Speakers
Jump to: Registration | Schedule | Press | Travel | FAQ
 Achal Prabhala is a researcher and writer based in Bangalore, India, whose research work concerns access to knowledge and to medicine. Recent projects include an initiative to collect and publicly archive literary journals from Kenya, Nigeria, India, South Africa, the Middle East and the US; a report to the Indian Government for an overhaul of country's copyright act; essays on piracy and the legal commons; a commission to evaluate Botswana's patent law and medicines registration system; and an evaluatory framework for assessing copyright law and access to knowledge. Read more... |
 Benjamin Mako Hill is a Debian hacker and author of the Debian GNU/Linux 3.1 Bible and "The Official Ubuntu Book". He works in the Computing Culture group of the MIT Media Lab, and is on the boards of Software Freedom International (the organization that organizes Software Freedom Day) and the Ubuntu Foundation. Hill was on the board of Software in the Public Interest from March 2003 until July 2006, serving as the organisation's vice-president from August 2004. Read more... |
|
Brian Behlendorf (Born March 30, 1973) is an technologist, computer programmer, and an important figure in the open-source software movement. He was a primary developer of the Apache Web server, the most popular web server software on the Internet, and a founding member of the Apache Group, which later became the Apache Software Foundation. Behlendorf served as President of the Foundation for three years. |
 Erin McKean is Chief Consulting Editor, American Dictionaries, for Oxford University Press, and the editor of VERBATIM: The Language Quarterly. She was the editor in chief of the The New Oxford American Dictionary, 2e. Her other books about words include Weird and Wonderful Words, More Weird and Wonderful Words, Totally Weird and Wonderful Words, and That's Amore. |
 Florence Nibart-Devouard serves as one of the elected representatives to the Board since june 2004, and is the current Chair of the Board. She was elected by the Board to this position on October 21, 2006. Florence was born in Versailles (France). She grew up in Grenoble, and has been living since then in several French cities, as well as Antwerpen in Belgium and Tempe in Arizona. Read more... |
|
Heather Ford is the Executive Director of iCommons and is based in Johannesburg. iCommons is a relatively new organisation, incubated by Creative Commons, with the goal of bringing together the various 'streams' of the global commons movement. Once a year, iCommons hosts the iCommons Summit (last year in Rio http://www.icommons.org/isummit/, this year in Dubrovnik) where we bring together people who practice commons-based peer production in the areas of free software, open access, Creative Commons, access to knowledge and free culture communities around the world. |
 Isaac Mao is a venture capitalist, blogger, software architect, entrepreneur and researcher in learning and social technology. He divides his time between research, social works, business and technology. He is now Vice President of United Capital Investment Group and Director to Social Brain Foundation, advisor to Global Voices Online and several web 2.0 businesses. |
 Jimmy Wales is an Internet entrepreneur and wiki enthusiast, and co-founder of the Wikipedia project. Jimmy was born in Huntsville, Alabama in 1966, and is a graduate of Auburn University and the University of Alabama. He worked as Research Director at Chicago Options Associates, a futures and options trading firm then located in Chicago. In the mid-1990s he started Bomis, a search portal focusing on aspects of pop culture, one of the first users of the freely licensed data of the Open Directory Project. |
 Joichi Ito is a co-founder and board member of Digital Garage and the CEO of Neoteny. He is the Chairman of Creative Commons. He is on the board of Technorati and helps run Technorati Japan. He is the Chairman of Six Apart Japan the weblog software company. He is the board of a number of non-profit organizations including The Mozilla Foundation, The Internet Corporation For Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) and WITNESS. |
 Lawrence Liang is a legal researcher and an Indian lawyer of Chinese descent, based in the city of Bangalore, who is known for his legal campaigns on issues of public concern. He is a founder of the Alternate Law Forum, and as of 2006 has emerged as a prominent spokesperson against concepts like "intellectual property". Read more... |
 Melissa Hagemann manages the Open Access Initiative within the Information Program of the Open Society Institute (OSI)/Soros foundations. Since convening the meeting in December 2001 which led to the development of the Budapest Open Access Initiative, she has been active within the Open Access movement which advocates for the free online availability of peer-reviewed literature. |
|
Raoul Weiler located in Belgium in Antwerp. During the last years my activities focus primarily on sustainability issues as a planetary challenge, the use of low-cost ICT in schools and communities as a contribution to the eradication of illiteracy and bridging the digital gap, and facilitating the access of all to the oncoming worldwide information and knowledge societies, as well as on sustainable economy questions. |
 Rebecca MacKinnon is currently an Assistant Professor at the University of Hong Kong's Journalism and Media Studies Centre, where she teaches "new media", examining the intersection between the Internet and journalism. At the Berkman Center, MacKinnon and her colleague Ethan Zuckerman co-founded Global Voices Online, an award-winning international citizen media community, with which she remains involved in management. |
 Teemu Leinonen leads the Learning Environments research group of the Media Lab, University of Art and Design Helsinki. The group is involved in research, design and development of New Media tools, as well as their use and application, in the field of learning. The research group has coordinated research and development projects funded by The European Commission (IST), National Technology Agency of Finland (TEKES), the Nordic Council of Ministers and the UNESCO. |
 Wayne Mackintosh is the Education Specialist for eLearning and ICT policy at the Commonwealth of Learning based in Vancouver (www.col.org). He is an advocate of free software and led a Government funded project called the eLearning XHTML editor (eXe) when still living in New Zealand. Prior to joining COL, Wayne was the founding Director of the Centre for Flexible and Distance Learning at the University of Auckland and before working in New Zealand worked for the University of South Africa. |
 Joris Komen was curator of birds at the National Museum of Namibia. He has spent considerable time and energy promoting the relevance of the Internet and other technologies to African museums and schools within and around Nambia. He is a champion of incentive-reward mechanisms to provide ICTs to schools in Namibia by way of a biodiversity-oriented school competition called Insect@thon. Komen played a critical role in launching and driving SchoolNet Namibia. |
 Angela Beesley, chair of Wikimedia's Advisory Board, is a co-founder of Wikia and a former member of Wikimedia's Board of Trustees. Angela has been involved with Wikipedia since February 2003. Angela has contributed a chapter on managing wikis to the book Wikis: Tools for information Work and Collaboration. |
 Ward Cunningham is the Director of Committer Community Development of the Eclipse Foundation, an innovative open source collaboration among large and small commercial interests focused specifically on software development. Ward co-founded the consultancy, Cunningham & Cunningham, Inc., has served as an Architect in Microsoft's Patterns & Practices Group, the Director of R&D at Wyatt Software and as Principle Engineer in the Tektronix Computer Research Laboratory. |
 Ravikant is a historian, writer and translator, working with Sarai programme of the CSDS, Delhi on issues such as Language, Technolgy and popular culture. He has also been associated with Indlinux, the platform of volunteers responsible for localising free software desktops like Gnome and .kde. He has Co-edited three books:Translating Partition, Katha New Delhi, 2001. Deewan-e-sarai 01: media vimarsh://hindi janpad(Vani prakashan, 2003), and Deewan-e-sarai 01: Shaharnaama(2005). |