Speakers

Neil Bunn is a Technology Architect for IBM specializing in Supercomputing and Complex Computing Solutions. He holds a degree in electrical engineering from Queen's University, is a certified Professional Engineer and is a Senior Member of IEEE. He holds certification as a Master Certified Architect from the Open Group, and is a patented inventor for IBM.

Since the October 2000, the launch of OpenOffice.org, I have been the Community Manager of the Project. I am also the chair of the governing body, the Community Council. In addition to representing OpenOffice.org at public events, I also coordinate community development around the world.

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Emma Jane Hogbin is an internationally renowned open source software advocate and technical author. Her first book, Front End Drupal, is recognized in the industry as the most important book for Drupal designers. Through her talks on The 100-Mile Client Roster and women in technology Emma is helping to transform the way we work. She is a frequent speaker at open source conferences in Canada, the US and Europe and likes single malt whiskey. These two things are probably not related.

Rajith Attapattu is a Senior Software Engineer from Red Hat’s Emerging Technology team. Rajith is an open source enthusiast and is a contributor on several Apache Projects including Apache Axis2, Apache Qpid, Apache Tuscany and Apache Synapse projects. His recent focus has been on Building Scalable and Reliable Messaging Middleware, and he is part of the AMQP — Advanced Message Queuing Protocol — working group. He has published several articles and spoken at several conferences and user groups, including ApacheCon, Colorado Software Summit, and Toronto JUG.

Khalid has 25 years of experience in software development and consulting. Starting with a Sinclair ZX Spectrum, he got his first job developing and doing database administration on mainframes. He has been developing and hacking on UNIX since 1987, and Linux since 1995. In 1999, he was using "LAMP" before the term was coined. He is a regular open source developer and contributor since 2003, mainly for Drupal core as well as contributions. At last count, he had some 35 modules for Drupal available at drupal.org.

Troy Unrau is a bad coder, so has found other ways of contributing to KDE, from user support to website repairs to marketing. Troy is a member of the KDE Marketing Working Group and the KDE Promotion Team. He is perhaps best known for the series of articles entitled "The Road to KDE 4" which were published in the lead up to the KDE 4 release. He has previously written about Open Source for Ars Technica, and frequently helps to plan KDE events within North America. He received his B.Sc.

Gregory Boehnlein is VP of N2Net, a national provider of mission critical Voice and Data services. In addition to over 10 years experience with Telco service providers Gregory is also the CTO of Etone Connect, a distributor that is delivering next generation VoIP technology to the SOHO market. Gregory has spoken at numerous conferences on the topic of Open Source VoIP deployments is actively involved with the development of Asterisk Open Source PBX as well as other Open Source Projects.

Chris Cunnington is a former journalist who worked for Maclean Hunter (which was bought by Rogers.) Seduced by the fun of programming he began to learn about the original object oriented language, Smalltalk. A co-founder of the Toronto Smalltalk User Group. He is the proprietor of Smalltalk Television, an online concern that shows people Smalltalk basics by showing how to make web pages with his favorite lanauge.

Dru Lavigne is a network and systems administrator, IT instructor and curriculum developer, and author. She is author of BSD Hacks, The Best of FreeBSD Basics, and the upcoming Definitive Guide to PC-BSD. She is currently the Editor-in-Chief of the Open Source Business Resource, a free monthly publication covering open source and the commercialization of open source assets. She is founder and current Chair of the BSD Certification Group Inc., a non-profit organization with a mission to create the standard for certifying BSD system administrators.

Leigh Honeywell is a jane of many trades. By day she works at a major security vendor while finishing up a degree at the University of Toronto. By night (and sometimes over lunch) she is a co-founder and director of HackLab.TO, Toronto's hacker space. She also serves on the board of advisors of the SecTor security conference, is a Google Summer of Code mentor, as well as an avid cyclist, book nerd, and traveler.

Video of presentation.

Jim is a Consulting Sales Specialist and Linux Champion at IBM Canada and has worked at IBM for 36 years. In this role he leads IBM Canada's activities in the Linux and Open Source arena. He is a graduate of the BC Institute of Technology, has co-authored over 20 IBM RedBooks, and is an active speaker on information technology across the US and Canada at organizations such as SHARE and CMG.

Linux for Tough Economic Times - Jim Elliott - IBM Canada, Inc.

Carl Schmidtmann has been configuring, managing and securing Unix servers since 1982 for companies from large multi-nationals to 2 person offices. He has taught several courses on Unix and programming for UC Berkeley Extension and several technology training companies. In 1992 he founded and is still head of Faultline Network Solutions, Inc. which provides contract IT solutions.

Dr. David Chan is an Associate Professor with the Department of Family Medicine at McMaster University. He worked as a software engineer prior to entering the field of medicine. He has devoted the past 25+ years in developing Free/Open Source Software solutions to enhance patient care. He has developed a set of web-based applications collectively known as OSCAR (Open Source Clinical Applications and Resources).

Jorge O. Castro currently works on the Community Team in External Developer Relations for Canonical Ltd. A long time GNOME and Ubuntu enthusiast, Jorge has been a contributor to the GNOME Journal and Linux Ars, and is an active member and supporter of MUG, the oldest Unix user group in Michigan. Jorge has been using Linux since 1998, and his current passion is putting the Midwest on the Open Source map by speaking and promoting at Open Source conferences such as Penguicon, and Ohio LinuxFest [and Ontario GNU Linux Fest -ed]. He is an avid Red Wings fan.

Joe 'Zonker' Brockmeier is a longtime FOSS advocate, and currently works for Novell as the community manager for openSUSE. Prior to joining Novell, Brockmeier worked as a technology journalist covering the open source beat for a number of publications, including Linux Magazine, Linux Weekly News, Linux.com, UnixReview.com, IBM developerWorks, and many others.

A 16 year veteran in the content management world, Cheryl has held senior product and solution marketing roles with companies such as Open Text and Hummingbird. Today she's running the corporate and product marketing organization for Nuxeo and helping educate customers and market analysts on the value of open source ECM. She's published widely on information management topics and is an active member of industry associations such as AIIM and ARMA. Cheryl is the Chief Marketing Officer for Nuxeo - Open Source Enterprise Content Management.

Steven has been a UNIX/Linux system administrator for more than 5 years and a user for 10, building, running and administering Solaris, Redhat, Debian boxen. He also is a leader of the Toronto OpenSolaris User Group and a consultant focusing on Open Source technologies.

Rikki Kite is the Associate Publisher of Linux Pro Magazine and Ubuntu User magazine. She maintains a blog on the Linux Pro website that highlights women in open source. Prior to working on Linux Pro, Kite worked as an editor for Sys Admin magazine, UnixReview.com, The Journal of Linux Technology, and The Perl Journal, and she wrote her Master's thesis on women in open source. Stop by the ROSE Blog for dispatches from the world of women in open source.

Myles Braithwaite is a geek/programmer/hacker living in Toronto where he runs the small web development company, Monkey in your Soul, for the last five years. He is strong advocate of the Open Web philosophy and web standards.

CouchDB - Myles Braithwaite

John Mertic is a software engineer at SugarCRM, and has several years of experience with PHP web applications. An avid writer, he has been published in php|architect, IBM Developerworks, and in the Apple Developer Connector, and is the author for the upcoming book 'The Definitive Guide to SugarCRM: Better Business Applications'. He has also contributed to many open source projects, most notably the PHP project where is the creator and maintainer of the PHP Windows Installer.

Multi-award winning writer, speaker, and columnist, Marcel Gagné, is the author of the "Moving to Linux" series of books. He appears on radio, television, and live on the World Wide Web. One of the best known voices of the Linux and open source world, Marcel created the famous (or perhaps, infamous) "Cooking with Linux" column in Linux Journal. Marcel is a published science fiction author and editor, a pilot, an avid science and technology buff, and a former top 40 disc jockey. You can find his new monthly column in the pages of LinuxPro Magazine and quarterly in Ubuntu User.

Mel is a hacker. Over time, Mel has progressed from hacking hardware (electrical engineer) to code (software developer) to organizational cultures (community QA team lead). She now hacks communities of practice as a member of Red Hat's Community Architecture team. These days, Mel spends most of her time with on open source in education, teaching professors how to teach open source, leading the Fedora Marketing team, and generally getting things out of the way of people who want to Get Stuff Done.

Kuhn began his work in the Free, Libre and Open Source Software (FLOSS) Movement as a volunteer in 1992, when he became an early adopter of the popular GNU/Linux operating system, and began contributing to various Free Software projects. He worked during the 1990s as a system administrator and software development consultant for various companies, large and small. He also taught Advanced Placement Computer Science (using only Free Software) at Walnut Hills High School in Cincinnati. In January 2000, he was hired by the Free Software Foundation (FSF).

Ralph has a Computer Science degree from the Technical University Darmstadt, a M.Sc from University of Texas at Dallas and a law degree from The Open University, UK. He has been involved in Unix/Linux projects during his studies as well as in his professional career in the telecommunication, financial, IT and education sectors. Ralph has used RedHat, SUSE, Debian and (K)Ubuntu Linux distributions and is currently involved within the Ubuntu and Debian projects in various capacities, in particular in the Bug-Triage for (K)Ubuntu.

Karlie Robinson is a professional busy-body who funds her passion for all things open source through On-Disk.com. She is the lead architect for many successful programs, including; the On-Disk.com Developers Portal and the Fedora Sponsored Media Project. When she's not diving into Open Source development projects or taking care of business as the owner of Webpath Technologies, Karlie can be found at SCORE Rochester counseling small business start ups.

Rob Day has been involved with Linux and open source since the early 90s, and has been both a developer and professional corporate instructor. He is currently a Linux consultant based in Waterloo, Ontario.