Schedule: Keynote sessions

Chris DiBona is the Open Source Programs Manager for Mountain View, Ca based Google, Inc. His job includes managing open source related compliance and outreach programs for the company. More information about Google’s open source program can be found at http://code.google.com/opensource

Before joining Google, Mr. DiBona was an editor/author for the hugely popular online website slashdot.org and he is an internationally known advocate of open source software and related methodologies. He co-edited the award winning essay compilations “Open Sources” and “Open Sources 2.0” for O’Reilly and writes for a great number of publications. He was briefly the Linux guy on TechTV, starred in Floss Weekly and speaks on a variety of open source issues internationally.

Edd Dumbill is co-chair of the O’Reilly Open Source Convention, and leads the design and implementation of conference software at O’Reilly.

Gunnar Hellekson Lead Architect, Red Hat Government

Gunnar is the Lead Architect for Red Hat Government, where he and his team work with systems integrators and government agencies to encourage the use of open source software in government. He’s a Red Hat Certified Engineer, and the author of all kinds of whitepapers and lengthy emails like “New Approaches to Multilevel Security with Red Hat Enterprise Linux.” You can see a fat version of him talking about some of this on the Open Source in Government site.

Prior to joining Red Hat, he worked as a developer, systems administrator, and IT director for a series of internet businesses. He’s also been a business and IT consultant to not-for-profit organizations in New York City. During that time, he spearheaded the reform of safety regulations for New York State’s electrical utilities following the tragic death of Jodie Lane.

When he’s not spreading the Good News about open source, he’s wishing he had a dog.

As Corporate Vice President of the External Research Division of Microsoft Research, Tony Hey is responsible for the worldwide external research and technical computing strategy across Microsoft Corp. He leads the company’s efforts to build long-term public-private partnerships with global scientific and engineering communities, spanning broad reach and in-depth engagements with academic and research institutions, related government agencies and industry partners. His responsibilities also include working with internal Microsoft groups to build future technologies and products that will transform computing for scientific and engineering research. Hey also oversees Microsoft Research’s efforts to enhance the quality of higher education around the world.

Before joining Microsoft, Hey served as director of the U.K.’s e-Science Initiative, managing the government’s efforts to provide scientists and researchers with access to key computing technologies. Before leading this initiative, Hey worked as head of the School of Electronics and Computer Science at the University of Southampton, where he helped build the department into one of the pre-eminent computer science research institutions in England.

Hey is a fellow of the U.K.’s Royal Academy of Engineering and a member of the European Union’s Information Society Technology Advisory Group. He also has served on several national committees in the U.K., including committees of the U.K. Department of Trade and Industry and the Office of Science and Technology.

For his service to science, Hey received the award of Commander of the Order of the British Empire in the 2005 U.K. New Year’s Honours List.

Hey is a graduate of Oxford University, with both an undergraduate degree in physics and a doctorate in theoretical physics.

Dirk has been an active developer and contributor in the Linux space since its earliest days. Among other roles, he worked as Chief Technology Officer of SuSE and as Vice President of The XFree86 Project, Inc. Dirk joined Intel in 2001. He works in the Software and Solutions Group and focuses on the technology direction of Intel’s Open Source Technology Center and guides Intel’s engagements in open source. He is an active contributor in many open source projects and organizations, various program committees and advisory boards.

Clay is Director of Sunlight Labs. Prior joining Sunlight, Clay was one of the four founders of Blue State Digital, the progressive left’s premier technology and online strategy firm. This firm, which was born out of the Howard Dean campaign, was also responsible for Barack Obama’s Web presence. At Blue State Digital, Clay was responsible for developing the organization’s brand and building its initial client roster. He also had a hand at building some of the company’s early technical tools. Before joining Blue State, Johnson was the lead programmer for Dean for America in 2004, overseeing the development of grassroots tools like GetLocal, DeanLink and Project Commons. Prior to entering politics, Johnson was a technologist at Ask Jeeves (now Ask.com) where he helped to develop the company’s Web syndication product. He also started the first Internet Knowledge Exchange, KnowPost.com, and worked as an entrepreneur-in-residence at a Venture Capital firm, but still claims that he learned the most from his first job—as a waiter at Waffle House in Atlanta, Georgia.

Michael Lopp is a Silicon Valley-based engineering manager. When he’s not worryig about staying relevant, he writes about pens, bridges, people, and werewolves at the popular weblog, Rands in Repose. Michael wrote a book called “Managing Humans” which explains that while you might be rewarded for what you produce, you will only be successful because of your people.

Michael surfs in Northern California whenever he can because staying sane is a full time gig.

Erik Meijer is an accomplished programming-language designer who has worked on a wide range of languages, including Haskell, Mondrian, X#, Cω, C#, and Visual Basic. He runs the Cloud Languages Team in the Business Platform Division at Microsoft, where his primary focus has been to remove the impedance mismatch between databases and programming languages in the context of the Cloud. One of the fruits of these efforts is LINQ, which not only adds a native querying syntax to .NET languages, such as C# and Visual Basic, but also allows developers to query data sources other than tables, such as objects or XML. Most recently, Erik has been working on “Democratizing the Cloud” and preaching the virtues of fundamentalist functional programming in the new age of concurrency and many-core. Some people might recognize him from his brief stint as the “Head in the Box” on Microsoft VBTV. These days, you can regularly watch Erik’s interviews on the “Expert-to-Expert” and “Going Deep” series on Channel 9.

Tim O’Reilly is the founder and CEO of O’Reilly Media, Inc., thought by many to be the best computer book publisher in the world. O’Reilly Media also publishes online through the O’Reilly Network and hosts conferences on technology topics, including the O’Reilly Open Source Convention, the O’Reilly Emerging Technology Conference, and the Web 2.0 Conference. Tim’s blog, the O’Reilly Radar “watches the alpha geeks” to determine emerging technology trends, and serves as a platform for advocacy about issues of importance to the technical community. Tim is on the boards of MySQL, CollabNet, Safari Books Online, Wesabe, and ValuesOfN, and is a partner in O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures.

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.

Kirrily Robert has been involved in open source software since 1993, as a Linux user, Perl developer, and community leader and advocate. She is best known for her work in the Perl community, where she has been a CPAN contributor, author, speaker, and trainer. She has worked extensively in the Open Source and Internet industries since the mid 90s, as a developer, sysadmin, and community manager. She has presented and given tutorials at many conferences, including OSCON, Yet Another Perl Conference, linux.conf.au, the Open Source Developer’s Conference (Australia), and has also spoken to numerous user groups and at BarCamps and unconferences.

Kirrily has recently been working on several projects related to women in Open Source and other geek communities. In 2008 she launched the Geek Feminism Wiki, and more recently she has been contributing to and writing about two large open source projects with majority female developers: the Dreamwidth journalling platform and the Organization for Transformative Works’ “Archive Of Our Own.” Her interests also include free culture, open data, and technology for social justice.

Kirrily currently resides in San Francisco, where she works for Metaweb Technologies as Community Director for Freebase.com, an open, creative-commons-licensed, API-accessible, structured database of the world’s information.

Karl Schroeder is the author of ten science fiction novels and numerous short stories, as well as The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Publishing Science Fiction, which he wrote with Cory Doctorow. He divides his time between writing fiction and consulting in the area of Strategic Foresight (technology foresight, chiefly in scenario design).

Mr. Schroeder lives in Toronto with his wife and daughter.

Mark Surman is executive director of the Mozilla Foundation. His job is to help people who want to make the internet better. Before Mozilla, Mark was a fellow at the Shuttleworth Foundation and founding director of telecentre.org. He lives in Toronto, where he spends a fair bit of time banging a drum about all things open. Mark blogs at: http://commonspace.wordpress.com.

As a geneticist with a love of mathematics and a fascination in economics, Simon has always found himself dealing with complex systems, whether it’s in behavioural patterns, environmental risks of chemical pollution, developing novel computer systems or managing companies. These days Simon works as the Software Services Manager for Canonical, helping define future cloud computing strategies for Ubuntu. He is a passionate advocate and researcher in the fields of open source, commoditisation, innovation and cybernetics . He is also fond of ducks. As he says “they’re fowl but not through choice”.

Jim Zemlin, formerly executive director of the Free Standards Group, is the executive director of the Linux Foundation. Zemlin previously served as vice president of marketing for Covalent Technologies, the leader in products and services for the Apache web server. Prior to that, he was a member of the founding management team of Corio, a leading enterprise application service provider that had a successful initial public offering in July 2000. Widely quoted in the press on open source and commercial software trends, Zemlin has also been a keynote speaker at industry and financial conferences including Gartner’s Open Source Conference, Linux World and OSCON. Zemlin is an adviser on open source strategy to various companies and governmental groups including Hyperic, Zmanda and the Chinese Open Source Promotion Union.