Changing Education... Open Content, Open Hardware, Open Curricula

Cliff Schmidt is the Executive Director of Literacy Bridge (www.literacybridge.org), a nonprofit organization empowering children and adults with affordable tools for knowledge sharing and literacy learning.

Prior to founding Literacy Bridge, Cliff ran a successful software consulting business that developed technical, business strategy, and legal policy solutions for both nonprofit and for-profit organizations throughout Europe, the Middle East, and North America. His expertise included intellectual property issues, nonprofit governance, privacy policies, export controls, and community development. He also served many nonprofit open source organizations, such as The Apache Software Foundation (ASF), the Eclipse Foundation, and the Free Software Foundation, including positions on the board of directors and as the Vice President of Legal Affairs for the ASF.

In the 12 years prior to his consulting work, Cliff worked as a software developer and industry standards representative for Microsoft, as the manager of open source programs for BEA Systems, and as a nuclear engineer and submarine officer for the US Navy.

• Web site

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.

• Web site

Mark is founder of Ubuntu, a popular free operating system for desktops and servers. Ubuntu is beautiful, easy to use and precision engineered for consumers and large-scale enterprise deployments alike. It has been adopted by an amazing number of people, from families that just want a PC that works for safe web surfing, to heavy industry, massive cloud computing environments, supercomputers, several armies, national police forces, banks and schools in the Amazon.

Mark leads product strategy and design at Canonical, which sells commercial support for Ubuntu, mainly to large enterprises and governments who deploy it professionally. Canonical also builds many of the unique elements of Ubuntu for desktop, cloud and server deployments. Mark champions design-driven development and has a focus on quality and cadence in the engineering work done at Canonical.

After graduating from the University of Cape Town with a degree in finance and information technology, Mark founded Thawte, a company specialising in digital certificates and cryptography. When Thawte was acquired in 1999 by VeriSign, and he founded HBD, an investment company, and setup the Shuttleworth Foundation, which funds innovative change in society by supporting Fellows and investing in their projects. He moved to London in 2001, and began preparing for the First African in Space mission, training in Star City, Russia, and Khazakstan. In April 2002 he flew in space, as a cosmonaut member of the crew of Soyuz mission TM34 to the International Space Station. After a tour of schools in South Africa promoting science and mathematics for aspiring astronauts he started work on Ubuntu. Today he lives on the lovely Isle of Man along with 12 ducks, the equally lovely Claire, two black bitches and the occasional itinerant sheep.

• Web site

Derek Keats is Executive Director of Information & Communication Services at the University of the Western Cape (UWC) in South Africa, and has a mandate to use information and communications technologies to strengthen UWC as a national institution of higher education in a global context. He is a biologist with strong interests in using technology to improve teaching and learning, to enable higher education in the developing world to respond to the challenges of globalization, and to promote sustainable development while maintaining the quality of the environment.

• Web site

Dr. Kurshan has spent her career committed to using technology to improve children’s learning. She has founded several successful companies focused on technology and education. In her new position as the Executive Director of Curriki, she plans to build a global community that will provide the best open source curricula just a click away. Earlier in her career, Dr. Kurshan developed the first children’s software products for Microsoft – Creative Writer and Fine Artist and also created award-winning products for McGraw-Hill, Apple, CCC (Pearson) and others. As a professor, she helped students research the impact of technology on learning. Dr. Kurshan also publishes articles based on personal research exploring women’s attitudes toward technology, how kids use computers, and new ways of learning through understanding. She has been quoted in many influential journals and serves as a reviewer and advisor to research projects for the National Science Foundation and other government and business groups.

Currently, Dr. Kurshan serves on the boards of WorldSage, a for-profit higher education system to address education for the 21st Century and Interschola, a company that helps education clients turn idle assets into cash by selling the goods via online auctions, as well as several education technology companies, including Fablevision. Among numerous honors, Dr. Kurshan received the Education Academic Society’s Making It Happen Award and the Highest Leaf Award from the Women’s Venture Fund. She is listed in Who’s Who in Technology Today.

Dr. Kurshan received her Ed.D. and M.S. from Virginia Tech University and her B.S. from Newcomb College at Tulane University.

• Web site

Dr. David Wiley is Associate Professor of Instructional Psychology and Technology at Brigham Young University, Founder of the Open High School of Utah, and Chief Openness Officer of Flat World Knowledge. He was formerly Associate Professor of Instructional Technology at Utah State University and Director of the Center for Open and Sustainable Learning, a Nonresident Fellow at the Center for Internet and Society at Stanford Law School, a Visiting Scholar at the Open University of the Netherlands, and is a recipient of the US National Science Foundation’s CAREER grant. He is the founder of OpenContent, coining the term “open content” and releasing the first open license for content in 1998. His career is dedicated to increasing access to educational opportunity for everyone around the world.

• Web site

A board member at CollabNet and the Mozilla Foundation, but mostly now a free agent on all things open source.