Danese Cooper
Open Source Diva, Wikimedia Foundation and Open Source Initiative

Danese Cooper has an 20-year history in the software industry and has long been an advocate for transparent development methodologies. She currently serves as the CTO at Wikimedia Foundation. Previously Cooper worked for six years at Sun Microsystems, Inc. on the inception and growth of the various open source projects sponsored by Sun (including Netbeans, GridEngine, JXTA, Jini, OpenSolaris, 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 has served on the OSI Board since December 2001 has been a Member of the Apache Software Foundation since 2007. Cooper joined Wikimedia Foundation in February 2010, after four years advising Intel on Open Source Strategies and a year working on startup REvolution Computing. She speaks internationally on open source and licensing issues.