Program Speakers

Beyond unfree: The software you can go to jail for talking about

Cory Doctorow is a science fiction author, activist, journalist and blogger — the co-editor of Boing Boing and the author of many books, most recently In Real Life, a graphic novel; Information Doesn't Want to be Free, a book about earning a living in the Internet age; and Homeland, the award-winning, best-selling sequel to the 2008 young adult novel Little Brother.

Serving as a special consultant to the Electronic Frontier Foundation on several occasions, he is currently working with them on Apollo 1201, an anti-Digital Restrictions Management (DRM) campaign. He co-founded the peer-to-peer free software company OpenCola, and serves on the boards and advisory boards of the Participatory Culture Foundation, the Clarion Foundation, the Metabrainz Foundation and The Glenn Gould Foundation.

Photo under CC-BY 4.0 and courtesy of Alex Schoenfeldt.

When we fight we win: Technology and liberation in Trump’s America

Kade Crockford is the Director of the Technology for Liberty Program at the ACLU of Massachusetts. Kade works to protect and expand core First and Fourth Amendment rights and civil liberties in the digital 21st century, focusing on how systems of surveillance control and impact not just society in general but also their primary targets—people of color, Muslims, immigrants, and dissidents.

The Technology for Liberty Program aims to use our unprecedented access to information and communication to protect us, from dystopian monitoring and centralized control, and enrich open society and individual rights by implementing basic reforms to ensure our new tools do not create inescapable digital cages limiting what we see, hear, think, and do. Towards that end, Kade researches, strategizes, writes, lobbies, and educates the public on issues ranging from the wars on drugs and terror to warrantless electronic surveillance.

Photo under CC-BY 4.0 and courtesy of the ACLU of Massachusetts.

Sumana Harihareswara first started using GNU/Linux in the late 1990s. Since then, she has contributed to a number of projects (including GNOME, MediaWiki, Zulip, and GNU Mailman), and become a leader, speaker, and advocate for free software and communities. From 2014-2015, she served as a member of the Ada Initiative Board of Directors. She has been a community manager, writer, and project manager, working with Collabora, GNOME, QuestionCopyright.org, Fog Creek Software, Behavior, and Salon.com.

As a writer, her work appears on the website of her consultancy, Changeset Consulting, as well as her personal blog. She has written for numerous publications, including Crooked Timber, Geek Feminism, GNOME Journal, Linux World News, Model View Culture, Linux World News, GNOME Journal, The Recompiler, and Tor.com. In 2009, she co-edited and co-published the Thoughtcrime Experiments anthology.

Photo under CC-BY 4.0 and courtesy of Parker Higgins.

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.

Algorithmic bias: Where it comes from and what to do about it

Dr. Ajunwa is a Fellow at the Berkman Klein Center at Harvard University and an incoming Assistant Professor of Organizational Behavior at Cornell’s ILR School. She holds a doctorate from Columbia University and was previously a practicing attorney. She has published extensively on issues arising in the workplace. Her most recent paper on workplace wellness programs was published by the Harvard Business Review. Her forthcoming article on privacy and discrimination issues regarding the use of big data in the workplace, "Limitless Worker Surveillance," is forthcoming from the California Law Review and was endorsed by the NY Times Editorial Board. Her opinions and commentary on big data issues have been featured in the NY Times, the Guardian, CNN, Bloomberg, and other major media outlets. Her forthcoming book, "The Quantified Worker" will be published by the Cambridge University Press.

Photo under CC BY 3.0.

A free software portfolio: The importance of free software in computer science

Tom Callaway is the Education Outreach team lead at Red Hat, and a Red Hat employee since 2001. He is a co-author of Raspberry Pi Hacks (O'Reilly, 2013). Formerly, Tom was the Fedora Engineering Manager, Fedora Packaging Committee Chair, a Fedora Board Member, and a Fedora Engineering Steering Committee Member. He maintains over 300 free software packages in Fedora, and serves on the Software Freedom Conservancy's Evaluation Committee. In his spare time, he enjoys gaming, geocaching, pinball, hockey, and science fiction.

Batten down the hatches - A non-technical security workshop for activists

Albert Carter is a programmer at MIT CSAIL's Big Data Initiative. Outside of the office, he works on issues surrounding environmental activism, bicycles, and rock climbs.

Photo under CC-BY 3.0 and courtesy of Jon Evans.

Verifying software freedom with reproducible builds You, too, can write reproducible software!

Vagrant Cascadian is a free software developer involved in the the Debian project, the Linux Terminal Server Project (LTSP), and as a system administrator for an ARM build farm for Reproducible Builds. You can find Vagrant on social networks such as the OpenPGP web of trust and the Debian Bug Tracking system!

Rock and roll bands and free software projects: A comparative analysis

Pamela S. Chestek is the principal of Chestek Legal in Raleigh, North Carolina. She counsels creative communities on open source, brand, marketing and copyright matters. Prior to returning to private practice, she held in-house positions at footwear, apparel, and high technology companies and was an adjunct law professor teaching a course on trademark law and unfair competition. She is a frequent author of scholarly articles, and her blog, Property, Intangible, provides analysis of current intellectual property case law. Pam has a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Penn State and a Juris Doctor from the Western New England University School of Law. She is admitted to practice in Connecticut, the District of Columbia, Massachusetts, New York and North Carolina, and has been certified by the North Carolina Board of Legal Specialization in Trademark Law.

The GNU philosophy: Ethics beyond ethics

Marianne Corvellec has been a free software activist with April since 2011, becoming a board member in 2015. Professionally, she specializes in data science and software engineering. Her community work includes teaching with Software Carpentry and Data Carpentry.

Freedom and loathing on the campaign trail '16

Remy DeCausemaker is a Hackademic who studies communities of contributors to help them work together to use their powers for good. He has helped see through a number of firsts for the Free Software Movement: the first Academic Minor in Free/Open Source Software and Free Culture at a university in the United States at RIT, the first Community Action & Impact Lead for the Fedora Linux distro, and most recently, the first FOSS Community Manager for a Presidential Campaign or US National Political Party. He's a career civic hacker who fights for the users, and wears the suit so hackers don't have to.

Photo under CC-BY 4.0.

Aibohphobia and the Reifier's Schadenfreude

Luke Demarest is a visual artist interested in free culture, human rights, and language. He is a facilitator at Blackspace and a member at HacDC. Previously, he was a web engineer at Rosetta Stone, an artist-in-residence at the American Underground, and worked on John Cage Centennial events as a principal project manager at the Mountain Lake Workshop. He has a BFA from the School of Visual Arts at Virginia Tech.

Animated GIF workshop with Gimp

Máirín Duffy learned the downside of proprietary software before her career even started: student projects she'd completed her freshman year of college were bitrot by her senior year. She is now a passionate advocate for the use of free software, particularly creative software like Gimp and Inkscape. Máirín uses free software exclusively for her award-winning design work at Red Hat and has taught numerous workshops to share her knowledge at local schools, tech conferences, and community organizations. She is a principal interaction designer at Red Hat's Boston area office and works on the Fedora project.

Photo under CC BY 3.0.

Text, layout, and calligraphy on the Arabic Web

Nick is a traveling web developer and mapmaker. In the past he has worked with One Laptop per Child, Code for America, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Asia Foundation. In 2016-17 Nick helped add right-to-left language support in the OpenStreetMap iD editor.

Civilian Code Conservation Corps: Free software for governments of all sizes

Cecilia Donnelly is an open source specialist at Open Tech Strategies in Chicago. She has particular experience with and interest in free software for non-technical organizations.

The secret life of the bitcoin blockchain

Financial activist, digital rights advocate and subversive technologist. Bitcoin/blockchain payments technology expert and critic from the non-right-wing minority within the crypto community. B.Sci. in Theoretical Mathematics. National Science Foundation merit scholar.

Currently co-producing the Hacktivist Village, a programme inspired by hacker ethos exploring evolving structures of power within society, in an art & music gathering setting. Booked RMS to come to speak to his first music festival crowd at Symbiosis Gathering, who were blown away by free software philosophy.

Photo under CC BY 3.0.

Pentesting loves free software

Christian Fernandez has a wide range of skills, which he brings to bear on the problem of cyber security from a number of different angles: software programmer, systems architect, network engineer, ethical hacker, and of course cybersecurity specialist.

Starting in 1994, he was associated with the seminal Spanish hacking collective BBK, where he went by the name ReK2WiLdS or ReK2. Growing up in Spain, he moved to the US at the age of 28, where he currently lives and works.

A strong believer in freedom, liberty, and privacy in cyberspace, he has collaborated with the FSF and Electonic Frontier Foundataion (EFF), and was the co-creator of Binary Freedom, a digital rights advocate group which operated between 2004 and 2009.

He has been a FLOSS developer since its early days in 1997, working on high visibility projects such as the KDE Desktop for the libre operating system Gnewsense.

The surreptitious assault on privacy, security, and freedom

Mike Gerwitz is a free software hacker and activist with a focus on privacy and security. He is a GNU maintainer and does various volunteer work for GNU, including software evaluation and administrative tasks. Mike spends much of his free time with his wife and two sons; his remaining free time is spent primarily on hacking, research, volunteer work, and activism. Other hobbies include caffeine consumption and never-ending home renovations.

A fully-free cell phone experience, no baseband required

Denver is the founder and lead developer of JMP, a free software chat gateway that lets you text and call people using a real phone number without a phone, part of the Soprani.ca projects. Denver also works part-time managing the technical side of Software Freedom Conservancy's license compliance work, triaging new reports and verifying complete corresponding source. He has previously written free software magnetic stripe reader firmware and desktop tools and has patches accepted into GNU wdiff, Wine, and the kernel named Linux.

Photo under CC-BY-SA 3.0 and courtesy of Christopher Vollick.

Move fast and break democracy

Shauna Gordon-McKeon is an independent researcher and developer who focuses on free technologies and communities. She runs a business, Galaxy Rise Consulting, providing web and mobile development and data science services to individuals and organizations. She can often be found using her skills as a writer, public speaker, and teacher to help free software and open science communities more accessible to newcomers.

Photo under CC BY 3.0 and courtesy of Nick Taft.

Algorithmic bias: Where it comes from and what to do about it

Ben is a PhD Candidate studying Applied Mathematics at Harvard's School of Engineering and Applied Sciences and a Fellow at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society. His primary areas of study are the uses of data and technology by city governments; the intersection of data, algorithms, and social justice; and the impacts of algorithms and technology on society. Ben is currently on leave for the 2016-2017 academic year on a fellowship to work for the City of Boston Analytics Team.

Photo under CC BY 3.0.

Contacts to connections: CRM funneling for FLOSS projects

William Hale, aka Salt, is a Seattle local who studies Technology and Society at the University of Washington (UW) Department of Communication.

He focuses on Free/Libre/Open Source Software (FLOSS) and Culture; Hackers, Makers, and Breakers; and Computer-Mediated Communication using real-time synchronous systems.

William attends, organizes, and speaks worldwide at: conferences, conventions, events, festivals, and faires; on the topics of crowdmatching, communication, indieweb, infosec, gnu/linux, music, and sci-fi/fantasy. He is very approachable and will always be found wearing a kilt.

Photo under CC-BY-SA 3.0 and courtesy of Julie Anne Noying.

Striking at the roots: An ecological analysis of mass surveillance

Gordon Hall is a hacker, activist, and founding member of the decidedly anarchist Counterpoint Hackerspace, a free learning collective. Notable works include kadtools, storj, kfs, and diglet.

Running a TV channel with free software

Zeeshan Hasan is managing director of Sysnova Information Systems, a free software-based ERP consultancy in Bangladesh.

The monster on the project

Tibbs recently graduated from the University of West of Scotland with a degree in computer security. She has relocated to Portland, OR, where she evangelizes for privacy and security while doing security assurance work for Portland General Electric. She is passionate about encouraging small children to take the plunge into STEM and about laughing at cats on the internet.

Securely backing up GnuPG private keys...to the cloud‽

Joey has been developing free software for 20 years. He is best known for his long involvement in the Debian project, where he led the development of the Debian Installer, and created Debian tools like alien, debhelper, debconf, and pristine-tar. Outside the Debian project, Joey's best known free software projects include git-annex, ikiwiki, and etckeeper. He lately uses Haskell for most projects.

Joey lives deep in the woods in the Appalachian mountains of Tennessee, subsisting on solar power and communicating largely through git pull and push over a dialup modem line.

Security, privacy, free software and accessibility

Chris Hofstader is the former director of access technology for Free Software Foundation. He has worked in the accessibility field professionally for 18 years and now serves as an activist on disability and technology related issues. Chris writes one of the most popular independent blogs in the accessibility field (www.hofstader.com) and is considered one of the leading experts and most notable critics in the field.

Photo under CC BY 3.0 and courtesy of Chris Hofstader.

Pump.io - The federated, extensible social network

AJ Jordan is an 18-year-old programmer and system administrator from Seattle, WA. He's been contributing to free software for several years and in particular is the primary maintainer of the pump.io reference implementation, as well as a comaintainer of prism-break.org. He self-hosts almost every internet service he uses, and is passionate about security, privacy, good UX, and freedom. In his spare time he enjoys photography and poetry. He is currently living in New York City attending the Recurse Center over his gap year before attending college in the fall.

Photo under CC-BY 4.0 and courtesy of Laura Welland.

Turning sensors into signals: Free your IoT from walled gardens with JavaScript

Full Time Graduate Researcher, part time hacker and FOSS enthusiast I used to write code for IBM Watson and do a bunch of other things at their lab . At present crawling my way towards a PhD at RICE University.

I contribute with Mozilla in WebVR,Security and Emerging Technologies team and also a Mozilla TechSpeaker. Have been recognized for the contribution in firefox in it's about:credits page

Creative Commons Attribution 3.0

Understanding the complexity of copyleft defense

Bradley M. Kuhn is the Distinguished Technologist at Software Freedom Conservancy, on FSF's Board of Directors & editor-in-chief of copyleft.org. Kuhn began his work in the software freedom movement in 1992 as a volunteer developer & early adopter of GNU/Linux. He worked during the 1990s as a system administrator & software developer. Kuhn's charity career began in 2000 at FSF. As FSF's Executive Director from 2001–2005, Kuhn led FSF's GPL enforcement, launched its Associate Member program & invented Affero GPL. Since 2006, Kuhn has worked with Conservancy in various volunteer & staff roles.

Photo under CC-BY 4.0.

Procedural 3D animation in Blender

Bassam is a 3D generalist 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. Bassam is continuing to pursue a model of production that invests in commonwealth. They teach, write and lecture around the world on open production and free software technique. Raised in Damascus, Bassam trained in the United States as an electrical and software engineer.

Photo under CC BY 3.0 and courtesy of Fateh Slavitsky.

Fixing trust on the Internet

Tom Marble is the founder of Informatique, Inc., a consultancy which leverages his hardware, software and intellectual property background for client projects as diverse as telematics for electric vehicles, probabilistic modeling, temporal planning visualization, autonomous cyber defense, and multiplayer online gaming.

Marble is committed to increasing diversity in technology by organizing ClojureBridge, a weekend workshop for women to learn the Clojure programming language. He has also been a long time contributor to the Debian project by participating on the Java Team.

A role for free software in movements, communities, and platform cooperativism

Micky Metts is a member of Agaric, a worker-owned tech cooperative. Known as an activist hacker, industry organizer, public speaker , author, connector, advisor, and visionary. Micky acts as a liaison between the Solidarity Economy Network (SEN) and The United States Federation of Worker Cooperatives, with an intention to bring communities together. A member of FSF.org and Drupal.org, a community based on free software, Micky grew up in Weston, CT, and now lives in Boston, MA, with long-time partner John M. Crisman.

The free software movement in the age of Trump

Professor of Law and Legal History at Columbia University Law School and founder of the Software Freedom Law Center. Professor Moglen has represented many of the world's leading free software developers. He 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.

Photo under CC BY 3.0.

Patents, copyrights and trademarks: Won't someone please think of the children?

Patents, copyrights and trademark rights have been growing and expanding in scope and application. In most cases, it seems the original intent of spurring innovation or protecting creators has gotten a bit lost, if not completely inverted. Certainly, there must be a way to support inventors without enabling predators and protect creators without empowering trolls. We need to slay our own monsters, instead of leaving them for the next generation.

If you've ever wondered why a smell can be trademarked or why math can, no... can't, well... maybe gets patented, then this talk is for you. The kids of tomorrow might not want to sample our music or work with our legacy codebases, but they won't thank us for taking the option off the table. There are many entities that are highly invested in endless copyright, creative trademark enforcement or patent maximalism, but what do they want? More importantly, how can they be stopped? It won't be easy, but there are some things you can do.

This talk will cover why it feels so darned difficult to get common sense policies in place. You'll learn about some likely avenues for political disruption, aka lobbying, voting and affecting policy. Consider attending this talk, for the children.

Photo under CC-BY 4.0 and courtesy of Ernie Kim.

The post-truth Santa Claus and the concealed present

FSF Latin America board member. LibrePlanet São Paulo activist. 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.

Photo under CC BY 3.0 and courtesy of Islene C. Garcia.

Algorithmic bias: Where it comes from and what to do about it

Andy Oram is a writer and editor at O'Reilly Media. As editor, he brought to publication O'Reilly's Linux series, the ground-breaking book Peer-to-Peer, and the best-seller Beautiful Code. In print, his articles have appeared in The Economist, Communications of the ACM, Copyright World, the Journal of Information Technology & Politics, Vanguardia Dossier, and Internet Law and Business. Conferences where he has presented talks include O'Reilly's Open Source Convention, FISL (Brazil), FOSDEM, and DebConf. He also participated in a panel about free software in government at the 2014 LibrePlanet conference. Andy participates in several groups in the Association for Computing Machinery policy organization, USACM. He also writes for various web sites about health IT and about issues in computing and policy.

SecureDrop: Leaking safely to modern news organizations

Conor Schaefer is the Senior DevOps Engineer for Freedom of the Press Foundation, specializing in automation and deployment for the SecureDrop platform. He has taught computer literacy and IT certification courses for the underprivileged, and worked as a GNU/Linux sysadmin and developer for academic researchers.

Will the FCC still ban your operating system? (Maybe.)

Eric Schultz is an independent software engineer and free software consultant. Currently, he is 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 free software projects. Eric has collaborated with employees from dozens of companies to create free 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, politics, sports and his Yorkie, Penelope.

Technology for direct actions

Andrew Seeder is an organizer at the Dudley Street Neighborhood Initiative in Roxbury. He is on the Technology Working Group for the Boston Ujima Project. He helps run cryptoparties. He is building Boston Meshnet with friends. Tweet him at @ahseeder. 3B48 B4BE F922 B906.

Prospects for free software and free culture in the workplace

Mustafa Shameem is a developer turned management/technology consultant advising Fortune 500 financial firms on strategy, project management, and software delivery. Additionally, he's an advocate for FOSS (Free and Open-Source Software), free culture, and cooperative, democratic forms of workplace organization. He currently works for EY as a Manager in Banking Technology Solution Delivery practice.

Meet them where they are: Free software and social justice today

Brett Smith is the Director of Strategic Initiatives at Software Freedom Conservancy. He works on a variety of the organization's programs, including project membership, outreach, and non-profit accounting. Over the years he's held a variety of advocacy and technical roles in free software. In the past he's been a developer and product manager at free software bioinformatics startup Curoverse; a system administration at the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C); and a license compliance engineer at the FSF.

Photo under CC-BY 3.0.

The set of programmers: How math restricts us

Carol Smith is a director of the Open Source Initiative. She has worked as an Education Partnership Program Manager at GitHub. Before GitHub, she managed the Google Summer of Code program for 6 years and worked at Google for over 10 years. She has a degree in Journalism from California State University, Northridge, and is a cook, cyclist, and horseback rider.

Let's encrypt office hours

Noah is a Staff Technologist on the Tech Projects team. He works on the various software the EFF produces and maintains, including but not limited to Privacy Badger and Certbot. Noah also works on the security and training materials that EFF uses to teach people about internet security and privacy.

Before joining EFF Noah was a researcher at the MIT Media Lab as well as a free software/culture advocate. Noah is an avid conference organizer and has organized events such as the Roguelike Celebration, LineConf, and the Stupid Shit That Nobody Needs and Terrible Ideas Hackathon. He lives in the Mission District of San Francisco with his family of twitterbots.

Photo under CC BY 3.0.

Free software & the law: A lighthearted trip down memory laney

Robinson has over a decade of experience in FOSS development, organization, & outreach, with an emphasis on Serious Games, productivity, & Higher Ed.

Currently the Director of FOSS Strategy at the LOT Network, he was Senior QA Engineer for The Document Foundation (TDF), Senior Developer At the Interactive Media Lab at the Geisel School of Medicine, & technical consultant at Tiltfactor Game Lab for Digital Humanities at Dartmouth College.

Robinson is a regular speaker at FOSS/Tech confs in US & Europe & serves on the Engineering Steering Committee for TDF.

Photo under CC-BY 4.0.

The Lisp machine and GNU

Lead developer of GNU MediaGoblin, Guile and Guix enthusiast, free software and free culture activist. Works on the ActivityPub federation standard, and way too many other things.

Photo under CC-BY 4.0.

Software heritage: Preserving the free software commons

Stefano Zacchiroli is Associate Professor of Computer Science at University Paris Diderot, on leave at Inria. His research interests span formal methods, software preservation, and free software engineering. He is co-founder and current CTO of the Software Heritage project. He is an official member of the Debian Project since 2001, where he was elected to serve as Debian Project Leader for three terms in a row over from 2010-2013. He is a Board Director of the Open Source Initiative (OSI) and recipient of the 2015 O'Reilly Open Source Award.