Sue Gardner, Wikimedia Foundation

Since 2007, Sue Gardner has served as the Executive Director of the Wikimedia Foundation, the global non-profit that operates Wikipedia. Wikipedia is the world's largest and most popular encyclopedia, which is free to use and free of advertising. Wikipedia contains more than 30 million volunteer-authored articles in over 280 languages, and is visited by more than 516 million people every month, making it the fifth most popular website in the world.

Ms. Gardner, a seasoned journalist, was formerly head of CBC.ca, the website for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, one of Canada's most prominent and best-loved cultural institutions. Under her leadership, CBC.ca won many international awards for excellence, and grew to become Canada's most popular news site. She started her career in 1990 as a producer with CBC's "As It Happens," an internationally-recognized groundbreaking news and current events radio program. She has worked in radio, television, newspapers, magazines and online.

Sue Gardner has been described as the librarian to the world and the Mother Teresa of the Internet. In 2009, she was voted by Huffington Post readers as their media game-changer of the year and in 2012, Forbes magazine named her the world's 70th most powerful woman. Her work is motivated by the desire to ensure that everyone in the world has free and easy access to the information they want and need.

Eben Moglen, Software Freedom Law Center

Professor of Law and Legal History at Columbia University Law School. Professor Moglen has represented many of the world's leading free software developers. Professor Moglen earned his PhD in History and law degree at Yale University during what he sometimes calls his “long, dark period” in New Haven. After law school he clerked for Judge Edward Weinfeld of the United States District Court in New York City and for Justice Thurgood Marshall of the United States Supreme Court. He has taught at Columbia Law School since 1987 and has held visiting appointments at Harvard University, Tel Aviv University and the University of Virginia. In 2003 he was given the Electronic Frontier Foundation's Pioneer Award for efforts on behalf of freedom in the electronic society. Professor Moglen is admitted to practice in the State of New York and before the United States Supreme Court.

Karen Sandler, GNOME Foundation

Karen M. Sandler is the Executive Director of the GNOME Foundation. She is known for her advocacy for free software, particularly for software safety on medical devices. Prior to joining GNOME, she was General Counsel of the Software Freedom Law Center. Karen continues to do pro bono legal work with SFLC and serves as an officer of the Software Freedom Conservancy. She is also pro bono General Counsel of QuestionCopyright.org and an advisor to the Ada Initiative. Before joining SFLC, Karen worked as an associate in the corporate departments of Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher LLP in New York and Clifford Chance in New York and London. Karen received her law degree from Columbia Law School in 2000, where she was a James Kent Scholar and co-founder of the Columbia Science and Technology Law Review. Karen received her bachelors degree in engineering from The Cooper Union. She is a recipient of the O'Reilly Open Source Award.

Richard Stallman, Free Software Foundation

Richard is a software developer and software freedom activist. In 1983 he announced the project to develop the GNU operating system, a Unix-like operating system meant to be entirely free software, and has been the project's leader ever since. With that announcement Richard also launched the Free Software Movement. In October 1985 he started the Free Software Foundation.

Since the mid-1990s, Richard has spent most of his time in political advocacy for free software, and spreading the ethical ideas of the movement, as well as campaigning against both software patents and dangerous extension of copyright laws. Before that, Richard developed a number of widely used software components of GNU, including the original Emacs, the GNU Compiler Collection, the GNU symbolic debugger (gdb), GNU Emacs, and various other programs for the GNU operating system.

Richard pioneered the concept of copyleft, and is the main author of the GNU General Public License, the most widely used free software license.

Richard graduated from Harvard in 1974 with a BA in physics. During his college years, he also worked as a staff hacker at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Lab, learning operating system development by doing it. He wrote the first extensible Emacs text editor there in 1975. He also developed the AI technique of dependency-directed backtracking, also known as truth maintenance. In January 1984 he resigned from MIT to start the GNU project.