Open Source / Open Government

Danese Cooper has an 18-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. After four years advising Intel on Open Source Strategies, in February 2009, Cooper joined REvolution Computing to advise on open source projects, investment and support. She speaks internationally on open source and licensing issues.

• Web site

Greg Elin created the Sunlight Labs at the Sunlight Foundation in 2006 and now serves as the organization’s Chief Data Architect, where he researches and evangelizes new ways to share heterogeneous, incomplete government data. The Sunlight Foundation is a Washington DC-based non-partisan grant making and programming foundation committed to helping citizens, bloggers and journalists be their own best congressional watchdogs, by improving access to existing information and digitizing new information, and by creating new tools and Web sites to enable all of us to collaborate in fostering greater transparency. Greg Elin is also the creator of Fotonotes, an open-source image annotation technology, and has attended Etech for many years and learned a great deal.

• Web site

Co-founder and board member of various non-profits and for-profits in the tech sector, most specifically focused on Open Source: CollabNet, the Apache Software Foundation, and Mozilla. Now helping various collaboration and Open Source software initiatives in DC.

• Web site

Silona is currently focused on creating the League of Technical Voters. Before this she started her own company, ElecTech that created specialized software for political campaigns, and ran a web consulting business where she was one of the first people to create websites for hire, and to successfully optimize her clients’ websites for usability and top search engine ranking. She has also worked in the gaming industry, creating high visibility web presences, content management systems, and large database back-end integrations. Silona volunteers for the ACLU and EFF on technology-based civil liberties issues, and has lobbied on various issues. The combination of her involvement in political activism, educational activism, psychometrics for gaming communities, lobbyist work, netizen activities and web design make her uniquely suited to envision the framework that will make the LoTV system all possible.

• Web site

Michael Tiemann wrote the GNU C++ compiler (1987), started the world’s first open source copmany (Cygnus Support, 1989), raised the first venture capital for an open source company (1996), joined the OSI Board (2003) and became President of the OSI in 2005.

He is also VP of Open Source Affairs at Red Hat.

• Web site