OSCON 2010 Keynotes

Mayor Sam Adams of Portland, Oregon was elected Mayor of Portland in May 2008. Prior to being elected Mayor, Adams served as a Commissioner on the City Council for four years earning a reputation as a “policy-driven” advocate for sustainability, public transit, transportation planning, the arts, and gay rights.

As a City Commissioner, Adams was Commissioner in Charge of Portland’s Office of Transportation and the Bureau of Environmental Services, and council liaison to, among others, the Regional Arts & Culture Council, the Association of Portland Neighborhood Business Districts, and Worksystems, Incorporated. In his role as Mayor, Adams is the lead Council member on Economic Development, Planning and Sustainability, Education, Arts and Culture, and Transportation.

During his first year as Mayor, Adams has launched a number of initiatives designed to showcase and provide support to Portland’s open source software community. Notably, Mayor Adams and City Council approved the nation’s first open source and open data resolution, which places open source software on equal footing with commercial software for purposes of City contracts. Also, Portland recently launched Civic Apps for Greater Portland, which is the nation’s first regional open data and open source app contest.

Mayor Adams brings renewed focus to developing and implementing plans that will not only keep Portland livable, vibrant, and economically healthy, but will also increase Portland’s status as a national leader. He is proud of Portland’s open source software community, and he wants to do his part to ensure Portland maintains its reputation as an international hub for open source innovation.

Chris DiBona is the Open Source and Public Sector 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 a technologist, writer and programmer based in California. He is the program chair for the O’Reilly Strata and Open Source Convention Conferences.

He was the founder and creator of the Expectnation conference management system, and a co-founder of the Pharmalicensing.com online intellectual property exchange.

A veteran of open source, Edd has contributed to various projects, such as Debian and GNOME, and created the DOAP Vocabulary for describing software projects.

Edd has written four books, including O’Reilly’s “Learning Rails”. He writes regularly on Google+ and on his blog at eddology.com.

Paul Fenwick is the managing director of Perl Training Australia, and has been teaching computer science for over a decade. He is an internationally acclaimed presenter at conferences and user-groups worldwide, where he is well-known for his humour and off-beat topics.

In his spare time, Paul’s interests include security, mycology, cycling, coffee, scuba diving, and lexically scoped user pragmata.

Dirk Hohndel 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 Services 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. Dirk holds a Diploma in Mathematics and Computer Science from the University of Würzburg, Germany. He lives in Portland, OR.

Marten Mickos builds global disruptive businesses. As CEO of MySQL AB for seven years, Mickos grew that company from a garage start-up to the second largest open source company in the world. After the acquisition by Sun Microsystems of MySQL AB for $1bn, he served as Senior Vice President of Sun’s Database Group.

Previously, Mickos held multi-national CEO and senior executive positions in his native Finland. He is a member of the board of RightScale, Mozilla Messaging and Electrosonic. Mickos holds a M.Sc. in technical physics from Helsinki University of Technology. In 2006 he received the Audemars Piguet “Changing Times Award: European Entrepreneur of the Year 2006” and the Nokia Foundation Award.

Marten’s tweets can be followed at www.twitter.com/martenmickos and Wikipedia provides more on information on him.

Lew Moorman is instrumental in driving strategic planning, product development and new business initiatives for Rackspace. He joined the company in April of 2000 and has served a variety of strategy and marketing roles throughout the company’s growth. Before joining Rackspace, Moorman held several positions at the management consulting firm McKinsey & Company, advising high technology clients on critical strategic issues.

As Rackspace Hosting’s Chief Strategy Officer, Lew Moorman drives strategic planning, product development and new business initiatives across the company. He also serves as President of Rackspace’s Cloud business, leading the company’s fastest growing business unit. He speaks frequently at industry events on cloud computing, hosting and the rapidly evolving world of IT.

Moorman received a B.A. from Duke University and a J.D. from Stanford Law School.

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 hosts conferences on technology topics, including the O’Reilly Open Source Convention, the Web 2.0 Summit, Strata: The Business of Data, and many others. O’Reilly’s Make: magazine and Maker Faire has been compared to the West Coast Computer Faire, which launched the personal computer revolution. Tim’s blog, 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 also a partner at O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures, O’Reilly’s early stage venture firm, and is on the board of Safari Books Online.

Jennifer Pahlka is the founder and executive director of a new non-profit, Code for America. Previously she was the co-chair and general manager of the Web 2.0 events for TechWeb, in partnership with O’Reilly. Prior to that, she chaired Enterprise 2.0, and before that was the director of the Game Group at CMP. During her tenure in the games business, she oversaw the dramatic growth of the Game Developers Conference (GDC) from 1995 to 2003 and launched a number of notable programs, including the Independent Games Festival, known as the Sundance of the game industry, and the Game Developers Choice Awards. Her roles included publisher of Game Developer magazine and Gamasutra.com, the premiere web site for game developers, and executive director of the International Game Developers Association (IGDA), an independent non-profit association serving game developers around the world. She has served on the advisory boards of the Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) and the GDC and held a board of directors position on the IGDA for three years. She is a graduate of Yale University.

Jean Paoli is General Manager, Interoperability Strategy at Microsoft, and one of the co-creators of the XML 1.0 standard with the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). He has long been a strong and passionate advocate of XML and open standards. Jean manages the Interoperability Strategy team that coordinates the technical interoperability activities across Microsoft.

Jean jump-started the XML activity in Microsoft. He created and managed the team that delivered msxml, the software that XML-enabled both Internet Explorer and the Windows operating system. Paoli helped architect Office XML support and was instrumental in creating the newest XML Office application, InfoPath.

Paoli has been a significant player in the worldwide XML community since 1985, when the technology was then known as SGML. Until 1996, when he joined Microsoft, Jean was based in Paris, where he worked in collaboration with European research institutes, including INRIA in France. He designed several systems for major corporations where SGML, in its approach of structuring and storing information, ensured the long life and easy exchangeability of the data across systems. His specialty has been building end-user markup editing tools. Jean participated in ISO standardization activities and was co-chair of the TC45 Ecma standard committee that standardized the Office Open XML Formats at Ecma International.

Jean is the recipient of multiple industry awards for his role in the XML industry, such as PC Magazine, Technical Excellence Award – co-creator of XML (1998), InfoWorld – Top Technology Innovators Award 2003, IDEAlliance – XML Cup (2004).

Stormy Peters currently works as the Executive Director of the GNOME Foundation. Stormy joined the GNOME Foundation from OpenLogic where she set up their OpenLogic Expert Community. Previously, Stormy worked at Hewlett-Packard (HP) where she founded and managed the Open Source Program Office that is responsible for HP’s open source strategy, policy and business practices. Stormy joined HP as a software engineer in the Unix Development Lab after graduating from Rice University with a B.A. in Computer Science.

Stormy is also an advisor for HFOSS, OpenSource World, IntraHealth Open and OpenLogic, as well as founder and president of Kids on Computers, a nonprofit organization setting up computer labs in developing countries.

Stormy is a frequent keynote speaker on business aspects of Open Source Software at major conferences such as the Open Source Business Conference and the O’Reilly conferences, as well as government organizations such as the United Nations and the European Union. Stormy is involved in GNOME and free and open source software because it is changing the world and the community is full of smart, passionate people!

Rob Pike is a Distinguished Engineer at Google, Inc. He works on distributed systems, data mining, programming languages, and software development tools. Before Google, Rob was a member of the Computing Sciences Research Center at Bell Labs, the lab that developed Unix. While there, he worked on computer graphics, user interfaces, languages, concurrent programming, and distributed systems. He was an architect of the Plan 9 and Inferno operating systems and is the co-author with Brian Kernighan of The Unix Programming Environment and The Practice of Programming. Other details of his life appear on line but vary in veracity.

Allison Randal is a Debian and Ubuntu developer, specializing in C and dynamic languages (Perl/Python/Ruby/etc). She is on the board of directors of the Python Software Foundation and The Perl Foundation, co-founder of the FLOSS Foundations group for open source leaders, founder and president of Onyx Neon Press, and Open Source Advisor to Canonical. Her current hobby is astrophysics.

David Recordon is the Senior Open Programs Manager at Facebook, where he leads open source and open standards initiatives. He joined Facebook from Six Apart where he focused on platform strategies, and previously worked at VeriSign in the emerging business group. David has played a pivotal role in the development and popularization of key social media technologies, such as OpenID and OAuth. He collaborated with Brad Fitzpatrick in the development of OpenID, which has since become the most popular decentralized single-sign-on protocol in the history of the Web. In 2007, he became the youngest recipient of the Google-O’Reilly Open Source Award.

Bryan Sivak was appointed by Mayor Adrian M. Fenty on October 13, 2009 to the Cabinet post of Chief Technology Officer (CTO) for the District of Columbia. As CTO, Sivak leads the Office of the Chief Technology Officer (OCTO), an organization of more than 500 staff that provides technology services and leadership for 86 agencies, 38,000 employees, residents, businesses and millions of visitors.

Sivak has over 15 years of experience in building software and internet technologies and organizations. In 2002, he founded and developed InQuira, Inc., a multi-national technology solutions company whose products are used at top private and public sector organizations including Bank of America, UK Ministry of Defence, Nokia and T-Mobile. During his tenure, he oversaw every aspect of the business from design and development of the product to sales, marketing and management activities relating to the overall execution of InQuira’s business plan and growth of the company. In 2005, he moved to London and opened the European office of the company, which he grew from zero to 30% of the company’s revenue in four years.

Prior to his work with InQira, Sivak founded Electric Knowledge LLC, which provided the world’s first Natural Language Search engine available on the web. The company’s customers included Bank of America and Fidelity Investments and several others. Electric Knowledge eventually merged with Answerfriend, which was the basis for the formation of InQuira.

Sivak holds a BS in Computer Science from the University of Chicago.

Jill Tarter holds the Bernard M. Oliver Chair for SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) and is Director of the Center for SETI Research at the SETI Institute in Mountain View, California. Tarter received her Bachelor of Engineering Physics Degree with Distinction from Cornell University and her Master’s Degree and a Ph.D. in Astronomy from the University of California, Berkeley. She served as Project Scientist for NASA’s SETI program, the High Resolution Microwave Survey, and has conducted numerous observational programs at radio observatories worldwide. Since the termination of funding for NASA’s SETI program in 1993, she has served in a leadership role to secure private funding to continue this exploratory science. Currently, she serves on the management board for the Allen Telescope Array, a joint project between the SETI Institute and the UC Berkeley Radio Astronomy Laboratory. When this innovative array of 350 6-m antennas begins operations at the UC’s Hat Creek Radio Observatory, it will simultaneously survey the radio universe for known and unexpected sources of astrophysical emissions, and speed up the search for radio emissions from other distant technologies by orders of magnitude.

Tarter’s work has brought her wide recognition in the scientific community, including the Lifetime Achievement Award from Women in Aerospace, two Public Service Medals from NASA, Chabot Observatory’s Person of the Year award (1997), Women of Achievement Award in the Science and Technology category by the Women’s Fund and the San Jose Mercury News (1998), and the Tesla Award of Technology at the Telluride Tech Festival (2001). She was elected an AAAS Fellow in 2002 and a California Academy of Sciences Fellow in 2003 (and CAS Scientific Trustee in 2007). In 2004 Time Magazine named her one of the Time 100 most influential people in the world, and in 2005 Tarter was awarded the Carl Sagan Prize for Science Popularization at Wonderfest, the biannual San Francisco Bay Area Festival of Science. In 2006 Tarter became a National Advisory Board member for the Center for Inquiry’s Office of Public Policy in Washington, DC. She is also a Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal (CSICOP) Fellow. Tarter was one of three Technology, Education, Design (TED) prize winners in 2009.

Tarter is deeply involved in the education of future citizens and scientists. In addition to her scientific leadership at NASA and SETI Institute, Tarter has been the Principal Investigator for two curriculum development projects funded by NSF, NASA, and others. The first, the Life in the Universe series, created 6 science teaching guides for grades 3-9 (published 1994-96). Her second project, Voyages Through Time, is an integrated high school science curriculum on the fundamental theme of evolution in six modules: Cosmic Evolution, Planetary Evolution, Origin of Life, Evolution of Life, Hominid Evolution and Evolution of Technology (published 2003). Tarter is a frequent speaker for science teacher meetings and at museums and science centers, bringing her commitment to science and education to both teachers and the public. Many people are now familiar with her work as portrayed by Jodie Foster in the movie Contact.

Simon Wardley, based in the UK, is a Researcher for the Leading Edge Forum and his focus is on the intersection of IT strategy and new technologies. Simon’s current research project is entitled A Lifecycle Approach to Cloud Computing.

Simon is a seasoned executive who has spent the last 15 years defining future IT strategies for companies in the FMCG, Retail and IT industries. From Canon’s early leadership in the cloud computing space in 2005 to Ubuntu’s recent dominance as the #1 Cloud operating system.

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. He is a passionate advocate and researcher in the fields of open source, commoditization, innovation, organizational structure and cybernetics.

Simon is a regular presenter at conferences worldwide.