Fellows

Amanda is the CEO of Trustable Software, www.trustable.io an open initiative and not for profit company, looking at risk and transparency in Software through the determination of state of the art practices in engineering, legal and compliance to create auditable processes and appropriate insurance for open source.

Amanda is also a European Representative of the defensive patent pool, the Open Invention Network; a Director of OpenUK; joint-organiser of the UK Open Source Awards, www.opensourceawards.org, having been a judge of the awards in 2014 and 2015; a member of the OASIS Open Projects’ Advisory Council (open source and open standards); and Chair of the Open Source (OS) and Intellectual Property (IP) Advisory Group of the United Nations Technology Innovation Labs.

She was General Counsel of Canonical, setting up the global legal team and running this for 5 years and has worked in a variety of sectors, ranging from Fashion to Fintech, across EMEA, US, AsiaPac and Emerging Markets, based out of the UK and Amsterdam.

As well as many years of structuring and negotiating a multitude of deals, her roles have included contribution to, and leadership of, a number of multi-organisational collaborative projects and open source initiatives. She has expertise in open source software, governance, IP, compliance audits, policies and processes as well as commercialisation and contracting around open source.  Amanda was a member of the Open Stack Drafting Committee during its set up in 2012.

Amanda is a regular international speaker and author covering technology, collaboration and legal issues, an Executive Editor and co-Founder of the International Free and Open Source Law Review, Fellow of Open Forum Academy and Editor of the book, Free and Open Source Software: Law, Policy and Practice, 2nd Edition, to be published by Oxford University Press in 2020.

Andrew Katz is recognised as a leader in the field of open source licensing in the UK. He was involved in the drafting of the UK Creative Commons Licence, and has contributed to the GPL Version 3 project. He has spoken at events including BCS conferences, and LinuxWorld Expo, and has sat on panel discussions involving open source software with other experts such as Alan Cox, John “maddog” Hall, Mark Shuttleworth and Glyn Moody. His articles and commentary have appeared widely in the press, including The Telegraph, Financial Times, Microscopeand the Register. He has lectured in the UK, Finland and the Netherlands.  He is a founder editor and contributor to the International Free and Open Source Software Law Review.

The independent legal directory Chambers and Partners (2007 edition) says:

The “entrepreneurial” and “immensely experienced” Andrew Katz is an “easy guy to get along with” and a “technology enthusiast.” His expertise includes computer and telecommunications technology and he has a particular focus on open source licensing issues.

Andrew Updegrove is a co-founder and partner of the Boston law firm of Gesmer Updegrove LLP. Since 1988 he has served as legal counsel to over 135 standards development organizations and open source foundations, most of which he has helped structure and launch. He has been retained by many of the largest technology companies in the world to assist them in forming such organizations.

 He has also written and spoken extensively on the topics of consortia, standard setting and open source software, has given testimony to the United States Department of Justice, Federal Trade Commission, and Congressional and State legislative committees on the same topics, and has filed “friend of the court” briefs on a pro bono basis with the Federal Circuit Court, Supreme Court, and Federal Trade Commission in support of standards development in leading standards-related litigation. In 2002, he launched ConsortiumInfo.org, a website intended to be the most detailed and comprehensive resource on the Internet on the topics of consortia and standard setting, as well as Standards Today, a bi-monthly eJournal of news, ideas and analysis in the standard setting and open source areas with over 7,000 subscribers around the world. In 2005, he launched the Standards Blog. ConsortiumInfo.org serves over 10 million page views annually.

He has been a member of the United States Standards Strategy revision committee, and received the President’s Award for Journalism from American National Standards Institute (ANSI) in 2005. His current and past Board service includes the Boards of Directors of ANSI, the Linux Foundation and the Free Standards Group, and the Boards of Advisors of HL7 and Open Source for America. He is a graduate of Yale University and the Cornell University Law School.

Anthony D. Williams is a best-selling author, speaker and consultant who helps organizations harness the power of collaborative innovation in business, government and society. He is the co-author of the groundbreaking bestseller Wikinomics and the much-anticipated follow-up MacroWikinomics: Rebooting Business and the World.

Anthony is currently a visiting fellow with the Munk School of Global Affairs at the University of Toronto and a senior fellow for innovation with the Lisbon Council in Brussels. Among other appointments, he is also an advisor to GovLoop, the world’s largest social network for government innovators and a founding fellow of the OpenForum Academy, a global research initiative focused on understanding the impact of open standards and open source on business and society.

Brian Kahin is currently Fellow at the Center for Digital Business at MIT’s Sloan School of Management and Senior Fellow at the Computer & Communications Industry Association. He was founding director of the Harvard Information Infrastructure Project (1989-1997) and subsequently served as Senior Policy Analyst at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (1997-2000). He has taught at the Harvard Kennedy School, the University of Maryland, the University of Michigan, and the University of Colorado. He has edited ten books on ICT-related issues, most recently Advancing Knowledge and the Knowledge Economy (with Dominique Foray). He is a graduate of Harvard College and Harvard Law School.

Cameron Neylon is Professor of Research Communication at the Centre for Culture and Technology at Curtin University and Director of Knowledge Unlatched Research. He is interested in how to make the internet more effective as a tool for scholarship. He writes and speaks regularly on scholarly communication, the design of web based tools for research, and the need for policy and cultural change within and around the research community. A one-time biomedical scientist who has moved into the humanities via Open Access and Open Data advocacy, his research and broader work focuses on how we can make the institutions that support research sustainable and fit for purpose for the 21st century and how the advent of new communications technology is a help (and in some cases a hindrance) for this.

My name is Carlo Daffara, founder of NodeWeaver, a company implementing open source-based private cloud platforms; formerly head of research and development at Conecta, a consulting firm specializing in open source systems. Italian member of the European Working Group on Libre Software and co-coordinator of the working group on SMEs of the EU ICT task force. Since 1999, I worked as evaluator for IST programme submissions in the field of component-based software engineering, GRIDs and international cooperation. Since 2000, member of the Internet Society (ISOC) working group on public software as part of the group committee, and contributed to the open source part of the article presented by ISOC to Unesco on global trends for universal access to information resources. Coordinator of the open source platforms technical area of the IEEE technical committee on scalable computing, and coordinator of the Open Source competence centre of the DiTeDi digital district. My main research field is the economics of IT, and the adoption processes of OSS infrastructures in public administrations and private companies.

Carlo Piana is a lawyer by training and a Free Software advocate. A qualified attorney in Italy, Piana has been practicing IT law since 1995, focusing his practice on software, technology, standardization, data protection and digital liberties in general, and serves as external General Counsel to the Free Software Foundation Europe (“FSFE”).

Piana is a member of the Editorial Committee of the International Free and Open Source Software Law Review (“IFOSS L. rev.”) and is member of the board of directors of the Protocol Freedom Information Foundation.

Dr. Catharina Maracke is an associate professor at the Graduate School for Media and Governance, Shonan Fujisawa Campus, at Keio University and a faculty associate at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University. Her current work and research interests include intellectual property and policy, the interaction between law and new media, and the role of Universities in the development of Internet policies.

Catharina graduated from the University of Kiel and the Hamburg Court of Appeal, Germany, with the first and second state examination. While studying, she obtained a scholarship from the Max-Planck-Institute for Intellectual Property, Competition and Tax Law in Munich to write her PhD thesis on the history of the German Copyright Act of 1965. As international Director at Creative Commons she has overseen the international license porting projects. Catharina has served as a board member for iCommons and the OpenCourseWare Consortium and as a member of WEF Global Agenda Council on the Future of the Intellectual Property System. She is admitted to the bar in Germany.

Chris Taggart is the CEO and co-founder of OpenCorporates: The Open Database Of the Corporate World, which has worked with the open data community to build a database of over 25 million companies, all open data. Originally a journalist and later magazine publisher, he now works full time in the field of open data, and is on the UK government’s Local Public Data Panel, and Mayor of London’s Digital Advisory Board.

Dirk has 35 years of Internet engineering experience. He has worked for the Joint Research Centre of the European Commission, the United Nations, telecommunications firms, national satellite&space agencies and founded several startups. He participated in international standards bodies, such as the IETF and W3C on metadata, GIS, PKI, Security, Architecture and Internet standards.

He helped create, and was the  president of the Apache Software Foundation, has worked on the Apache webserver since the early days of the NCSA that helped define what is now commonly referred to as `open source’ software.

During the startup-years – Dirk build the initial engineering team at Covalent, as VP of Engineering and was instrumental in the first two rounds of venture capital funding in San Francisco. Dirk-Willem was one of the Founders of Asemantics, a leader in Enterprise Information Integration; which helped make the Semantic Web, and standards such as RDF, a reality. He then initiated Joost.com, a peer to peer based video and build and lead the team that created the worlds first instant play P2P viewer and a back office system with user profile driven advert targeting and payment settlements. He was the Chief Technical Architect at the BBC where has helped shape the audience facing delivery platform Forge in the time for the Olympics and where he helped make open standards, information security and compliance a core enabler for business processes. He currently works on several medical and privacy intensive security projects with a heavy emphasis on Architecture and Governance. When not at work, he loves to sail, hang out at the makerspaceleiden.nl or play with his lego.

Dr Andrew A. Adams is a multi-disciplinary researcher looking at social, legal, and ethical (SLE) aspects of computer and communications technologies.

He is Deputy Director of the CBIE at Meiji University in Tokyo. He is currently under-employed as a contract lecturer and research fellow.

He previously engaged in research in computational logic and computer mathematics.

Dr. Björn Lundell has been researching the Open Source phenomenon for a number of years. He co-lead a work package in the EU FP6 CALIBRE project (2004-2006) and was the technical manager in the industrial (ITEA) research project COSI (2005-2008), involving analysis of the adoption of Open Source practices within companies. He is the project leader for the Open Source Action (OSA)-project (2008-2010), and the project leader for a Nordic (NordForsk) OSS Researchers Network (2009-2012). His research is reported in over 60 publications in a variety of international journals and conferences. He is a founding member of the IFIP Working Group 2.13 on Open Source Software, and the founding chair of Open Source Sweden, an industry association established by Swedish Open Source companies. He was the organiser of the Fifth International Conference of Open Source Systems (OSS 2009), which was held in Skövde, Sweden.

Daniel M German is an Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Victoria. His duties are divided along two main areas:

Research into software engineering. In particular, software evolution, open source and intellectual property. He also explores computational photography in his spare time.

Teaching several courses at Uvic, primarily Database Systems, Social and Professional Issues, Media Applications and more recently Intro to Software Engineering.

Efthymios Altsitsiadis is a Doctoral Assistant / Funds specialist in the Research Group Marketing, Faculty of Business and Economics at Katholieke Universiteit Leuven. He previously was a Project / Quality Manager at Charite and an External Consultant on EU funds at Q-PLAN NORTH GREECE LTD.

Jochen Friedrich is a member of IBM’s Technical Relations Europe team which is part of the IBM standards and open source strategy organization. He is responsible for coordinating IBM’s software standardisation activities in Europe with a special focus on telecommunications, interoperability and services as well as on open standards and the European standardisation framework.

Jochen Friedrich started his career in IBM at the Scientific Centre Heidelberg in 1998. Since then he has held several lead positions in Research and Development. He worked as operations manager for the IBM European Voice Technology Development team and was responsible for Business Development and Project Coordination for Voice Research projects in Europe. Jochen has broad experience in driving new, emerging technologies, managing multi-national and multi-company teams and setting up multi-company projects in the European Union research framework.

In addition to his IBM responsibilities, Jochen is a member of a regional board of the German Association of Electronics, Electrical Engineering and Information Technologies (VDE), he was a foundational Board member of the Enterprise Interoperability Centre (EIC) and holds lead roles in European industry associations, most notably in the OpenForum Europe (OFE) where he chairs the standardisation task force, in DigitalEurope (DE) and in the German ICT association BITKOM.

Jochen lives with his wife and two children in Heidelberg, Germany. He holds a PhD in Humanities from Heidelberg University (Germany), spent an academic year at Reading University (United Kingdom) and holds a degree as Certified Telematics Engineer.

Jun Iio, Ph.D., is a Professor at Chuo University. He graduated from the University of Tokyo (BEng, MEng) in 1994, entered in Mitsubishi Research Institute, Inc., Tokyo, Japan. After working as a Research Director of Mitsubishi Research Institute, Inc., he joined in the faculty of Chuo University, 2013.

He has worked on many R&D projects regarding OSS, such as the FLOSS-JP/Asia developer survey, the Open School Platform project, and several OSS-based system development projects in ASEAN countries. In addition, he was the key member of the project that built an OSS curriculum and educational guidelines for Japanese universities.

Laura DeNardis is a full-time professor of Communication Studies. She is a globally recognized Internet governance scholar whose research addresses Internet policy and technical design issues related to communication rights and freedom of expression online. DeNardis comes from Yale Law School, where she held a joint research and teaching appointment and served as Executive Director of the Yale Information Society Project. Her books include Opening Standards: The Global Politics of Interoperability (MIT Press 2011); Protocol Politics: The Globalization of Internet Governance (MIT Press 2009); Information Technology in Theory (Thompson 2007); and a forthcoming Yale University Press book on Global Internet Governance. DeNardis earned a PhD in Science and Technology Studies from Virginia Tech, an MEng from Cornell University, an AB in Engineering Science from Dartmouth College, and was awarded a postdoctoral fellowship from Yale Law School.

Maha Shaikh is an Assistant Professor at Warwick Business School. Her area of research involves open source, open development, and open innovation. Her PhD focused on the dynamics of learning and organizing in open source collectives. Until recently Maha was a post-doc at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) in the Information Systems and Innovation Group. Her research has concentrated on how, why, and under what conditions the public and private sector decides to adopt open source software and/or process.

Maha holds a PhD in Information Systems from the LSE. Her past affiliations include the University of Limerick, where she worked on a number of projects, including the OPAALS project, with Professor Brian Fitzgerald at the Lero Research Centre. At the LSE she was also a Research Officer to Professor Leslie Willcocks, and was studying the relationship of open source to outsourcing, open innovation and open business models. Maha’s co-authored book on the secondary adoption of open source by the public sector, published by the MIT Press was recently published (November 2011). This is co-authored with Professor Brian Fitzgerald, Professor Jay Kesan, Dr Barbara Russo, and Professor Giancarlo Succi. She has published, and presented at all the main information systems conferences like ECIS, ICIS, AMCIS, HICSS, and her own special interest group, the OSS conference.

She maintains a personal blog on WordPress.

Dr. Mathieu Paapst LLM works as a lecturer and researcher at the department of legal theory, section Law and IT of the University of Groningen. He is interested in the legal, ethical and sociological aspects of the information society. He graduated with a Master’s degree on Law and ICT and he received his PhD on a multidisciplinary research project (Law, Public Administration, Innovation and Technology Management) regarding open source and open standards policy resistance in IT procurement.  He has been project coordinator and/or researcher for several Dutch research projects (e.g. on standardization policy compliance for the Dutch ministry of Economic Affairs, on semantic interoperability standards for the ministry of Justice, and on e-Casemanagement, an international research for the judicial organizations).  He is chief editor of the Ars Aequi Law book on Dutch Internetlaw, and editor of the academic journal “Tijdschrift voor Internetrecht”. He is a board member of the Internet Society (ISOC-nl), and a member of the Dutch governments Commission of procurement experts.

Trained as a software engineer and specialising in process management, Dr. Paul J. Adams has worked in both academia and industry as a researcher and project manager, covering a variety of Free Software-related topics. In 2009 he worked for Zea Partners conducting research on behalf of the commercial community involved in Zope and Plone development and services. Prior to this he worked as a research and project manager for Sirius Corporation in the UK. Paul graduated in 2004 as a Software Engineer, from the University of Durham, UK. His subsequent doctorate was conducted between 2005 and 2009 from the University of Lincoln. Paul was awarded Chartered IT Professional status, in 2008 and is a full professional member of the British Computer Society (for whom he is co-founder and former chairman of the Open Source Specialist Group), IEEE as well as of KDE e.V. and the Fellowship of the FSFE.

Dr Richard Danbury is a Research Associate in the Faculty of Law at the University of Cambridge. He has a background in law and broadcast journalism. He is currently the research associate on the AHRC- funded study: “Appraising Potential Legal Responses to Threats to the Production of News in the Digital Environment”.

He practised, briefly, as a criminal barrister at 9-12 Bell Yard, before spending a decade at the BBC, working mainly in TV news and current affairs, including extended periods on Newsnight and Panorama. He was the Deputy Editor of the BBC’s 2010 Prime Ministerial Debate.

Dr Danbury was a fellow of Oxford University’s Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, before embarking on a masters and a doctorate which studied the position of institutional journalism and journalists in English law, both from a doctrinal and theoretical point of view.

He continues to be interested both in the legal position of the institutional media, and in questions of comparative freedom of speech, particularly in an on-line environment, both in respect of the institutional media and more generally. To this end, he has been a researcher on the Ranking Digital Rights project, and at Oxford’s Programme for Comparative Media Law and Policy.

He has presented his work, inter alia, at the 2013 W G Hart Legal Workshop at the Institute of Advanced Legal Studies, University of London, where he delivered a paper: “Sowing dragons’ teeth: a right of Press Freedom”. His previous publications include “The Inca Trail” (Trailblazer Publications, 1999).

Timothy John Phillip Hubbard is a professor of Bioinformatics at King’s College London, Head of Bioinformatics at Genomics England and Honorary Faculty at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute in Cambridge, UK. Hubbard was educated at the University of Cambridge where he was awarded a Bachelor of Arts degree in Natural Sciences (Biochemistry) in 1985. He went on to do research in protein design in the Department of Crystallography, Birkbeck College, London where he was awarded a PhD in 1988 for research supervised by Tom Blundell. Hubbard’s research interests are in Bioinformatics, Computational biology and Genome Informatics. During his tenure at WTSI he supervised several successful PhD students to completion in these areas of research. Hubbard was appointed Professor of Bioinformatics at King’s in October 2013. His research has been published in leading peer reviewed scientific journals including Nature, the Journal of Molecular Biology, Nucleic Acids Research, Genome Biology, Nature Methods, Nature Reviews Cancer and Bioinformatics. His research been funded by the Medical Research Council (MRC) and theBiotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC).

Dr. Tineke M. Egyedi works as a senior researcher on standardisation issues at the ICT department of the faculty of Technology, Policy and Management ate the Delft University of Technology. She is currently rounding off two research projects of the Next Generation Infrastructures program about the tension between standards and infrastructure flexibility, and on the rise of Inverse Infrastructures.

Among her main research interests are standards and the environment, and the ‘dynamics of standards’ on which she co-edited a book in 2008. The latter theme includes problems of standards change and of competing standards. More recent,  she finalised a simulation exercise called ‘Setting Standards’ together with United Knowledge. This exercise aims to provide people from industry, novice standardizers, policy makers and university students hands-on experience with standards committee work, and is currently used to train US government officials and Chinese standardization officials.

Tineke Egyedi has collaborated in national and US science foundation projects as well as many European projects. She has done policy studies for Dutch ministries; worked as a consultant for national and international companies and standards bodies;  and worked as researcher for the Royal Institute of Technology in Sweden, the University of Maastricht and the Delft University of Technology, the Netherlands.

She has organized and chaired several European and international conferences, program committees, sessions and conference tracks. She has published widely. From 2008- 2010 she was (vice-)chair of the International Cooperation for Education about Standardization (ICES).  She was nominated for Ada Lovelace Day 2010. Since 2005 she is president of the European Academy for Standardization (EURAS).

Dr. Tony Cornford is a Senior Lecturer in the Information System and Innovation Group of the Department of Management at the London School of Economics and Political Science. His research interests include e-Government and open source development processes and he has published research that considers the role of technicalagents in open source communities. He undertakes research into in public sector strategies for use of open source software. Together with Maha Shaikh, another OFE Fellow, and with the support of OFE he has prepared a report for the UK Cabinet Office on the Total Cost of Ownership of Open Source Software. 

His other primary research interests are focused on healthcare information systems and he has  published studies on telehealth, technology and health policy, electronic prescribing systems, evaluation, and healthcare infrastructures. He recently worked as part of  two teams undertaking evaluations of key aspects of the UK’s NHS National Programme for Information Technology (NPfIT). The first was an evaluation of the Electronic Prescribing Service, and the second was an Evaluation of the National Care Records Service in secondary care. He has also undertaken a study for the NHS Connecting for Health to establish the lessons that can be learned from the various implementations in the UK of electronic prescribing in secondary care.

Emma Mulqueeny is the CEO of Rewired State and Young Rewired State: independent developer networks delivering change for industry and country. Rewired State is the only independent developer network in the UK with over 600 software developers and designers, bringing about digital innovation and revolution through rapid prototyping events focused on research and development (R&D) and marketing campaigns.Young Rewired State is the only young developer network of UK kids aged 18 and under who have taught themselves how to code.Emma writes regularly for the Guardian and on her own blog and is best known for her campaign to ‘Teach our kids to code’, relentlessly pushing the potential of the UK digital industry.

Flavia Marzano, graduated in Computer Science at the University of Pisa, Professor at Link Campus University.

Involved for more than 20 years in the promotion of free software in the Italian Public Administrations, she took part in national and regional boards for the definition of the legislation on free software in the Public Administration and in particular in the definition of the Codice dell’Amministrazione Digitale (DECRETO LEGISLATIVO 7 marzo 2005, n. 82), norm  which provides specific clauses for the adoption of the free software in Italy.

As Councilor for the Municipality of Rome, in 2016 she prepared a resolution that commits the institution to adopt free software unless justified.

She also deals with analysis of complex processes (in particular in the field of Local Public Administration) and design and management of innovation in processes.

She has a wide and differentiated experience in the field of academic and professional training and orientation with particular attitude for mentorship and coaching.

Frank Karlitschek is a long time open source contributor and privacy activist. He contributed to KDE and other free software projects since the end of the 90s and was a board member of the KDE e.V. He is a regular keynote speaker at conferences.

He managed engineering teams for over 10 years and worked as head of unit and managing director at different internet companies. 2007 he founded a startup which develops social networking and e-commerce products for several fortune 500 companies. Over the years he helped several startups with management consulting and investments to bootstrap and build successful products.

Frank launched several initiatives over the years to make the internet more secure and more federated. Examples are the open collaboration services and the user data manifesto.

In 2010 he started the ownCloud project and is leading the community project since then. In 2011 he co-founded ownCloud Inc. to offer commercial services around ownCloud. In 2016 he left ownCloud and founded Nextcloud to bring the vision to the next level. He currently serves as managing director at Nextcloud GmbH.

Georg Greve is the CEO and President of the Board at Kolab Systems AG. In addition he is active on the board of the Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE) which he initiated in 2001 and chaired until 2009. He is also involved in various other groups such as Open Forum Europe (OFE) and the European Committee on Interoperable Systems (ECIS) and has been active in the inception of a variety of Open Source/Free Software activities such as the X.Org Foundation, the Open Database Alliance and others.

A self-taught software developer with several years of experience on the job, and traditionally trained Physicist, Mr Greve has many years of experience in interoperability, Open Standards, Free Software and IT policy. Having worked with a wide variety of groups including the European Commission, the World Bank, the United Nations World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), Internet Governance Forum (IGF), ICANN and others as well as on occasion representing entities such as Google and the German civil society as part of the German governmental delegation at the United Nations World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS), Georg Greve has an encompassing perspective on these issues from a wide variety of angles.

For these accomplishments in Free Software and Open Standards Georg Greve was awarded the Federal Cross of Merit on ribbon by the Federal Republic of Germany on 18 December 2009.

Glyn Moody is a writer, blogger and speaker. His journalism appears in national newspapers, magazines and online; he writes about the use of open source in the enterprise at http://blogs.computerworlduk.com/open-enterprise/, and his blog about open source, open content and open culture is at http://opendotdotdot.blogspot.com.

After gaining two degrees in mathematics from Cambridge University, Moody entered business journalism before specialising in the field of computers in 1983. He started writing, lecturing and consulting about business use of the Internet in early 1994, and about open source in 1995. In 1997 he wrote the first mainstream feature about GNU/Linux and free software, which appeared in Wired magazine (http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/5.08/linux_pr.html).

His book, “Rebel Code: Linux and the Open Source Revolution” – the only detailed history of free software written so far – was published in 2001. “Digital Code of Life: How Bioinformatics is Revolutionising Science, Medicine and Business” appeared in 2004, and explores the rise and importance of the digital genomics.

Helen Darbishire is a human rights activist specialising in the public’s right of access to information (freedom of information), media and internet freedom, and the development of open and democratic societies with participatory and accountable governments. Helen is founder and Executive Director of the Madrid-based NGO Access Info Europe, established in 2006 to promote the right of access to information in Europe and globally.

Prior to founding Access Info, Helen worked for the Open Society Foundations (1999-2005) where she directed programmes on freedom of expression and information, based in Budapest and New York. Her start in human rights was working as a campaigner with Article 19 (1989-1998), developing its programmes in central and eastern Europe during the 1990s. She has provided expertise to a wide range of non-governmental and inter-governmental organisations, including UNESCO, the Council of Europe, the OSCE, and the World Bank. Helen is a founder of the global Freedom of Information Advocates Network and served two terms as its chair (2004-2010).

Helen holds a degree in History and Philosophy of Science and Psychology from Durham University, UK. Resident in Madrid, she speaks English, French and Spanish.

Dr Ian Brown is a prominent cybersecurity expert who consults for international organisations and other clients, currently leading on a multidisciplinary study for the Commonwealth on election cybersecurity. Ian is Visiting CyberBRICS Professor at FGV Law School in Rio de Janeiro, senior fellow at Research ICT Africa, and was previously Principal Scientific Officer, at the UK Government’s Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport and Professor of Information Security and Privacy at the Oxford Internet Institute until 2016.

He has worked as a consultant for the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime on their study of global cybercrime. For the OECD, he co-authored with Peter Sommer the 2010 report “Reducing Systemic Cybersecurity Risk”. His most recent books are Regulating Code: Good Governance and Better Regulation in the Information Age (with Christopher T. Marsden) (2013, MIT Press) and Research Handbook on Governance of the Internet (editor, 2013, Edward Elgar)

Karel De Vriendt worked twenty five years (1987-2012) as an IT expert for the European Commission. From 2005 to 2011, he was leading the team responsible for the implementation of the IDABC programme and for the definition and implementation of the ISA programme. He was actively involved in initiatives such as the transeuropean network TESTA, the Open Source Observatory and Repository (OSOR) and the Semantic Interoperability Centre Europe (SEMIC) now both merged into Joinup and in the elaboration of the European Interoperability Strategy and theEuropean Interoperability Framework. During his career, he also acquired a good practical experience in the public procurement of IT goods and services. Karel De Vriendt is now retired but has kept his interest in improving (computer based) public services via the collaboration between public and private partners and via the sharing and re-use of software based service components. He also remains a big supporter of open standards and open source software as essential elements to support collaboration, sharing and reuse.

Karsten Gerloff was the President of the Free Software Foundation Europe. FSFE’s mission as an independent not-for-profit organisation is promoting freedom in the information society through Free Software.

In the course of this mission, Karsten Gerloff works together with developers, activists, business leaders and high-level political decision makers in order to create an environment where Free Software can reach its full potential as the foundation of a free digital society. He leads FSFE’s participation in community and policy processes at the European and global level, and is a frequent speaker at a wide variety of conferences and events.

Karsten Gerloff has conducted extensive research on the economic and social effects of Free Software for the European Commission and other clients, and has led the development of training materials for Free Software entrepreneurs in Southern and Eastern Africa.

Prof. Dr. Knut Blind studied economics, political science and psychology at Freiburg University. In the course of his studies he spent one year at Brock University (Canada), where he was awarded a BA. Finally, he took his Diploma in Economics and later his doctoral degree at Freiburg University. Between 1996 and 2010 he joined the Fraunhofer Institute for Systems and Innovation Research, Karlsruhe, Germany, as a senior researcher and at last as head of the Competence Center “Regulation and Innovation”.

In April 2006 Knut Blind was appointed Professor of Innovation Economics at the Faculty of Economics and Management at the Technische Universität Berlin. Between 2008 and 2016 he held also the endowed chair of standardisation at the Rotterdam School of Management of the Erasmus University. From April 2010 he is linked to the Fraunhofer Institute of Open Communication Systems in Berlin. In 2012, he initiated both the Berlin Innovation Panel and the German Standardization Panel. Besides numerous articles on innovation he published further contributions on standardization, patents and further innovation aspects in refereed journals.

Martin is  a veteran of over 30 years in global ICT standardisation both at the formal International level and in global fora and consortia, and is now active in standards and technology policy. Martin has contributed to and edited many standards and specifications, as well as chairing committees and serving on advisor committees and Board of Directors.  This has inspired a keen interest in how standards bodies work, and what makes good, and bad, policies and procedures for open standards development, as well as working on internal processes an organisation needs for effective participation. Martin has been exposed to the implications of patents and standardization and how they affect open collaboration, and more recently, on the interplay between standards, patents, open source software, and legislation. Martin applies this expertise at the policy level particularly focused on EU institutions and policy makers. Martin is currently the Chair of the Board for the OASIS Open Europe Foundation (Stichting).

Mirko Boehm is the CEO of Endocode, where he specialises in consulting to and mentoring small to large businesses on complex software development endeavours, the use of open source products and methods in organizations, and software-related issues of business strategy and intellectual property.

The Open Invention Network protects the open source ecosystem by acquiring patents and licensing them royalty-free to entities. Mirko Boehm is responsible for the Linux System Definition, which defines the technical scope of the patent non-aggression agreements.

He has been a KDE contributor since 1997, including several years on the KDE e.V. board. He is doing research on Open Source at the Technical University of Berlin, is a member of the FSFE Germany team, and a Qt-certified specialist and trainer. He lives with his wife and two kids in Berlin.

Peter Suber is the Director of the Harvard Open Access Project, Faculty Fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society, Special Advisor at the Harvard Office for Scholarly Communication, Senior Researcher at SPARC, Research Professor of Philosophy at Earlham College, and a non-practicing lawyer.  He writes the SPARC Open Access Newsletter, was the principal drafter of the Budapest Open Access Initiative, and sits on the boards of many groups devoted to open access, scholarly communication, and the information commons.  He has been active in promoting open access for many years through his research, speaking, and writing.  His most recent book is Open Access (MIT Press 2012).

Since 2008 Prof. Axel Metzger has been holding a professorship for private law, intellectual property, information technology law and private international law at the law faculty of the University of Hannover. His main research areas include international aspects of intellectual property, aspects of the development of Open Source, methodical aspects of international private and economic law as well as current questions of the German civil law with special regard to comparative and economic aspects.

Professor Christopher T. Marsden is Professor of Internet & Media Law at the University of Sussex. He was formerly Senior Lecturer (2008-12) then Professor of Law (2012-13) at Essex, having previously taught and researched at Warwick (1997-2000), Oxford (2004-5), LSE (1995-1997). He has both LL.B (1989) and LL.M (1994) in Law from LSE, Ph.D. from Essex.

He is author of four monographs on Internet law:

• “Regulating Code” (2013, MIT Press with Dr Ian Brown),
• “Net neutrality: Towards a Co-Regulatory Solution” (2010, Bloomsbury),
• “Internet Co-regulation: European Law, Regulatory Governance and Legitimacy in Cyberspace” (2011, Cambridge),
• “Codifying Cyberspace” (Routledge/Cavendish 2007 with Dr. D. Tambini, D. Leonardi)

He is also author-editor of the interdisciplinary Internet policy books

• “Regulating the Global Information Society” (Routledge 2000), and
• “Convergence in European Digital TV Regulation” (Blackstone/OUP 1999).

Peter Murray-Rust is a contemporary chemist born in Guildford in 1941. He was educated at Bootham School and Balliol College, Oxford. After obtaining a Doctor of Philosophy he became lecturer in chemistry at the (new) University of Stirling and was first warden of Andrew Stewart Hall of Residence. In 1982 he moved to Glaxo Group Research at Greenford to head Molecular Graphics, Computational Chemistry and later protein structure determination. He was Professor of Pharmacy in the University of Nottingham from 1996-2000, setting up the Virtual School of Molecular Sciences. He is now Reader in Molecular Informatics at the University of Cambridge and Senior Research Fellow of Churchill College.

His research interests have involved the automated analysis of data in scientific publications, creation of virtual communities e.g. The Virtual School of Natural Sciences in the Globewide Network Academy and the Semantic Web. With Henry Rzepa he has extended this to chemistry through the development of Markup languages, especially Chemical Markup Language. He campaigns for Open Data, particularly in science, and is on the advisory board of the Open Knowledge Foundation and a co-author of the Panton Principles for Open scientific data. Together with a few other chemists he was a founder member of the Blue Obelisk movement in 2005.

In 2002, Peter Murray-Rust and his colleagues proposed an electronic repository for unpublished chemical data called the World Wide Molecular Matrix (WWMM). In January 2011 a symposium around his career and visions was organized, called Visions of a Semantic Molecular Future. In 2011 he and Henry Rzepa were joint recipients of the Herman Skolnik Award of the American Chemical Society.

Tetsuo Noda has worked for Shimane University as a researcher of Economics. He graduated from the graduate school of Hitotsubashi University in Japan in 1991.
He is now studying and teaching the economic influence of the information technology, at Shimane University. He is presenting some study papers on the relation between open source development style and the productivity in information service industries at academic societies domestically and internationally.
He is also leading the collaborative research of stabilization and the upgrade of OSS centering on Ruby as the Shimane University’s project research.

Rishab Aiyer Ghosh (born 1975) is a journalist, computer scientist and Open-source software advocate. A former Open Source Initiative board member, he is Founding International and Managing Editor of peer-reviewed journal First Monday, and Programme Leader of Free/Libre and Open Source Software at UNU-MERIT. Ghosh has undertaken several studies on free software, which he terms “FLOSS” – an alternative term for free software which he is credited with coinin. FLOSS emphasizes the essential value of the term “libre” (meaning with few or no restrictions).[3] Ghosh’s work represents an effort to reshape the global understanding of FLOSS, including the governmental and academic spheres.

Roberto Di Cosmo is an alumnus of the Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa, with a PhD in Computer Science from the University of Pisa, Roberto Di Cosmo was associate professor for almost a decade at Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris. In 1999, he became a Computer Science full professor at University Paris Diderot, where he was head of doctoral studies for Computer Science from 2004 to 2009. He is currently on leave at Inria.

His research activity spans theoretical computing, functional programming, parallel and distributed programming, the semantics of programming languages, type systems, rewriting and linear logic, and, more recently, the new scientific problems posed by the general adoption of Free Software, with a particular focus on static analysis of large software collections. He has published over 20 international journals articles and 50 international conference articles.

In 2008, he has created and coordinated the European research project Mancoosi, that had a budget of 4.4Me and brought together 10 partners to improve the quality of package-based open source software systems. Following the evolution of our society under the impact of IT with great interest, he is a long term Free Software advocate, contributing to its adoption since 1998 with the best-seller Hijacking the world, seminars, articles and software.

He created in October 2007 the Free Software thematic group of Systematic, that helped fund over 50 Open Source research and development collaborative projects for a consolidated budget of over 200Me. From 2010 to 2018, he was director of IRILL, a research structure dedicated to Free and Open Source Software quality. He created in 2015, and now directs Software Heritage, an initiative to build the universal archive of all the source code publicly available.

Rufus Pollock is an economist and co-founder of the Open Knowledge Foundation. He is currently a Shuttleworth Foundation Fellow, an Associate of the Centre for Intellectual Property and Information Law at the University of Cambridge and a Director of the Open Knowledge Foundation which he co-founded in 2004.

He formerly held the Mead Research Fellowship in economics at Emmanuel College, Cambridge.

He is credited by web inventor Tim Berners-Lee for starting the Raw Data Now ‘meme’.

Shane Coughlan is an expert in communication methods and business development. He is best known for building bridges between commercial and non-commercial stakeholders in the technology sector. His professional accomplishments include establishing a legal department for the main NGO promoting Free Software in Europe, building a professional network of over 270 legal counsel and technical  experts across 4 continents, and aligning corporate and community interests to launch the first law review dedicated to Free/Open Source Software.

Shane has extensive knowledge of Internet technologies, management best practice, community building and Free/Open Source Software. His experience includes engagement with the server, desktop, embedded and mobile telecommunication industries. He does business in Europe, Asia and the Americas, and maintains a broad network of contacts.”

A well-known and respected leader in the Free software community, computer industry veteran Simon Phipps has been involved at a strategic level in some of the world’s leading technology companies. In addition to senior leadership positions he has worked in such hands-on roles as field engineer, programmer and systems analyst, as well as run a software publishing company. He worked with OSI standards in the eighties, on the first commercial collaborative conferencing software in the nineties, and helped introduce both Java and XML at IBM. He was a founding Director of the Open Mobile Alliance.

He takes an active interest in several Free and Open Source software organisations, serving as a Director of the Open Source Initiative and on the advisory board of Open Source for America. A widely read thought-leader, he publishes regularly both on his own blog and in many other places such as IDG’s ComputerWorldUK. He is part of FossAlliance, a group of proven international consultants for free and open source software.

In mid-2000 he joined Sun Microsystems where he helped pioneer Sun’s employee blogging, social media and community engagement programmes. In 2005 he was appointed Chief Open Source Officer, coordinating Sun’s extensive participation in Free and Open Source software communities until he left in 2010. In that role he oversaw the conversion to Free software of the full Java platform, the Solaris UNIX operating system, the SPARC architecture and the rest of Sun’s broad software portfolio, all under OSI-approved Free licenses.

He has been an outspoken advocate of the value of Open Document Format (ODF) and other truly open standards for businesses and governments. He has been an advisor to local and national government agencies across Europe, the Pacific Rim and Latin America as they have devised and implemented strategies around Free and Open Source software and is a co-founder of the FossAlliance consulting alliance.

He holds a degree in electronic engineering and is a Chartered Engineer and Fellow of the British Computer Society. His personal home page and blog.

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 currently leads our research entitled The Clash of the Titans.

Simon’s most recent published research (December 2014) is entitled Of Wonders and Disruption where he attempts to predict the nature of technological and business change over the next 20 years. His previous research covers topics including The Future is More Predictable Than You Think – A Workbook for Value Chain Mapping, Beware of Geeks Bearing Gifts: Strategies for an Increasingly Open Economy, Learning from Web 2.0 and 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, and has been voted as one of the UK’s top 50 most influential people in IT in Computer Weekly’s 2012 and 2011 polls.

Simonetta Vezzoso is a non-governmental advisor to the International Competition Network and a representative of the Italian Library Association in the World Intellectual Property Organization. After obtaining an Italian degree in law, a German Phd in economics and extensive interdisciplinary research work on innovation related areas, such as open source, competition policy in the Internet economy, Simonetta teaches the course of Intellectual Property and Competition Law at the University of Trento, Italy. She also regularly blogs on http://competitionwave.blogspot.it/.

Trond Arne Undheim is the Director of Standards Strategy and Policy in Europe, the Middle East and Africa (the EMEA region) for Oracle Corporation. He writes the weekly blog Trond’s Opening Standard, chairs the OFE Standardization Interest Group, and participates in the CEN/ISSS European e-Business Interoperability Forum.

He has worked at the European Commission where he led ePractice.eu, the good practice initiative. He speaks six languages, has co-founded several start-ups including a think tank and a consulting firm. He obtained his Ph.D. (2002) in Technology Studies and Sociology from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, and lives in London. Trond recently published the book Leadership From Below. He is also the founding Editor of the European Journal of ePractice , reaching thousands of decision makers in public and private sector across the world.