Alison Chaiken, http://she-devel.com

ginger coons, Libre Graphics magazine

Joshua Gay, Free Software Foundation

Joshua works with Donald in our licensing and compliance team, and has twice previously worked with the FSF as a campaigns manager. He is a programmer and activist whose interests revolve around technology, government, education, and computer user-freedom.

Bradley Kuhn

Bassam Kurdali, Blender

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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 open production and free software technique. Raised in Damascus, Bassam trained in the United States as an electrical and software engineer.

Kӱra, Free Software Foundation

Kira is on the campaigns team working primarily on Defective by Design. Kira is a student at Hampshire College concentrating on the intersection of feminism with free software and free culture. They view the importance of free software through a lens of social justice as a way to work against ableism, racism, classism, and (hetero/cis)sexism. Kira also serves on Students for Free Culture's Board of Directors as their webmaster and technology director.

Francois Marier, Mozilla

Francois is a software engineer on the Mozilla Identity team where he fights for the free Web by building alternatives to centralized proprietary silos. A long time Debian developer, Francois contributes to several free software projects. He is also a licensing volunteer for the FSF and leads the development of Libravatar.org . You can follow him on Identi.ca (@fmarier) or on his ikiwiki blog: http://feeding.cloud.geek.NZ .

Deb Nicholson, Open Invention Network

Deb Nicholson works at the intersection of technology and social justice. She is the Community Outreach Director at the Open Invention Network and the Community Manager at Media Goblin. She also serves on the board at Open Hatch, a non-profit dedicated to matching prospective free software contributors with communities, tools and education and is an Advisor to The Ada Initiative, an organization supporting women in open technology and culture. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Libby Reinish, Free Software Foundation

Libby's job is to inspire people to use free software and put pressure on companies that violate user freedom. She is a justice organizer who believes in the power of appropriate technology to transform communities. Before joining the FSF, Libby worked to build community radio stations with the Prometheus Radio Project and advocated for better media policy at Free Press.

Donald Robertson, III, Free Software Foundation

Donald is our copyright administrator in addition to doing licensing and compliance work with Joshua. Donald is a graduate of the New England School of Law and interned for the Hon. William G. Young at the federal district courthouse in Boston. Donald was previously the managing editor of the New England Law Review and wrote and published An Open Definition: Derivative Works of Software and the Free and Open Source Movement, 42 New.

Rubén Rodriguez, Trisquel

Zak Rogoff, Free Software Foundation

Zak is an activist and programmer. He wants to get people to think about software's potential to make our society more just and democratic. His degree is in robotics engineering, but most of his paid work has been as a campaigns manager.

When he's not working or commuting to work, Zak likes to wax philosophical about video games, cook veg food, play with animals and ride bikes with his friends.

Italo Vignoli, The Document Foundation

Italo Vignoli is one of the founders and a member of the Board of Directors of The Document Foundation, with responsibility for marketing and communication. He is also an international spokesman for the project. From September 2004 to the end of 2010 he has been a member of the OpenOffice marketing project. He is also a member of Assoli, the Italian association of Free Software advocates, and a strenuous supporter of software freedom.

Christopher Webber, GNU MediaGoblin