GUADEC 2005 Speakers
Keynote Speakers
Miguel de Icaza
Miguel de Icaza is one of the foremost luminaries in the Linux development community and one of the world's most prominent advocates for Free Software. Miguel founded the GNOME project and is now Vice President of Developer Platforms for Novell. He was the first recipient of the prestigious MIT Innovator of the Year award in 1999. More recently, he received the 2005 STUG Award from USENIX in recognition of GNOME. Miguel has galvanized efforts to make Linux accessible and available to the average computer user, and continues to reach out globally by working with international organizations to introduce affordable technology alternatives, like Linux, to other nations. Miguel began the Mono project, an open source effort led by Novell to provide developers with open source tools for building cross-platform applications that can run on Linux, UNIX, and other platforms.
Dan Kusnetzky
Daniel Kusnetzky, Vice President of IDC's System Software research, is responsible for research and analysis on the worldwide market for operating environments, PC and device management software, mobile and wireless infrastructure software and the fabric of distributed computing software known as the virtual environment. He examines emerging technology trends, vendor strategies, research and development issues, and end-user integration requirements.
Mr. Kusnetzky regularly advises end users, independent trade organizations, the trade press, and vendors on relevant issues. His opinions have been published in publications such as Boston Globe, Business Week, Computer World, Communications Week, Information Week, InfoWorld, Investor’s Business Daily, Network World, New York Times, PC Week, PC World, San Jose Mercury News, Wall Street Journal, and others. He as appeared on CNN, MSNBC and CNBC.
Mark Shuttleworth
Mark studied finance and information technology at the University of Cape Town, and went on to found Thawte, a company specializing in digital certificates and Internet privacy. He sold Thawte to US company VeriSign in 1999, and founded HBD Venture Capital and the Shuttleworth Foundation. In April 2002, Mark flew in space, as a cosmonaut member of the crew of Soyuz mission TM34 to the International Space Station. Mark was born and raised in South Africa. He is currently living in London and recently started Canonical, Ltd., corporate parent of Ubuntu, on the the Isle of Man.
Nathan Wilson
Nathan has been at DreamWorks animation studio for 8 years where he is the project lead for software distribution and configuration management. His film credits include the Prince of Egypt, the Road to El Dorado, Spirit, Sinbad, SharkTale and the upcoming release Madagascar. Nathan was the technical lead for DreamWorks' transition to Linux and the GNOME desktop. He has been an advocate of open source tools and development since 1984.
Prior to working at DreamWorks, Nathan established Digital Domain's New Media department, worked on a multimedia development environment at Apple, was a founder of Teleos Research, and did robotics and AI research at SRI International. He has a masters in computer science from the University of California Santa Cruz and a masters in experimental psychology from the University of Pennsylvania. He is also an avid mycologist.
Other Speakers
Dr. Cornelia Boldyreff
Cornelia Boldyreff has over 25 years experience in Software Engineering and has been a Professor of Software Engineering at Lincoln since January 2004. She leads the Distributed Software Engineering group. Her research spans both distributed systems and software engineering. Dr. Boldyreff's recent research has been focused on collaborative software development within the Framework 5 GEneralised eNvironment for procEsS management in cooperative Software Engineering (GENESIS) project and the EPSRC Collaborative Determination, Elaboration and Evolution of Design Spaces (CoDEEDS), on collaborative learning via the Grid within the LeGE-WG project, and on system evolution within the Web Site Evolution project. Her group developed the Open Source Component Artefact Respository within GENESIS and developed support for collaborative design teams within CoDEEDS. Cornelia's current research in Open Source Software is within the the Framework 6 CALIBRE Coordination Action where Lincoln has developed and supports the project's collaboration infrastructure, the CWE.
James Bowes
James is currently taking his Masters in Computer Science from Dalhousie University in Novia Scotia, Canada. He started working on GNOME in 2004 with help from the GNOME Love folks. Now they won't let him go. James vows to one day get gnome-keyring-manager into the GNOME Desktop.
Horst Braeuner
Horst Braeuner is the Chief Technology Officer and Chief Information Officer for the City of Schwaebisch Hall in the German federal state of Baden-Württemberg. Mr. Braeuner holds a diploma in Public Adminstration. He is a Certified Security Engineer and project manager for the city network.
Prof. Bernd Brügge
Bernd Bruegge is university professor of computer science with a chair for Applied Software Engineering at the Technische Universität München and adjunct professor at Carnegie Mellon University. His research interests include software architectures for dynamic systems, agile software development processes, and software engineering education. He received a PhD in computer science from Carnegie Mellon University.
Matthias Clasen
Matthias Clasen has been working on GTK+ for almost 4 years, and has been responsible for most GTK+ releases since 2.4. He is also contributing to gtk-doc and GLib. Being a mathematician and logician by education, Matthias has been a member of the Desktop Team at Red Hat since April 2004. He usually spends the time away from the computer with his family.
Andrew Cowie
Andrew is a long time Unix and Linux user & advocate, but somewhat unusually was an infantry officer in the Canadian army, having graduated from Royal Military College with a degree in engineering physics. He saw service across North America and a peacekeeping tour in Bosnia. He later ran operations for an SMS company in Manhattan and was a part of recovering the company after the Sept 11 attacks.
Now based in Sydney, Andrew runs Operational Dynamics, a management consultancy helping clients worldwide with technology strategy, changes & upgrades, enterprise architecture, and performance improvement for mission critical systems & the people who run them. Andrew is a frequent conference speaker, presenting about increasing the level of professionalism in the operations world.
On the technical side, Andrew has extensive experience as a Unix/Linux sysadmin, Java developer, and has long been a GNOME enthusiast. Most recently, he has been contributing by testing the releases from the java-gnome language bindings project, packaging it for Gentoo, and writing applications using java-gnome, eclipse, and gcj.
Thomas Davies
Thomas Davies joined BBC Research and Development in 2000 after a PhD in Mathematics and a spell in IT and comms consultancy. He's been involved in video coding systems and compression algorithms since 2001, and began developing what became the Dirac system in 2003. He's currently leading algorithmic developments within Dirac.
Anna Dirks
Anna Dirks is a Free Software developer who works for Novell, where she focuses her efforts on usability and user interface design. She has recently conducted a large scale usability study which examined the issues that people migrating to a Linux desktop experience, and is eager to discuss her findings at GUADEC. In her spare time, she enjoys cooking and scuba diving.
Hubert Figuiere
Hubert Figuière had his first contact with UNIX in 1993, and has been using Linux daily since 1999. An avid photographer, when Hubert Figuière is not hacking, he is taking pictures. This hobby has lead to the enjoyment of working on digital photography support on UNIX.
Glynn Foster
Glynn currently lives in New Zealand as he likes to be a day ahead of most people. He has been working on GNOME with Sun Microsystems for over 4 years now. Glynn was previously a GNOME Foundation Board director, and helped organize GUADEC in Dublin. He is now a free man, but does not say "bro".
Nat Friedman
Nat Friedman is Novell vice president of research and development. He co-founded Ximian with Miguel de Icaza to create a GNOME-based desktop application suite that would meet the demands of large scale enterprise deployments. With the acquisition of Ximian by Novell, Nat is now a driving force behind Novell's Linux product and open source strategies. Both a hacker and an entrepreneur since childhood, Nat earned bachelor's degrees in Mathematics and in Computer Science at MIT. A former steering committee and board member of the GNOME Foundation, Nat now serves on its Advisory Board.
Bdale Garbee
Bdale currently serves as HP Linux CTO, helping to make sure Linux will work well on future HP systems. His background includes many years on both UNIX internals and embedded systems. He helped jump-start ports of Debian GNU/Linux to 5 architectures other than i386, and has served as Debian Project Leader. When Bdale isn't busy keeping his basement computer farm full of oddball systems running Linux working, he is often found tinkering with amateur radio, particularly building amateur satellites.
Matthew Garrett
Matthew Garrett is a PhD student in genetics at Cambridge University. Despite critical acclaim, his Livejournal was deemed "too controversial" to appear on Planet GNOME. In response, he wrote a piece of software designed to do nothing but break other people's software. Matthew believes that the word "vindictive" is underused in modern life, and would also like to assure people that he has a good memory for petty details.
Ralph Giles
Ralph Giles is a long time volunteer with the Xiph.org Foundation, a non-profit dedicated to the development of freely-implementable digital multimedia technology. Among other things he is the maintainer of the Theora video project and the closest thing Xiph has to a metadata expert.
Under another hat, he works on Ghostscript. So you can blame him for linux printing sucking so much. He lives in Vancouver, Canada.
Parag Goel
Parag manages the Evolution and OpenOffice.org projects at Novell. He is a board member of gnomebangalore.org, where he is working towards building a GNOME hacker community in India. He likes to work with the student community in India to create many more GNOME hackers.
He has worked as a Unix/Linux developer for about 6 years before taking up a management role. He still loves to do a little bit of programming whenever he gets a chance.
In his spare time, he loves to play with his 2 year old daughter Prisha.
Peter Goodall
Peter Goodall, Product Manager for Novell Linux desktop, has been working in the software field for nearly 10 years. He began his career as a Windows support technician - but by 2001 he had had enough of the Blue Screen of Death, and joined at Ximian as the company's sole support technician. In his current role at Novell, Pete works directly with customers, helping to ensure that NLD continues to evolve to meet their needs.
Jesus M. Gonzalez-Barahona
Jesus M. Gonzalez-Barahona teaches and researches in Universidad Rey Juan Carlos, Madrid (Spain). He started to work in the promotion of libre software in 1991. Since then, he has carried on several activities in this area, like organization of seminars and courses, and the participation in working groups on libre software, both at the Spanish and European level. Currently he collaborates with several libre software projects (including Debian) and associations, writes in several media about topics related to libre software, and consults for companies and public administrations on issues related to their strategy on these topics. His research interests include libre software engineering, and in particular quantitative measures of libre software development and distributed tools for collaboration in libre software projects. In this area, he has published several papers, and is participating in some international research projects. He is also one of the promoters of the idea of an European master program on libre software, and has specific interest in the education about libre software.
Martin Grimme
Martin Grimme was born in 1979 in Passau, south Germany, where his passion for programming started with 13 years on a C64. In autumn 1999, he started studying computer science in Passau. His work on the popular desktop calendar gDeskCal began in December 2002 and he's been working on gDesklets since April 2003. His language skills include fluent English, some Japanese, and a bit of Mandarin Chinese, for natural languages, and Pascal, C, C++, Java, and Python for programming languages
Carlos Guerreiro
Carlos Guerreiro leads a software R&D team at Nokia Multimedia working on software for Linux based mobile devices. He is responsible for the development of an Application Framework which relies heavily on GNOME components. Before joining Nokia in 2001 and moving to Helsinki he worked as a freelance developer in Portugal on various Computer Graphics and GIS software projects. Sometimes, if he behaves well his kids might let him hack a bit on CGEO.
Dr. Barbara Held
Dr Barbara Held is presently working as Detached National Expert at the European Commission where she is Programme Manager at the unit for Interchange of Data between Administrations (IDA). She is project officer of the European Interoperability Framework (EIF) and related projects. Barbara Held formerly served at the German Government’s Coordination and Advisory Board for IT in the Administration in the Federal Ministry of Interior (KBSt).
Fernando Herrera
Fernando Herrera has been an open source developer since 1996. In 1997 he led the Eurielec Linux project, the first Spanish Linux distribution. Since then he has contributed to projects (usually very little contributions) like XFree86, the first linux-usb project, some KDE programs, and CiberTienda. He has also written technical articles for some spanish magazines about Unix programing, GTK+, KDE, etc.
He got involved in GNOME in 2002, first doing random patches and bugfixing, and finally taking over the maintainership of our beloved bug-buddy and gconf-editor. Lately he is doing more patches, gnome-keyring work, and helping with GNOME-love days.
Currently he is working for Tecsidel and Onírica, a little startup he founded with various friends three years ago.
Edward Hervey
Edward Hervey lead the initial development of Pitivi as his final year project at the Epitech Engineering School in France. After sucesfully pushing the project towards its initial release he is now working at Fluendo maintaining Pitivi and pushing it towards commercial grade quality.
Katy Huang
Katy Huang is an Associate with McKinsey’s Business Technology Office in London, United Kingdom. She has a Master of Engineering in Chemical Engineering, Economics and Management from Keble College, Oxford University and an MBA from Harvard Business School (HBS).
Katy has an active interest in various open source initiatives. During her time at HBS, she did a Voluntary Consulting Organization project for the GNOME Foundation. She also organized an Open Source Visionary Roundtable at Cyberposium 2004, the largest MBA technology conference worldwide. During her BEA summer internship, she designed the JRockit Resource Center for ISVs, a self-certification process and the ”Powered by JRockit" logo.
In her spare time, Katy loves dancing, travelling and skiing.
Ed Hunter
After being told by his graduate professor at Berkley in 1984 that Sun Microsystems was a startup that "might make it " Ed took his masters in computer science and sought his fortunes with the young company. Not being one to stay settled in one place for too long, Ed has been working in various parts of Sun for the past twenty years, most notably the Solaris group, iPlanet and Java Enterprise systems groups. He is currently in the CTO office in the Architecture and Technology group and is a chair of the Web Services Architecture Review Committee, one of Sun's internal architecture committees.
Outside of work he spends his free time in the theater (behind the scenes, not on stage).
Greg Kelleher
Greg Kelleher IBM Corporate LinuxSenior Program Manager, WW Linux Client Strategy and Market Development A member of IBM's global Linux Desktop team shares some insight into the GNOME's place in the world.
During the past 15 years, Greg Kelleher has worked with customers and business partners in the technology business focused on operating systems, server software, network infrastructure, and messaging. Greg is a long time advocate of open standards and Linux. For the past five years, Greg has been working as part of the IBM Linux team bringing Linux into the enterprise with IBM's customers, Business Partners, and Linux distribution partners.
Ben Konrath
Ben is a GNU/Linux and GNOME enthusiast. In the past, he has packaged Eclipse for a major GNU/Linux distributor and has made contributions to the GNOME community with his work on the GNOME On-screen Keyboard. Ben is looking forward to making future contributions to GNOME.
Stefan Kost
Stefan had his first contact with computers with z80-based machines and then an AMIGA. He studied computer science at the University of Applied Science at Leipzig, Germany, then worked for three years at the university developing software for online libraries.
He has contributed to several open source projects in the last few years, such as gstreamer, gtk-doc, GTK+/glib (mostly docs), and libxml, as well as his own buzztard multimedia project.
Harish Krishnaswamy
Harish Krishnaswamy is an engineer from the Linux Desktop Group at Novell. He has been hacking on the Evolution calendar and the Evolution Groupwise Connector since 2004. Earlier, he was part of the Nsure UDDI project, an LDAP-based Open source Enterprise registry server. He lives in Bangalore, India and is an active member of the GNOME Bangalore community.
Scott Kveton
Scott Kveton is currently the Program Director (in addition to being a Scorpio) for the Oregon State University Open Source Lab. After working for several dot coms (amazon|pdaverticals|rulespace.com) Scott returned to OSU as the Senior Unix Systems Administrator. After completely re-engineering OSU's core application infrastructure around Linux and Open Source tools he set to work on consolidating all of the OSU's Open Source efforts under the OSL. The OSU Open Source Lab is tasked with strategic application development for OSU as well as providing hosting to large Open Source projects such as Debian, Gentoo, Freenode and Mozilla with 10 million unique visitors a day.
Robert Love
Robert Love, a kernel hacker at Novell, has a perfectly normal spleen. He is active in and passionate about both the GNOME and kernel communities. He writes books; please buy them.
Davyd Madeley
Davyd Madeley is the current GNOME Applets maintainer, a job which kind of got lumped on him one day. He is currently studying at the University of Western Australia for his Bachelors in degree Electronic Engineering and Computer Science.
While not as prolific as some hackers, he has his fingers in a number of pies, and has worked on Nautilus, GNOME-VFS, Yelp, GTK+, GNOME-Panel, Drivel and of course GNOME-Applets. As well as studying and working on GNOME, Davyd also works for a Perth based IT consulting company, which is being subtly converted to open source from the inside.
Davyd dreams one day of having the most kickarse desktop in existence, though is trying to personally avoid putting in the work to do it.
Marcus Mazoni
Marcos Vinicius Ferreira Mazoni is the President and CEO of Companhia de Informática do Paraná - CELEPAR, the IT corporation for the Brazilian state of Paraná, where he also serves as Secretary of State. Mr. Mazoni has a background in telecommunications and has a great deal of experience developing and deploying free software in a variety of settings. He was responsible for the world's first major public sector deployment of free software in Rio Grande do Sul. Mr. Mazoni is also the President of the Brazilian Association of Public Companies on Data Processing, with the objective of stimulating free software implementation in government companies throughout the country.
Mark McLoughlin
Mark McLoughlin is the author of Vino, GNOME's fledgeling "Remote Desktop" solution. He has been hacking on GNOME for nearly four years now and in that time has found himself working on bits like the panel, ORBit/bonobo, GConf, the session manager etc. Mark currently works for Red Hat on their Desktop team.
Jim McQuillan
Jim has been developing solutions for customers, utilizing Unix and networking since 1984 and has been involved with Linux since 1995. Jim has functioned as a Chief Technologist for more than 20 years and is responsible for the successful deployment of health care systems throughout the North Eastern United States. Jim is currently the President of the Michigan Unix Users Group and is a member of the X.org Foundation interim board of directors. Additionally, Jim is the founder and project leader of the Linux Terminal Server Project (LTSP), an open source project which has received world wide recognition as the standard method of deploying Thin clients in a GNU/Linux environment.
David Megías
Dr. David Megías holds a PhD in Computer Science and a Masters Engineering degree in Computer Science from the Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona. Since October 2001, he is a lecturer at the UOC (Universitat Oberta de Catalunya.) Since October 2002, he has served the co-director of the International Master Program in Free Software which is currently offered at the UOC.
His current interests include Free Software and Open Source Software, security and copyright protection schemes, and process control. He has also experience in European projects, such as the European Network of Excellence of Cryptology.
Timothy Ney
Tim Ney has served as the GNOME Foundation's executive director since 2001, having participated in the foundation's formation as a member of it's Advisory Board. Mr. Ney has a wealth of experience working for non-profit organizations from technology to arts and media. He served as the Executive Director of the Independent Feature Project, an association of independent filmmakers and has produced documentary and feature films, including one shot in Germany. Previously at the Free Software Foundation, Mr. Ney is very familiar with the free and open software community and business model. He has advised governments in Brazil, Chile and Korea.
Having joined the GNOME Foundation at less than one year from its inception, Mr. Ney has played a crucial role in growing and developing the Foundation in its formative years. He oversees the GNOME Foundation's legal, administrative, and fundraising efforts, as well as the organization of GUADEC, the GNOME Summit in Boston and Forum GNOME in Brasil.
Anne Østergaard
Anne Østergaard has a Law Degree from the University of Copenhagen and has worked in the Danish State Administration and in international organizations for a decade preparing all kinds of legislation.
Anne now uses her expertise to work for better regulations, transparancy and democracy in the digital society, user friendly applications, free competition, free and open standards, interoperability, no software patents and to advocate for the use of Free Software and the use of free licenses in all fields of public administration and in the information society.
Andrew Overholt
Andrew Overholt works for Red Hat Canada at their Toronto office. After a stint in their database group while on an internship during university, he now works in their Developer Suite group focusing mainly on Eclipse in Fedora. Andrew attended the University of Toronto and graduated from their Engineering Science program Electrical Engineering option. He is currently the XXX-Leedur of the Lady Godiva Memorial Bnad (sic).
Keith Packard
Keith Packard has been developing open source software since 1986, focusing on the X Window System since 1987, designing and implementing large parts of the current implementation. He is currently employed by HP as a member of the Cambridge Research Laboratory working on window system technologies for pervasive and mobile computing. He received a Usenix Lifetime Achievement award in 1999 and an Open Source Grand Master award in 2003.
Conrad Parker
Conrad Parker is a Senior Software Engineer at CSIRO Australia, working on free software and open standards related to Annodex. He has otherwise developed some useful free software projects including the Sweep sound editor, sane-v4l2 and tractorgen, and contributes regularly to projects such as Ogg, speex, theora and xine.
He is a former board member of the Australian Unix Users Group and a former president of the Sydney Linux Users Group.
The bowl contains a fish, and the fish contains a bowl. Let us now place some free software in the bowl, and the fish will be free.
François Pellegrini
François Pellegrini is currently associate professor at ENSEIRB, a french engineering school in computer science. He is vice-president of ABUL, the Association of Libre software Users of Bordeaux, which is involved in major libre software projects such as AbulEdu, an integrated libre software environment for schools ranging from pre-school to high-school, and such as the Libre Software Meeting. François Pellegrini has been a staff member and the president of the program committee of the first three issues of the LSM. At the time being, as a member of the Eurolinux Alliance, he is working against the legalization of software patents in Europe, in particular through lobbying actions at the European Parliament.
Yannick Pellet
Yannick Pellet leads a software R&D team at Nokia Multimedia working on software for Linux based mobile devices. Yannick is responsible for Application and Multimedia development. He has been involved in open source work for Multimedia embedded such as the DSPGateway.
Germán Poó Caamaño
German Poo-Caamano is one the coordinators of the Spanish team and author of gnome-nettool, founder of the Chilean Linux Conference (know as "Encuentro Linux"), co-founder of GNOME-Chile, an active member of GNOME-Hispano, and a Free Software and GNOME advocate.
Franz Preis
Franz Preis is Director Strategic Alliances at Novell Germany. In this role he accounts for the working relationship with hardware and software alliances such as HP. Preis holds an intermediate diploma for electrical science. He previously worked for Siemens AG, Breilmann GmbH and others and was temporary employed in South America before joining Novell in 2000.
Leslie Proctor
Leslie Proctor brings more than 20 years of experience in marketing, public relations and event planning.
Leslie worked as an Account Supervisor for Ogilvy Public Relations, working on national, consumer technology and technology accounts. Her efforts garnered significant worldwide media attention for her clients. Additionally, Leslie has worked as press liaison for the Sundance Film Festival and the Los Angeles Festival, among others.
Leslie the first PR/marketing professional dedicated to the open source software arena, and has performed those duties for a wide variety of organizations, including the GNOME Foundation, OSDL, Free Standards Group, X.org and LTSP. She has been a featured speaker at a number of open source conferences from Seoul to Istanbul and is a founding member of the Linux Greenhouse and Linux Client Summit.
Leslie has experience in creating special events and tours of all sizes and types for a variety of clients, including Target Stores, Mervyn’s, American Movie Classics and Disney. She has coordinated the trade show presence for the GNOME Foundation, Ad Systems and others. She has helped coordinate the GNOME User and Developer Forum (GUADEC) for the past four years and has assisted the coordination of the Global Linux Expo in Korea.
Federico Mena Quintero
Federico Mena-Quintero is one of the founders of the GNOME project, and a long-time contributor to GTK+. He works for Novell, Inc. in the Novell Linux Desktop team. His broken German is a paragon of incompleteness and good intentions.
Dr. Walter Rogg
Dr. Walter Rogg is the founding director of the Stuttgart Region Economic Development Corporation (WRS) since its inception in 1995. Prior to that he was the founding director at the Saxony Economic Development Corporation and served as its chief executive (CEO) for four years. After receiving a degree in Political Science and a doctorate in Social Sciences from the University of Tübingen he worked as a journalist and editor at the Swabian Newspaper in Leutkirch and with Southwest Broadcasting in Tübingen and Stuttgart. At this point Dr. Rogg joined the Baden-Württemberg Ministry of Commerce where he assumed responsibility for the Department of Press, Public Relations and Location Marketing as its director
Damien Sandras
Damien Sandras is the creator and developer of the GNOME Meeting VoIP and videoconferencing software. He is also part of the FOSDEM (Free and Open Source Developers' European Meeting) core team and is a long-time Free Software proponent. He is a strong believer in standards and in VoIP technologies.
He is currently working for Multitel, a research center specialized in Open Source, image processing, vocal technologies and telecommunications.
Damien holds a M. Sc. in computing science engineering from the Université Catholique de Louvain where he started to work on GNOME Meeting as a graduation thesis.
Hans-Ulrich Schmid
Hans-Ulrich Schmid is project manager ICT of the Stuttgart Region Economic Development Corporation (WRS) since 2001. He has created and coordinates the initiative "Open Source Region Stuttgart". With more than 40 events to date and several active websites, the initiative was most effective in making the IT-industry and IT-users in Germany more aware of their Open Source software options.
Bernhard Schuler
Bernhard Schuler studied law at the University of Tübingen. Mr. Schuler has served as the head of the Environmental Office of the County Council of the Zollern-Alb-Kreis and in the central office of the Ministry of Environment of the State of Baden-Württemberg in Stuttgart. He was head of the department of media and law and a company lawyer for the State Ministry of Baden-Württemberg in Stuttgart.
In 1993, Bernhard Schuler was elected as Lord Mayor of Leonberg, a country town (Große Kreisstadt) with about 45,000 inhabitants in the county of Böblingen. In 2001, he was re-elected as Lord Mayor. In addition to his duties as Lord Mayor he also has other functions as follows: he is vice president of the administration council of the Bodenseewasserversorgung, a public water supply company. He also is vice president of the Governing Board of the Städtetag Baden-Württemberg, which is a representation assembly of the different towns and cities in Baden-Württemberg.
In 2002, Leonberg ran tests for the use of open source in the town government. In 2003, Mayor Schuler decided to introduce Open Office to the entire internal town administration of Leonberg. Since that time, the town employees are involved in replacing step-by-step the proprietary software with open source.
Bernhard Schuler lives in Leonberg. He is married and has got two sons.
Michael Schulz
Michael Schulz is the Technical Marketing Manager for Linux at HP in Europe, the Middle East and Africa. He's responsible for running technical programs and also helping customers understand the values and benefits of open source software. Michael joined Hewlett Packard in 2000 as a pre-sales consultant for Linux in the Competency Center for Enterprise Computing. Before this role he held different roles as Senior Consultant working with Top500 customers on implementing different technologies in their IT infrastructures. In addition Michael works with the various Open Source projects in EMEA to be the liason into HP and helps with both financial and hardware support.
Danilo Segan
Danilo Segan was born on March 29th, 1983 in Belgrade, Serbia and Montenegro. Currently 3rd year student of mathematics at the University of Belgrade, he got heavily involved in the GNOME community early in 2003, when he joined as a Serbian translation coordinator. He currently maintains or co-maintains two important pieces of software used for i18n in GNOME: intltool and xml2po. He's a big fan of Free Software.
Thomas Vander Stichele
Thomas Vander Stichele is Fluendo's project lead on the Flumotion Streaming Server. He has been an active contributor to GStreamer and GNOME for many years and did one of the first commercial deployments of GStreamer-based software while working as the CTO for one of Belgium's biggest private radio stations.
Anuradha Suraparaju
Anuradha Suraparaju graduated in Electronics and Communications Engineering from JNTU, Hyderabad, India. She has developed image processing software for the Indian Space Research Organisation and transport optimisation and vehicle tracking software for a commercial U.S./Australian software company. She joined BBC Research and Development in 2003 and has developed Free Software supporting the standardisation work of BBC R&D and is currently managing the Dirac video codec software.
Owen Taylor
Owen Taylor has been a core contributor to GTK+ project for over 8 years, with accomplishments such as coordinating the 2.0, 2.2, and 2.4 releases, redesigning the GDK layer to support multiple platforms, and designing and maintaining the Pango text layout library. With an educational background in Physics, Owen has been working on GTK+ and GNOME at Red Hat since 1998.
Wim Taymans
Wim Taymans was one of the two initial developers of the GStreamer framework and is the lead designer of the current 0.9/0.10 version. Having worked for many years with high availability systems in Belgian banking he now works fulltime on GStreamer for Fluendo making sure GStreamer is rock solid.
Falko Tesch
Being with Sun Microsystems (Star Division) for more than 7 years, Falko worked in various fields with and for StarOffice/OpenOffice.org.
Starting his experience with StarWriter 2.0 for OS/2 back in 1994 Falko became a steady user of all succeeding versions of StarOffice. In 1997 he joined the support team of Star Division (the creator of StarOffice). He eventually became one of the initial members of StarDivision's first marketing team. In 2000, when Sun Microsystems acquired Star Division, Falko moved into the emerging Product Management Team. With the team becoming the User Experience Team of today, he specialised in internationalisation and presentation issues.
Jon Trowbridge
Jon Trowbridge is a longtime GNOME hacker and free software advocate. He is the technical lead of the Beagle project and is currently employed by Novell.
Thomas Uhl
Thomas Uhl graduated from the University of Heidelberg as a medical computer scientist. While still a student, he published two books on Linux. One of these, Linux - Vom PC zur Workstation (Linux Universe - Springer Heidelberg), was translated into several languages. In 1994, he founded Thinking Objects Software GmbH, based in Stuttgart. Thomas Uhl became chairman of the Linux Working Group of Guide Share Europe (GSE) in November 2001. He was appointed to the board of directors of Topalis AG at the beginning of 2003. Thomas Uhl is a founding member of the association GNOME Deutschland e.V. and the Linux Solution Group (LiSoG).
Luis Villa
While an undergraduate computer science and political science major at Duke University, Luis worked as a a volunteer with the Mozilla project's QA team. After graduation, Luis was hired to lead and organize the QA process for Ximian's Evolution PIM. After the sucessful release of Evolution, Luis began working on the GNOME desktop's 2.0 release, successfully planning and executing a QA plan that tied together professional QA from Sun Microsystems, Inc. and QA volunteers from all over the globe. The eventual result of the plan was the GNOME 2.0 desktop, widely considered the most stable and bug-free release GNOME has yet had. Since then, Luis has lead teams at Ximian and Novell to deliver commercial Linux desktop products based on GNOME 2.2 and 2.6, while trying to remain active in GNOME via the board and bugsquad.
Thomas Wabner
Thomas Wabner studied computer science, and worked for five years, at the University of Applied Science in Leipzig, Germany, and now works for Siemens as a software engineer. He contributes to open source projects, such as Buzztard. Thomas also publishes articles in PC-Professionell magazine, and is an active vocalist.
Colin Walters
Colin Walters is a member of the desktop team at Red Hat. He has been an active member of the free software community for several years, contributing to projects such as GNOME, GNU Emacs, SELinux, and Debian. At Red Hat now, he concentrates on Fedora development, where among other things, he has been maintaining most of the desktop multimedia software, assisting with SELinux integration, and working on the GNOME printing infrastructure.
Matthias Warkus
Matthias Warkus is a 23-year-old student of philosophy in Marburg, Germany. He has contributed to GNOME as a translator for several years, and he has worked as a freelance translator, proofreader and reviser for O'Reilly Germany and Galileo Press. Articles by him on GNOME and other subjects have been published in different online and print media. In 2002, he wrote a comprehensive GNOME developer's manual, the translation of which has been endorsed by the GNOME Foundation as the Official GNOME 2 Developer's Manual.
Jeff Waugh
Jeff Waugh is the head beekeeper of the GNOME Release Team, a former Director of the GNOME Foundation Board and former president of the Sydney Linux User's Group. By day, he works on Ubuntu. By night, he steals dreams from small children and sells their distilled energy to large multi-national corporations to fund his Free Software habit. He still does not say "mate".
Fernando San Martin Woerner
Fernando is a System Engineer and Software Developer at Jefe de Informática de Galilea S.A, and maintainer of Gestor, an accountability project for GNOME in Chile. He is a member of the GNOME Chile community and a GNOME Foundation member since 2004 He is also a lecturer at Universidad Catolica del Maule, teaching GNOME and other linux stuff.
