eLiberatica 2009 speakers list |
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Renowned FLOSS experts, IT personalities, business people, government representatives, developers and students from all over the world will meet at eLiberatica to share their expertise and experience with their Romanian peers. Confirmed Speakers |
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Richard Matthew Stallman 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 Stallman also launched the Free Software Movement. In October 1985 he started the Free Software Foundation. There are too many things to say about Richard; we only wish to mention how happy we are that this year he will send a video presentation in exclusivity for eLiberatica attendees. We hope that next year he will come in flesh to our event. Monty Widenius has written 95 percent of the server code in MySQL. His database software programming dates back to 1978, and his working with TCX DataKonsult AB to 1981. Since 1995, he has been the primary force behind MySQL, devoting his time to product development, answering emails, attending conferences and educating MySQL developers. In 2003 Monty was awarded the Software Entrepreneur of The Year by swbusiness.fi. By January 2008, Sun Microsystems announced its intention to purchase MySQL for US $1 billion. A few months ago, Monty started a new organization named Monty Program which he will introduce it to you this year. We are so happy to have him again at eLiberatica. Georg Greve is a self-taught software developer with several years of experience on the job, and traditionally trained Physicist. Experienced writer with over a hundred published articles in English and German. Eight years of experience in the coordination of a multi-national organisation. Over seven years of experience in international policy at the United Nations, European Commission and in various countries, with focus on Information Technology related policy. Several years of experience coordinating interdisciplinary, international activities, often involving multiple organisations. Experienced speaker with speeches and keynotes at conferences and training seminars addressing a wide variety of audiences, including UNCTAD, the WorldBank and various training institutes. Strong background and interest in interdisciplinary policy issues involving technology, law and society. Adam Jollans is currently leading the worldwide Open Source & Linux strategy for IBM Software Group. This role covers a wide spectrum of activities, from understanding the market and working with customers, to developing IBM's Open Source & Linux software strategy, to briefing analysts and press. He is based in Hursley, England, and has been involved with Linux since 1998. He joined IBM in 1984, and since then has worked in a range of technical, sales and marketing roles - most of them associated with PC and small systems hardware and software. He graduated from the University of Cambridge, England in 1980 with a degree in Computer Science, and is a Chartered Engineer and a Member of the British Computer Society. In the winter of 2005, Lucian introduced to Zak Greant his thought of setting up an open source event in Romania. The idea was simple: to invite Zak and a few other high profile speakers to present in his homeland. This is how eLiberatica was born. Lucian were wearing many hats in his IT career, starting with web development and UX and finishing with web marketing and product promotion. John Koetsier's career focus is humanizing technology in the education space. He has created three course management systems over the past decade using free and open source technologies ... learning a little bit more each time. Currently serving as COO/Software Architect for EasyBits Software Canada and working on projects such as the user interface for Intel's Classmate PC, he has over 15 years experience in the business of education and technology. Previous positions include Director of Product Development for School Specialty Planning & Student Development and Technology Solutions Manager for Premier Agendas. Koetsier is currently in the last year of the Master of Educational Technology program at the University of British Columbia, and blogs on technology, social media, and education at Sparkplug 9. George Mitropoulos is a technology business development professional, with 13+ years of experience in several IT-Business related positions. His professional experience demonstrates a positive exposure in different roles, company sizes, customer industries, and cultures, including experience across Emerging Markets of Eastern Europe geographies. With Sun, George is effectively focused on leading Solutions Sales and supporting alliances that enable Sun to answer business issues expressed by customer executives. His academic background includes 2 master's degrees, in Information Systems and in Business Administration, while a range of professional certifications compliment his ongoing training. Long-time activist and evangelist of open standards and free software, co-author of the MozillaPL and Aviary.pl projects. He works at Mozilla Corporation on developing Mozilla Firefox and related online technologies, he helps grow communities and studies sources of motivation of volunteers. He is also studying sociology, blogging, playing Irish flute and guitar as well as training mixed martial arts because they are so different from sitting behind the desk :-) Adrian Curaj is a Professor at the Automatic Control and Computers Faculty, and Director of the Centre for Strategic Management at the POLITEHNICA University of Bucharest. He has been the Director of the Executive Agency for Higher Education and Research Funding in Romania since 2000, and a Vice-President of the National University Research Council since 2008. During 2007-2008 he served as the advisor of the Prime Minister, on IT&C, e-Governance, and Science and Technology. Adrian Curaj has more than 15 years experience in Science, Innovation and Higher Education programmes and policies. He has been working as consultant with World Bank, UNESCO, UNIDO and EC for studies in Tertiary Education, Science and Innovation, and Foresight. He coordinated the first National Foresight Exercise in S&T (2005-2006). He is acting as coordinator of the strategic project Quality and Leadership in Higher Education - The Future of the Romanian Higher Education (2009-2011), funded by European Structural Funds. He is a member of the External Advisory Board-PEOPLE, European Commission, DG-R, since 2007 and a member of the National UNESCO Commission. Jérôme graduated from Telecom Lille 1, a French engineering school specialized in telecommunications and network engineering. Through his studies and internships experiences, he found great interest in software development, in particular open source engineering and its applicable business strategies. Early in 2007, he joined as a software developer XWiki, the company that develops the open source XWiki platform and products, and markets it through customers, partners and research projects. He his an active XWiki commiter, and now manages the development of the Romanian subsidiary of the company, in Iasi. Jérôme is especially interested in the impact open source engineering has on real-world: from the new economic models it creates, the values and ethics it brings to businesses, to the power it gives back to its communities. Dr. Sabin Buraga is an associate professor at the Faculty of Computer Science of the "Alexandru Ioan Cuza" University of Iasi, Romania. He is a recipient of the "Gh. Cartianu" Award of the Romanian Academy and he considers himself as an academic "evangelist" of the most important existing Web technologies, by writing books and making presentations focused on significant aspects regarding open source and related topics. Recent technical talks include: Web Horizons (Internetics 2008), Why Web 3.0? (Iashington International Conference 2008), Are You Afraid Of Semantic Web? (eLiberatica 2007), From Metadata to Microformats (<Web />2006). More details about his professional and artistic activities are available on purl.org. You also follow him on Twitter. Eduard was the initiator and developer of the Concept Application Server in 2002. Now he is mainly focused on developing CAS and GyroGears, driven purely by the fun he has programming. He actually wrote about 90% of the CAS core without being paid. He specified and implemented the Concept Programming Language, a strict object-oriented programming language that runs on a virtual machine. After implementing other compilers and interpreters, he discovered the open source community with the variety of available projects that boosted the CAS implementation. He understood how the open source movement will provide key advantages for developers, and decided to go with an open source license for CAS. Vasile is a researcher at Romanian National Meteorological Administration, working in the Remote Sensing & GIS Laboratory since 2001. He received his diploma in cartography and physical geography in 2001. Currently is in charge of the scientific and operational activities in Meteo Romania related to rapid mapping, air quality data integration, spatial data infrastructure and web mapping. Vasile is a FOSS4G (free and open source software for geospatial) promoter and use his free time to further develop geo-spatial.org (http://earth.unibuc.ro/), a collaborative effort by and for the Romanian community to facilitate the sharing of geospatial knowledge and the discovery and publishing of free geographic datasets and maps. Dragos Manac is Lead Operations at System & Network Solutions (SNS),
a Romanian company representing Red Hat as a business partner and one of the first companies in Romania
to offer dedicated services in the Linux/UNIX area.
In the 6 years of activity SNS has done various projects, from video streaming and VoIP to web applications and HA/HPC clusters. Maria Diaconu's international experience in Agile software development is based on almost ten years of successful work in various and complex projects in Romania, France and Belgium. Starting the IT career as a high school teacher she continued to enlarged her horizon working as software developer, team leader, project manager and quality manager. Maria is working in the present as software consultant, methodologies trainer and coach, guiding people and teams that want to develop high quality software and increase their productivity. She is also a certified Scrum Master and CMMI® practitioner and holds a university degree in Economic Informatics. Ken Schwaber co-developed the Scrum process with Jeff Sutherland in the early 1990s to help organizations struggling with complex development projects. One of the signatories to the Agile Manifesto in 2001, he subsequently founded the AgileAlliance, a nonprofit organization dedicated to the creation of Agile software. He then founded the ScrumAlliance, a nonprofit organization dedicated to expanding the understanding of Scrum. A 30-year veteran of the software development industry (from bottle washer to boss), he has written three books about Scrum: Agile Software Development with Scrum, Agile Project Management with Scrum, and The Enterprise and Scrum. Juergen leads at ISM eCompany a horde of 100 employees. He is primarily interested in software engineering, quality improvement and complexity theory, from a manager's perspective. He is a writer, having published a number of papers and articles in several magazines, like Dr. Dobb's, Software Quality Professional, The Software Practitioner, etc. He is also a speaker, being regularly invited to talk at seminars and conferences about agile software development, project management, process improvement, and development management. However, sometimes he puts all writing, speaking and managing aside to do some intensive programming or to spend time on his ever-growing collection of science fiction and fantasy literature. Mircea is co-founder at balaur.ro, vice-president and co-founder at infoarena.ro and is working Scrum in UberVU team. In summer of 2008 he worked as Software Engineer Intern at Google and in summer of 2007 he worked as Software Developer Intern at Microsoft. He is co-author at "Fundamentele programarii" - programming manual for high-schools. In the last few years he gained multiple awards, two of them being Gold Medal at International Informatics Olympics, Merida (2006), Mexico and Silver Medal at International Informatics Olympics, Nowy Sacz, Poland (2005). Lucian is Project Manager at Luxoft Romania (former ITC Networks). He has more than eight years of experience in Software Development focused on Networking and Telecom. He discovered Scrum three years ago when he switched from a Waterfall approach to Agile. He faced the cultural changes that are involved in such a transition, the typical answer "This won't work in our case" being history. Now Scrum feels so natural and nobody wants to go back to Waterfall. Lucian has experience with implementing Scrum in large distributed teams, with more than 30 Engineers in three countries, where communication is the key factor. He created tools for "Release Tracking" and "Quality Metrics" that helped everybody to "Feel the Projects", including Engineers, Product Managers and Senior Management team. |
Danese Cooper has a 15-year history in the software industry and has long been an advocate for transparent development methodologies. She worked for six years at Sun like Chief Open Source Evangelist and helped on the inception and growth of the various open source projects (including OpenOffice.org, java.net and blogs.sun.com). From March 2005 till a few weeks ago when she joined REvolution Computing, Danese worked for Intel as a Sr. Director of Open Source Strategy where she advised on open source projects, investment and support. She has unique experience implementing open source projects from within a large proprietary company. She joined the OSI Board in December 2001 and currently serves as Secretary & Treasurer. She is also a member of the Apache Software Foundation. David Axmark is one of the founders of MySQL and worked with the product well before it had a name. He has worked as a consultant and software developer for nearly 20 years. Interested in free software since the early '80s, David has been committed to developing a successful business model through open source software. He has been involved with MySQL development from its beginning along with the fellow co-founder Michael Widenius. After MySQL acquisition by Sun, David left the organization and in the present he currently focuses on open source licensing aspects, community relations and evangelism. This year, he is joining Monty to present at eLiberatica. A rare moment for Romanians to meet some of the people who changed the IT world. Valer Mischenko is director of NLnet. He graduated from the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology after studying spacecraft control systems, algorithms, and software. He later obtained a degree in business administration. Valer participated in several Russian, European and international space projects before he finally settled down in the Netherlands. His view on society developments is "give people the freedom of choice in order to get the most of their innovative capabilities". Next to his work at NLnet Valer is developing the Instant Payment Flow concept and technology in collaboration with several universities. His ultimate objective in this is to develop open source technologies that can be used to prevent monopolies in the payment sector. NLnet Foundation stimulates network research and development in the domain of Internet technology. NLnet does not directly benefit from the undertaken projects, and all developments are published as Open Source. Free software activist since 1994. Founding member of the Spanish Linux users association Hispalinux. Member of the GNOME Foundation, the Foundation for a Free Information Infrastructure, the Instituto de Estudios Almerienses and is a visiting lecturer at the Instituto Superior de Estudios e Investigaciones Tecnolológicas. In his work career had been CTO of one of the very first commercial linux distributions in Spain, HispaFuentes Linux, and now manages their own consulting company, Planeta Olea SL, specialized on technology strategy and consultancy about free libre open source software, and the digital revolution. Besides these organizations, Ismael is deeply involved in the OSOR project managed by the European Commission program, IDABC. Jeroen van Meeuwen is a die-hard Linux user ever since Red Hat Linux 5.2 (Sept. 1998). He has worked with the Fedora Project on several important components and projects. For one, Jeroen is the author of Revisor - a distribution compose tool that enables anyone to customize, remix or remaster the Fedora distribution. With the Fedora Unity Project, Jeroen has remastered Fedora, re-introduced CD media, built and released the infamous Everything Spin, and as the Spins SIG leader, is now also in charge of the approval and creation of all Fedora live media. From within both the Fedora Infrastructure and his job, Jeroen has a lot of experience with Puppet. Having authored an OPL-licensed workshop based on Puppet and puppetmanaged.org, Jeroen certainly is an expert on large-scale configuration management. Having done the largest part of his work for the Fedora Project in his own free time, Jeroen was awarded RHCE of the Year 2008. In 1991, still a student, Remus Cazacu, together with 2 associates,
founded an IT and networking company for hardware, networking and software sales and support. Constantin Teodorescu is involved in major IT projects using FLOSS and is a noted guest speaker at many conferences on the applicability and advantages of open software and Linux OS. A dedicated Open Source supporter, Teo was involved in the development of PostgreSQL. His articles on the implementation of new technologies and alternative FLOSS solutions have been published in PC Magazine, BYTE Romania, PC Report and eWeek Romania. As former Secretary of State, Romanian Ministry of Communications and Information Technology he introduced the Government's Decision to adopt OpenID for Public Digital ID Providers in Romania. Teo was a surprise guest last year at eLiberatica when he represented the Romanian IT Minister. He had one of the most acclaimed speeches, the attendees loved him. So we decided that he is a must be for eLiberatica this year ;) Mircea is a core developer and trainer for JBoss application server. For the last two years he has been involved with research and development of JBoss middleware clustering stack, focusing on JGroups and JBossCache. His experience also include 6 years of JEE development with various application servers and tools, as well as academic research in the field of UML and distributed component models at Babes-Bolyai University, Cluj Napoca. Right now Mircea works on the next generation clustering solution for JBoss application server. Alina is a Free Software, Open Standards and Open Source Development Model activist and evangelist. She is now is contributing to Mozilla Europe by helping with community building and community marketing for Romanian and Catalan Mozilla communities. She is also collaborating with OSOR project as news reporter. During the last 5 years she has been contributing in various FLOSS projects, organizing events and seminars, public speaking about FLOSS, building communities and coordinating projects. She strongly believes in the importance of educating people in Free Software and Open Source. Even he is a physicist (graduated the Physics in Iasi) he reoriented his activity to network administration, obtaining a master degree in Network Security. As a regional technical manager for the Eastern and Oriental Europe, Calin have under technical coordination and survey 7 implantations of the Agency in the region. He is member of a team of 11 technicians from the 9 regional branches, which establish the best software and technical solutions for the Agency's activities. Felix Enescu is VP Consulting & EXP with KPC Group, Gartner Representative in Romania. Felix is also the President and founder of CIO Council, the only industry association representing the interests of corporate IT clients. Tibi promotes users' freedom and enjoys working for the public benefit
together with the nice people from Free Software communities. In the
past three years Tibi co-founded and coordinated two such Romanian
communities.
Also, in the autumn of 2008 he co-started a new rather courageous
project, designed to build a hierarchically simple structured
community on the principles of free arts, free technologies, free
market, IT localization, Romanian culture and humor. The group is
called Ceata ("Ceata sets free art and actual technologies"). Iosif has 12 years experience in the IT field. He started his career as a system engineer, but a few years later he redirected his activity towards software development and web-design. In 2006 he was included within the team of the IOSSPL international project (Integrated Open-Source System for Public Libraries). Iosif actively participated in the implementation and training courses dedicated to the opne-source IBLA Soft system across the country and the further development of the system, promoting the benefits of the open-source philosophy and community. In 2008 he participated as a Short Term EU Expert for the European project "Transparency - Law Transparency in Romania" for the pilot sub-project dedicated to analysis and modernizing the libraries of all the Courts of Appeal in Romania, by developing the IBLA Soft version dedicated to juridical libraries. Zoli, National Technology Officer at Microsoft, is passionate about business intelligence, security and development processes. With an IT experience of 16 years, he was a trainer, consultant and manager of a training & consulting company. Seeking to increase adoption of new technologies and raising the satisfaction of the Romanian architects, developers and IT professionals, Zoli is now one of the evangelists from Microsoft. Blog: zoli.herczeg.ro. Todi, Platform Strategy Manager at Microsoft, is involved in initiatives that incubate new technologies and new approaches for Microsoft's business model. Most recently, Todi started conversations with Open Source communities like PHP Fusion Romania and started the BizSpark program for software startups. Blog: studentclub.ro/todi. Corey is currently a freelance developer and journeyman, traveling around to pair-program with other developers. He is an active member in the software craftsmanship movement, focusing his attention on post-apprenticeship activities. He started programming in the early 80's by cheating at video games (they weren't compiled back then) and fell in love with development as a teenager. He currently specializes in Ruby, but will pair in just about any language you want. Ovidiu is a young online entrepreneur, software developer and new marketing enthusiastic. He holds a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science and is now studying Business Management at Babes Bolyai University. In the last six years, Ovidiu gained experience developing software working for companies in Cluj Napoca where he worked on the development of different enterprise solutions. At the beginning of 2009, driven by a personal vision of how the industry will evolve, by using Agile methods of work he launched www.Lucrez.in/IT, one of the first business social networks for Romanian IT professionals and IT companies. Mihnea is studying Informatics at University Bucharest and is working Agile/Scrum in UberVU team. In summer of 2008 he worked as Software Engineer Intern at Google Mountain View. During high-school and University he participated in many programming contests. When having time, he participates in English-debate contests throughout Europe. Razvan Gliga is IT Architect at IBM Romania, having a broad experience in software development projects, started on early 90's. He worked on more than 15 software development projects, ranged from COTS, national systems, enterprise systems and embedded, having different roles, including software developer, project manager, solution architect and technical team leader. In his activity he used Scrum, RUP and other software development processes and methodologies, and also helped different organizations to embrace Scrum, or to adapt internal software development methodologies. Alexandru is Software development consultant and trainer, helping customers develop high quality software. The main project he's involved in is an innovative eHealth project. He also works in partnership with Mosaic Works on various projects related to improving the quality of the software developed in Romania. He studied in the recent years the influence of human factor in software development and continues to work to find ways to improve the software quality. |
Richard Stallman The founder of 
"Monty" Michael Widenius CEO & VP Community, 
Georg C. F. Greve President, 
Adam Jollans Worldwide Open Source Strategy Manager,
Lucian Savluc eLiberatica Conference Chair,
John Koetsier 
George Mitropoulos Global Systems Engineering Leader, 
Zbigniew Branecki Mozilla Representative, 
Eng. Ph.D Adrian Curaj Centre for Strategic Management Director, 
Jérôme Velociter Manager for Romania, 
Dr. Sabin Buraga Associate Professor, 
Eduard Suica Founder, 
Vasile Craciunescu Researcher, 
Dragos Manac Lead Operations,
Maria Diaconu Chair & Event Coordinator, 
Ken Schwaber Co-developer of Scrum (
Jurgen Appelo Chief Information Officer (
Mircea Pasoi Co-founder and Software Engineer (
Lucian Parvu Project Manager (
Danese Cooper Open Source Diva, 
David Axmark Co-Founder of 
Valer Mischenko Director, 
Ismael Olea 
Jeroen van Meeuwen Board Member and Vice President, 
Remus Cazacu Genaral Manager, 
"Teo" Constantin Teodorescu Software Project Manager, 
Mircea Markus R&D 
Alina Mierlus Community Building,
Calin Dordia Regional Technical Manager, 
Felix Enescu VP Consulting & EXP for Romania,
Tiberiu Turbureanu Free Software Activist and Community Leader, 
Iosif Biro Business Development & IT Trainings Manager,
Zoli Herczeg National Technology Officer,
Todi Pruteanu Platform Strategy Manager,
Corey Haines Software Journeyman (
Ovidiu Negrean Founder and Owner (
Mihnea Giurgea Software Engineer (
Razvan Gliga IT Architect (
Alex Bolboaca Consultant and Trainer, (Note: Due to factors outside of our control, this list is subject to change. Any kind of change is going to be reflected under this section as soon as possible.