Daniel Kahn Gillmor is a technologist with the ACLU's Speech, Privacy and Technology Project, and a free software developer. He's a Free Software Foundation member, a member of Debian, a contributor to a wide range of free software projects, and a participant in protocol development standards organizations like the IETF, with an eye toward preserving and improving civil liberties and civil rights through our shared infrastructure.

Edward Snowden is a former intelligence officer who served the CIA, NSA, and DIA for nearly a decade as a subject matter expert on technology and cybersecurity. In 2013, he revealed the NSA was unconstitutionally seizing the private records of billions of individuals who had not been suspected of any wrongdoing, resulting in the largest debate about reforms to US surveillance policy since 1978. Today, he works on methods of enforcing human rights through the application and development of new technologies. He joined the board of Freedom of the Press Foundation in February 2014.

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.

Emmanuel is a Division III student at Hampshire College, studying how technology (especially restrictive technology, like DRM) can affect how individuals share information, learn, remix content, organize, and live their everyday lives. Born and raised in western Massachusetts, they are committed to building a free society, while improving the lives of others with technology. Their latest work can be found at http://emmanuel.im/ .

I'm a trans* Internet freedom fighter from the middle of nowhere (Gladwin, Michigan). I've volunteered with Mozilla since 2014, where I'm a technical speaker and digital rights evangelist.

Brian is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Science and Technology Studies at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. His research examines Social Justice at the critical intersections of technology, particularly Free Software, and gender/race/class.

Marianne Corvellec has been a Free Software activist with April since 2011. April is an advocacy association which has been promoting and defending Free Software in France and Europe since 1996. Marianne's focus has been on legal and institutional issues.

Scott Dexter is a Professor of Computer and Information Science at Brooklyn College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, where he has taught since 1998. He has written extensively on free software, including the book, co-authored with philosopher Samir Chopra, Decoding Liberation: The Promise of Free and Open Source Software. He is particularly interested in getting his students--of extremely diverse backgrounds--hooked on free software.

Erin Glass just joined UCSD as Associate Director and Digital Humanities Coordinator of the Center for the Humanities. Prior to her move, she served as a Digital Fellow at The CUNY Graduate Center where she worked on developing software initiatives that fostered collaborative research while protecting user freedom. She is also co-founder of Social Paper, which received a NEH Digital Start-Up grant, and is currently at work on a dissertation which theorizes student writing as a site where political and technical consciousness is forged.

Bassam is a 3D animator/filmmaker whose 2006 short, Elephants Dream, was the first "open movie." It established the viability of libre tools in a production environment and set precedent by offering its source data under a permissive license for learning, remixing and re-use. His character, ManCandy, began as an easily animatable test bed for rigging experiments. Multiple iterations have been released to the public, and Bassam demonstrates him in the animated tutorial video + short, The ManCandy FAQ. Under the sign of the urchin, Bassam is continuing to pursue a model of production that invests in commonwealth. He teaches, writes and lectures around the world on free production and free software technique. Raised in Damascus, Bassam trained in the United States as an electrical and software engineer.

Jonathan has been involved with the Free Software Movement for ten years, in France and now in Canada.

Software engineer, leader of Hypatia Software Organization. Python developer, open source author; MIT licenses everything. FreeBSD enthusiast.

Evan Misshula is the Project Manager for the NYC Tech Talent Pipeline Residency @ Queens College, an adjunct instructor at CUNY John Jay teaching network security and a PhD candidate at the CUNY Graduate Center in Criminal Justice. He is active in numerous free software meetups in NYC. He is interested in helping marginalized groups (particularly those stigmatized by contact with the criminal justice system) use Free Software to increase social and economic mobility.

Deb Nicholson wants to make the world a better place with technology and social justice for all. After many years of local political organizing, she became an enthusiastic free software activist. She is currently the Community Outreach Director at the Open Invention Network and the Community Manager at GNU MediaGoblin. She also serves on the board at Open Hatch, a.k.a. Free Software's Welcoming Committee.

FSF Latin America board member. GNU speaker. Free Software Evangelist. Maintainer of GNU Linux-libre, and co-maintainer of the GNU Compiler Collection, GNU binutils and GNU libc. GNU tools engineer at Red Hat Brasil.

While working towards a BFA in Interrelated Media from Massachusetts College of Art, Paige developed an interest in programming and a fascination in the complexity of natural systems. After graduation, Paige worked for mesh networking startup, Open Garden which helped to map her interest in natural decentralized systems onto concepts within technology. She previously organized San Francisco's bitcoin meetup and is fascinated by the freeing potential of cryptocurrencies. She currently fills various roles at MaidSafe with a focus on community and communication.

Eric Schultz is an independent software engineer and open source consultant. Most recently he was the Community Manager at prpl Foundation with a particular focus on building the OpenWrt community. Prior to this, Eric worked as Developer Advocate at Outercurve Foundation where he managed and supported the foundation’s 25 open source projects. Eric has collaborated with employees from dozens of companies to create free and open source software that improves lives. He has a passion for the promise and reality of free software, with a focus on empowering individuals, particularly in marginalized groups, with more control over their everyday lives. Eric lives in Appleton, Wisconsin where outside of work he enjoys developing free software, watching the Green Bay Packers and Milwaukee Bucks, and tweeting about technology, cute animals, politics and sports.

Andrew Seeder is the Data Systems Manager at the Dudley Street Neighborhood Initiative in Roxbury, Boston. He is also a consultant for the Smart Chicago Collaborative, sits on the IT Working Group for Boston Ujima, and is a member of the young professionals committee for YMCA's Training, Inc. He helps organize cryptoparties and works with friends on the Boston Meshnet project. Tweet him at @ahseeder.

Christopher Allan Webber is co-founder of MediaGoblin, longtime free software and free culture advocate, Creative Commons alumnus, and occasional Guix contributor. You can frequently find him nose-deep in some emacs buffer making ascii art or maybe something more important than that. He lives in Madison, Wisconsin.

Marina Zhurakhinskaya is a Senior Outreach Specialist focused on community diversity and inclusion at Red Hat. She co-organizes Outreachy, a mentorship and internships program that helps people from groups underrepresented in free software get involved; 244 people have so far participated in the program's paid, remote internships. Marina is a coordinator for GNOME's participation in Google Summer of Code and a creator of GNOME's newcomers tutorial and workshop. She served as a board member at the GNOME Foundation and at the Ada Initiative. Prior to her diversity outreach and community engagement roles, Marina developed software for GNOME. Marina is a recipient of an O'Reilly Open Source Award and of a GNOME Foundation Contributor of the Year Award "the Pants". She is a co-recipient of the Free Software Foundation Award for Projects of Social Benefit on behalf of the Outreach Program for Women.

Stefano Zacchiroli is Associate Professor of Computer Science at University Paris Diderot. His research interests span formal methods and their applications to improve software quality and user experience in the context of Free Software distributions. He has been an official member of the Debian Project since 2001, taking care of many tasks from package maintenance to distribution-wide Quality Assurance. He has been elected to serve as Debian Project Leader for 3 terms in a row, over the period 2010-2013. He is a Board Director of the Open Source Initiative (OSI). He is a recipient of the 2015 O'Reilly Open Source Award.