Daniel Kahn Gillmor

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. Photo license: This work by Daniel Kahn Gillmor is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

Edward Snowden

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. Photo license: Screenshot of a Citizen Four by Praxis Films. by Laura Poitras is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0.

Richard Stallman

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

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, and organize, among other things. Born and raised in western Massachusetts, they are committed to building a free society, improving the lives of others with technology.

George Chriss, OpenMeetings.org

Bassam Kurdali, Urchin

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 Le Lous, April

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

M.C. McGrath

M. C. is the founder of Transparency Toolkit, a free software project that helps people use open data to expose surveillance and human rights abuses. He is also a Thiel Fellow and an Echoing Green Fellow. Previously, M. C. graduated from Boston University with a degree in civic technology and did research at the MIT Media Lab.

Alexandre Oliva, FSF Latin America

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.

Paige Peterson, MaidSoft

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.

Andrew Seeder, Dudley Street Neighborhood Initiative

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.

David Thompson, GNU Guix

David Thompson is an FSF alumnus and Guile Scheme hacker. David works on system deployment tools for Guix, develops a functional reactive game engine called Sly (it's cool, you should check it out!), and is frequently found nose-deep in his copy of SICP. He lives in the Boston area.

Christopher Webber, GNU MediaGoblin

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.

Stefano Zacchiroli, Debian, IRILL

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.