Reinventing How America Votes Through Open Source Solutions

Deborah Bryant is Public Sector Communities Manager at Oregon State University’s Open Source Lab (OSU OSL), where she advocates and creates collaboration between public, private and academic concerns in pursuit of the successful adoption of open source technology and models. She leads OSL’s production of the annual Government Open Source Conference (GOSCON), the preeminent event and platform for collaboration amongst government IT management at all levels of government.

Deborah’s interest in open source and its implication for government is reflected in her civic involvement; she serves as a Board Director for DemocracyLab.org; on the Board of Advisors for the Open Source Digital Voting Foundation (OSDV.org) ; on the Oregon Statewide Distance Learning Advisory Council. Government transparency is a personal passion. She is also an elected official, serving as Commissioner in a local special services district.

Deborah’s government background started with the Oregon State Legislature during the Year 2000 legislative session and continued at Oregon’s Department of Administrative Services for five years where she served as Manager of Enterprise Strategic Planning and Policy in the Office of the State CIO and also as Deputy State CIO. During the Year 2002 legislative session she represented the State’s Executive Branch position on proposed Open Source legislation and earned a reputation for an open, constructive approach to working with diverse and often conflicting views.

Prior to entering the public sector, Deborah held management positions in several emerging technology areas; parallel and high-speed computing and commercialized internet and web applications in the 80s, commercial wide area networks, advanced telecommunications and data/voice convergence in the 90s.

About OSU OSL: The Open Source Lab is home to growing, high- impact open source communities. Its world-class hosting services power the Linux operating system, Apache Web server, Drupal content management system and over 50 other leading open source software projects now changing the face of computing.

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Joseph Lorenzo Hall recently graduated with his Ph.D. from the University of California, Berkeley School of Information working under information law professors Pamela Samuelson and Deirdre Mulligan. Hall started a postdoctoral research position at the Center for Information Technology Policy (CITP) at Princeton University this past Fall. Hall’s academic focus is on mechanisms that promote transparency, as core functions of our government become digital. His Ph.D. thesis used electronic voting as a critical case study in digital transparency. Mr. Hall holds master’s degrees in astrophysics and information systems from UC Berkeley and is a founding member of the National Science Foundation CyberTrust ACCURATE Center (A Center for Correct, Usable, Reliable, Auditable and Transparent Elections). He served as a voting technology, policy and law analyst on the teams that conducted the California Secretary of State’s Top-To-Bottom Review of voting systems and Project EVEREST, Ohio’s review of its voting systems.

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Greg is a Co-Executive Director of the OSDV Foundation. He brings 24+ years experience in the tech sector, divided between software development and technology business development. He is also a (non practicing) IP lawyer involved in Internet & technology public policy. His technical experience is in user interface, distributed computing, and digital security. He has significant product management/marketing experience in large firms and start-ups. He’s spent the past 7 years in VC sector advising start-up ventures. Greg’s interests in voting technology and digital democracy have become his pursuits.

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