Art of Community Lightning Talks

Dawn M. Foster is currently the Director of Developer Relations at Jive Software, a collaboration software company in Portland, OR. She has more than 12 years of experience in technology and software with expertise in open source software, web 2.0, social media, blogging, and community building.

Dawn is the author of Fast Wonder: An Open Culture Blog and is currently working on a book for O’Reilly Media about the Art of Community. She organizes a monthly Portland BarCamp Meetup event for local technology employees, is an organizer for the Portland BarCamp event, and helps organize Ignite Portland. She is a co-founder and Chair of Legion of Tech, a non profit organization focused on providing free events by and for the Portland Technology Community.

Previously, Dawn worked at Compiere, Intel, and a Midwestern manufacturing company in positions ranging from Unix system administrator to market researcher to open source strategist. She holds a bachelor’s degree in computer science from Kent State University and a master’s degree in business administration from Ashland University.

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Danese Cooper has a 15-year history in the software industry and has long been an advocate for transparent development methodologies. Cooper worked for six years at Sun Microsystems, Inc. on the inception and growth of the various open source projects sponsored by Sun (including OpenOffice.org, java.net and blogs.sun.com). She was Sun’s chief open source evangelist and founded Sun’s Open Source Programs Office. She has unique experience implementing open source projects from within a large proprietary company. She joined the OSI Board in December 2001 and currently serves as Secretary & Treasurer. In March 2005, Cooper joined Intel to advise on open source projects, investment and support. She speaks internationally on open source and licensing issues.

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Allison Randal is a Program Chair for O’Reilly’s Open Source Convention. Her first geek career was as a research linguist in eastern Africa. But eventually her love of coding drew her away from natural languages to artificial ones. Allison is the architect of Parrot (a virtual machine for dynamic languages), on the board of directors of The Perl Foundation, and founder and president of Onyx Neon.

Audrey is a Ruby developer, community organizer, and crafty geek based in Portland, OR. She works for Elevated Rails. She is also a board member for Legion of Tech, an umbrella organization for several local technology events, and an active member of the Portland Ruby Brigade, and of Dorkbot PDX.

Her other activities include knitting, photography, and geeking out on the meaning of location in a highly-networked world.

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Sulamita Garcia is Latin America Open Source Strategist at Intel. She is responsible for creating and maintaining a comprehensive LAR Linux strategy that takes into account all aspects of the Linux environment, including key elements around the community, government, standards, and vendors. She holds major Linux certifications: LPI level 2 and RHCE. After several years ahead Linuxchix Brazil, she was elected co-coordinator of Linuxchix International. She has worked for several years in Linux integration, security and development, and wrote several technical papers about high availability, load balancing and Slackware.

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Biography notes on Nnenna Nwakanma

Nnenna Nwakanma holds triple Bachelors Degrees in Social Sciences, English and History, and Masters Degrees in International Relations and Law. She has been one of the major Civil Society actors in the World Summit on the Information Society.

A key participant in the Global Information Society, she advises on the African Information Society Initiative (AISI) and is also an accomplished Civil Society trainer on major Information Society issues.

Nnenna Nwakanma has been part of the founding members of various ICT initiatives in Africa – The African Civil Society on the Information Society (ACSIS), the African Network of Information Society Actors – ANISA, and the Free Software and Open Source Foundation for Africa – FOSSFA.

Nnenna has lived in in Nigeria, Cameroon, Togo, Ghana and Ivory Coast. She speaks English, French and local West African languages

Nnenna is running an ICT consultancy firm, nnenna.org. She is one of the Directors of Open Source Intiative, Chair of FOSSFA council and Vice President of the Digital Solidarity Fund. Check on what Nnenna is doing on www.nnenna.org www.fossfa.net www.opensource.org www.dsf-fsn.org

And contact her on nnenna@nnenna.org nnenna@opensource.org

PHOTO A certain article online has a picture to it. http://www.mujeresenred.net/africa/spip.php?article21

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Stormy Peters joins OpenLogic from Hewlett-Packard (HP) where she founded and managed the Open Source Program Office. As an early adopter of open source, Stormy was responsible for HP’s open source strategy, policy and business practices. She was also a founding member of HP’s Linux Division.

Stormy is a frequent keynote speaker on business aspects of open source software at major conferences such as the Open Source Business Conference and the O’Reilly conferences. She has addressed the United Nations, European Union and various U.S. state governments on open source software.

Stormy joined HP ten years ago as a software engineer in the Unix Development Lab after graduating from Rice University with a B.A. in Computer Science.

Stormy is involved in open source software because it is changing the world and the community is full of smart, passionate people!

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Zaheda Bhorat is an Open Source and Open Standards advocate in her current role at Google. In the early days of open source she managed the OpenOffice.org project and community and took the project from inception to a 1.0 release. With her experience of building communities of contributers, she created one of the first open source marketing projects with a global team of passionate volunteers to promote both open source and launch the office suite. Zaheda has a passion for applying open source processes to more than code, and has engaged conributors in localisation communities, education and adoption for Free and Open Source software, particularly in the developing/emerging markets. Zaheda has over 15 years software industry experience, holds a BSc in Computer Science and now lives in California.