Amber Graner is an active Ubuntu community member and organizer who encourages everyone around her to participate, support, and learn about Ubuntu and Open Source. With a smile and a sense of humor, Amber reminds people that there is a place for everyone in the Ubuntu community – regardless of technical skill level (or lack thereof). She is constantly looking for people, places, and events within the Ubuntu community that help inspire Ubuntu users to participate actively within the Ubuntu community.

Other Blog: http://www.ubuntu-user.com/Online/Blogs/Amber-Graner-You-in-Ubuntu

Ari Lerner is a lead research engineer on the cloudteam at AT&T interactive. He has been working in the clouds for several years, back when it was called distributed computing! He develops primarily in ruby and erlang in the open-source community and loves the MIT license.

Bob Reselman is a Senior Technical Writer and Technical Editor for Edmunds Inc. Edmunds Inc. is a leading publisher of high volume, high availability, state of the art, Java based Web sites dedicated to empowering the automotive consumer. Experience Edmunds technology by visiting, www.Edmunds.com and www.InsideLine.com.

Bob is the author of many articles and books on computer programming including ASP 3.0 by Example and the novel, Coding Slave.

Brian has spent his life working on the details of how to build and scale out systems. He is currently working on a new MicroKernel designed MySQL called Drizzle and is building the plumbing required for a new generation of large scale computer deployment. He also spends time working on Apache Modules, Memcached, and Gearman. He is employed by Sun Microsystems as a Distinguished Engineer.

Unlike most engineers you will never find him in a cubicle, he spends much of his time traveling around the planet enjoying the diversity that is our world. In the past, he has been involved with projects for the Army Engineer Corps, The Virtual Hospital, Splunk, MySQL, and Slashdot. He calls Seattle his home since that is where his dog Rosalynd is.

Caryl BIgenho is a retired Los Angeles educator She spent 30 years teaching math, science, and computer science and serving as a counselor at the secondary level.

In 2007 she was a "First Day Donor" in OLPCs G1G1 program. Soon after receiving her XO in November 2007, she joined the OLPC support-gang. She continues to volunteer with OLPC and also with Sugar Labs, testing software and providing a teacher's perspective.

At SCaLE 7X, Caryl set up and ran an OLPC booth with XOs for hands-on testing. She spoke at the 2008 CUE conference and presented the XOs at LAUSD's Technology Expo at the LA Convention Center.

This summer she spoke to the Bozeman MT LUG about the OLPC Contributors Program which provides XOs on long term loans for people to do projects that will benefit the OLPC community as a whole.

Although her programming skills stopped with Pascal, her keen interest in technology in the schools and its impact on society continues.

Chris McEniry left the Massachusetts Institute of Technology with a BS-EECS in 2000, and has spent over ten years as an official and unofficial systems administrator. He can most recently be found in Southern California, helping to keep the lights on with Sony Computer Entertainment America (aka Playstation).

Christina has been involved in different communities, including the Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) movement, the women's movement and academia with experience centered in hacktivism, training and research. A former Managing Director of Internet Rights Bulgaria Foundation and ex-Coordinator of the Women's Information Technology Transfer (WITT), she has dedicated her last years to completing an MA thesis on the topic: Women's Contribution to FOSS Development at the University of Quebec in Montreal, Canada.
Christina's experience in FOSS is related to participation in creating the FSA – Bulgaria, leading the Legal Case Management (LCM) Project, being a LPI Proctor, a SPIP-bg translator. Long years training experience in strategic communication, website creation and use of FOSS (among which Ubuntu GNU/Linux and Drupal). Christina has given a number of presentations including the Know-How in Mexico city(2006), Oekonux in Manchester, UK(2009), and the FSCONS in Gothenburg, Sweden(2009).

David has been a system administrator at the University of Wisconsin Computer Science Department since 1991, serving as Associate Director of the Computer Systems Lab since 1995, and as Interim Director since April 2009. At the Lab he has worked as a system administrator for various systems and services; as a manager; served on several campus committees; and collaborated with other groups on campus. In the CS Department he works with faculty, staff and graduate students to support and contribute to their research projects and the instructional program. He also trains, manages and work with the undergraduate student system administration staff. Areas of responsibility and experience include policy development, security, network administration, liaison with the research projects, and a overall technical leadership. At various times he have been staff for specific research projects.

In addition to his work at the University, David is active in LOPSA, the League of Professional System Administrators. He is currently on the LOPSA Board of Directors, and gives system administration talks and system administration training at various events. In his free time, he flys single engine prop planes and both plays and officiates ice hockey.

I am an active maintainer for a number of packages that are part of the GNU project, including GNU Common C , GNU ccScript, GNU ccRTP, and GNU ccAudio, as well as the GNU telephony application server, GNU Bayonne, and GNU SIP Witch call server. I have served as the voluntary chairman of the FSF's DotGNU steering committee (http://www.dotgnu.org), and as the communities elected representative to the International Softswitch Consortium.

Out of curiosity, Diana attended SCALE 7x in 2009 as a fresh noob to open source and linux. As was the case with many before her, she came out of the expo inspired by the new ideas, the communities and the opportunity to contribute new ideas. Diana now contributes online through forums, personal advocacy, documentation, and bug reports. Furthermore, the expo introduced her to web design, and she has learned to hand code in html/css. Also, the python language has especially caught her attention and she has taught herself to program with the help of books, open courseware, and online tutorials. She is now a happy Ubuntu user and plans to add to her repertoire of programming languages and to help any potential enthusiasts get started.

Diana holds a bachelor's degree in psychology and pre-medical studies from University of California Berkeley. Instead of becoming a doctor, she decided to try other stuff, like high-tech public relations and online marketing. Nowadays, when she is not glued to her computer screen, she is an international flight attendant and enjoys catching glimpses of shooting stars from the window of a 777. She also loves learning new languages, not just those on the computer, and would love a chance to bring tears to your eyes with her French.

Doug is the founder and CEO of Hypertable, Inc, a company that provides commercial support for Hypertable, a massively scalable, open source database. Doug started the Hypertable open source project in 2007, while working as an Architect at Zvents, and has been actively building the technology ever since. Doug has over a decade of software engineering experience in the area of distributed computing and information retrieval. He joined Inktomi’s Web Search division in 1997 where he held both engineering and management positions. During his five year tenure, he designed and developed large-scale distributed systems, including significant pieces of the crawling and indexing software. Doug earned a B.S. in Computer Science from U.C. Santa Barbara in 1992 and holds four patents in search technology.

Emma Jane Hogbin has been working as a web developer since 1996. Her infectious enthusiasm and ability to explain concepts without using technical jargon puts even the greatest technophobes at ease. Passionate about helping people to acquire knowledge, Emma Jane volunteers with the Drupal and Ubuntu documentation teams, has co-authored a best selling book, Front End Drupal, and has written several articles for Linux Pro Magazine. In 2010 she is open sourcing her business with monthly DIY open source business kits (www.100mileclientroster.com).

Well-known in the open source community for her technical knowledge, Emma also uses her enthusiastic Canadian humour to bring open source to a wider audience…such as the Drupal socks and their GPLed pattern. Through her consulting company HICK Tech, and at conferences around the world, Emma Jane has inspired people to overcome fear, uncertainty, and doubt and to tackle problems head-on. She chronicles her adventures at www.emmajane.net.

As Chief Technology Officer of DisklessWorkstations.com, Erick strives to provide the Thin Client market with quality hardware solutions. Erick has been involved in the successful deployment of Linux, LTSP and open source solutions for the desktop in retail, manufacturing and distribution since 1995. Erick worked as the Chief Technology Officer for one of the largest retail florists in the country, integrating multiple platforms into one cohesive environment. He also holds a degree in accounting.

After many years as a software developer -- first on UNIX, then Linux -- Jake Edge started covering Linux and free software topics for LWN.net. He started free-lancing for LWN in 2003, mostly covering security issues, then joined LWN as full-time editor in 2007. Since that time he has written about a wide variety of topics of interest to free software developers. He lives in western Colorado with his wife Kristine and two loony dogs.

Jason Haslup is responsible for the development of Go Daddy Web-based Email and various email products. Jason has also held development and leadership roles in the Shared Hosting product line, with a focus on Linux and Open Source applications.

Prior to joining Go Daddy in 2005, Jason worked as a software developer working primarily in a Linux environment for companies both large and small. He holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Computer Science from the University of Arizona and a Masters degree in Computer Engineering from NTU. Outside the office, Jason enjoys contributing to Open Source projects, learning new technologies and keeping up with his young daughters.

Jeff Maier is a Field Applications Engineer with MontaVista Software with expertise in Security, Networking and Operating Systems. Jeff started his career writing flight code for GPS satellites as a Summer Technical hire at Rockwell International Space Systems.  He then moved on to create a dozen video games including the "Cabbage Patch Kids" video games for Coleco, and the "Urban Surfin' " and "Air Boardin'" interactive simulators for his company, Surf Systems. Jeff not only wrote the code, but designed and produced the artwork and the music for all of his games. Jeff is an accomplished author and songwriter and his work can be viewed at www.yogishanti.com

Jon A. Cruz is a professional developer with over 20 years of experience, working extensively in multimedia, including programming and 3D art creation, and has developed for a wide variety of platforms. Work includes R&D for mobile and other devices, servers for large mail and messaging systems, enterprise security applications, and user interface design and development. Currently he is involved in Open Source as a core developer and board member with Inkscape, is working on more comprehensive integration of LittleCMS and color management features, tablet enhancements and general UI features.

He represents Inkscape with the OpenICC and Create projects, focusing on shared resources and collaboration with other software. He has participated as a mentor in Google's Summer of Code since its first year with Inkscape and recently also for OpenICC. He was a keynote speaker at SVG Open 2008, and presented talks at Linux.conf.au 2009 and 2010, the Libre Graphics Meetings in Lyon and Montreal, and various Java users' groups.

Josh Berkus is best known for his role on the Core Team of the world-spanning PostgreSQL Project, but he has been involved in many other open source projects, including CivicDB, Open Source For America, O'Reilly OSCON, Perl, OpenSQL Camp, and several others. He is CEO of PostgreSQL Experts, a professional services company for PostgreSQL applications. And he's a darned good cook.

Karen Sandler is an attorney with the Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC) and serves as an officer of the Software Freedom Conservancy. Prior to joining SFLC, she worked as an associate at Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher LLP and Clifford Chance. Sandler received her law degree from Columbia Law School, where she was a Kent Scholar and co-founder of the Columbia Science and Technology Law Review. Sandler received her bachelor's degree in engineering from The Cooper Union.

Katherine Druckman is an HTML-flinging, PHP-hacking Linux Journal Webmistress by day, and a refined connoisseur of hostoric architecture and fine Chinese ceramics by night. She usually can be found surrounded by the charm of aging Texas buildings from the pioneer days or appreciating ceramics of the Song and Qing dynasties. Well, either that or sitting in a comfy chair with a laptop. Yeah, probably the laptop thing.

Now in her third year heading all things LinuxJournal.com, Katherine's experiences in web publishing for the open source audience have strengthened her stance as an impassioned Drupal fangirl.

Ken has been working in the IT field since the early 80's, first as a hardware tech whose oscilloscope was always by his side, and currently as a system administrator and consultant. Ken began working with Unix in 1989 with Digital Equipment Corporations Ultrix and with Linux since 1995. Supporting both Windows and Linux, Windows keeps him consistently busy while Linux keeps his job fun.

Kyle Rankin is a systems architect for Quinstreet Inc.; the current president of the North Bay Linux Users' Group; the author of The Official Ubuntu Server Book, Knoppix Hacks, Knoppix Pocket Reference, Linux Multimedia Hacks, and Ubuntu Hacks; and a contributer to a number of other O'Reilly books. Rankin is a columnist for Linux Journal, has written for PC Magazine, TechTarget websites and other publications. He speaks frequently on Open Source software including at OSCON, Linux World Expo, Penguicon, and a number of Linux Users' Groups.

Mirano is 12 years old and attends school in Aptos, CA. She is interested in art, computer games, music, role play, food, and writing. Mirano may never give you a serious answer about what she sees in her future, but she might say, "Stay tuned for more processing information ..."

Malakai is 12 years old and homeschools in Santa Cruz, CA. Malakai's passions include music, dance, theater, fashion, writing, art & manga, and role play. If you ask her what she wants to do when she is older, she is likely to say, "Please wait patiently until I have more information."

Saskia is 8 years old and homeschools in Santa Cruz, CA. Her favorite things include dance, music, reading, role play, sports, and going to the beach. Saskia probably won't tell you what she wants to do later in life, and that's OK.

Matthew Tippett has been involved one way or another with Linux or it's community since 1992.

Recent work has been with Phoronix Media defining features and functions with the Phoronix Test Suite, a benchmarking and validation test suit for Linux and other Unix OSes.

Professionally, Matthew manages teams of engineers developing Linux drivers at Palm, and previously at AMD.

Neil is a dentist who's interest in GNU/linux and open source applications co-incided with a deep disastisfaction with his commercial IT solutions supplier.

This prompted him to develop his own client/server application from scratch to run in his sucessful, multi surgery practice.

Along the way, Neil had to learn python, pyqt, version control, make licensing decisions, debian packaging, gnu translation tools and the list continues.

Neil does not claim to be anything other than an enthusiastic amateur is all these technologies, but he wants to get the message across that ANYONE can create their own IT solutions if they have the desire and passion to learn.

For the past decade, Ragi has worked on projects to build/revamp/maintain core technologies/data pipelines for different multinational companies as well as provided solutions for organizations like the National GeoSpatial Agency (formerly NIMA), National Geographic, United Kingdom Hydrographic Office, Navteq, TeleAtlas and several International Governments.

Currently, he runs his own geospatial consulting company and during his spare time, he is an active member of OSGeo where he promotes the use of Open Source Geospatial solutions.

Richard Fontana is Red Hat's Open Source Licensing Counsel. At Red Hat he spends most of his time advising developers about licensing, copyright and patent issues, educating non-developers about FOSS legal culture, and promoting open standards and intellectual property law reform.

Before joining Red Hat, Fontana was an attorney at the Software Freedom Law Center, where his principal client was the Free Software Foundation. He was co-author, with Richard Stallman and Eben Moglen, of the GNU GPL, version 3.

Rob Savoye is a long-time developer for the GNU project. Rob has been programming for 32 years, Rob started working with GCC & GDB in the 1980s, joined Cygnus Support in the beginning, and has worked on many GNU projects from GCC, GDB, newlib, autotools, and Cygwin, to various bits of GNU/Linux. Rob is also the primary author of libgloss, DejaGnu, GnuAE, PowerGuru, and lately Gnash. Rob was also the software architect of eCOS, and somehow wound up as a listed NASA inventor.

Creative Director Trinity Audio Group Inc.

Development Projects - Trinity DAW, a hand held Linux based recording studio with professional inputs and outputs.

Commercial Projects - Indamixx Portable Studio
Mobile DAW products utilizing UMPC, Netbook and Ultra Thin platforms.

Sarah Mei has been doing cutting-edge software development for more than 10 years. In 2009 she co-founded RailsBridge, a nonprofit dedicated to keeping the community around Ruby and Rails open and welcoming to all. As the lead of the Open Workshop project at RailsBridge, she organizes and teaches free workshops in San Francisco for women who want to learn Ruby on Rails. Last year over 200 women and girls learned Ruby through her efforts, and in 2010, her goal is to reach 500 more.

Shawn Pearce is the second in command of the Git project. He has been actively involved in the project since early 2006, contributing more than 1300 changes in 3 years. Shawn is the author of git-gui, a Tk based graphical interface shipped with git, and git-fast-import, a stream based import system often used for converting projects to git. Besides being the primary author of both git-gui and git-fast-import, Shawn's opinion, backed by his code, has influenced many key design decisions that form the modern git implementation.

In early 2006 Shawn also founded the JGit project, creating a 100% pure Java reimplementation of the Git version control system. The JGit library can often be found in Java based products that interact with Git, including plugins for Eclipse and NetBeans IDEs, the Hudson CI server, Apache Maven, and Gerrit Code Review, a peer code review system specially designed for Git. Today he continues to develop and maintain JGit, EGit, and Gerrit Code Review.

Ski's system administration career started when he was a mechanical engineer at a large company and they needed someone to maintain their data collection systems. After 10 years he was leading teams that maintained several hundred AIX workstations. The next 10 years he spent in IT management for small software firms leading teams of 3 to 10 people. He currently works as the system administrator for a school district supporting 100+ servers along with 6000 Mac workstations and is the owner of CCK Technologies which provides technology consulting for school districts and small software companies.

Ski has extensive experience with the challenges of small to medium business and education infrastructure buildouts, IT team creation, and Unix. Ski is a director of LOPSA, the League of Professional System Administrators and an active member of SASAG, the Seattle Area System Administrator Guild. He has taught classes in Linux, Perl, C, C++, and Operating Systems at Bellevue Community College and City University and given talks at SASAG and LinuxFest NW events.

In his free time, Ski is a member of KCESAR, King County Explorer Search and Rescue and loves to hike, bike, kayak, and nordic ski (of course) with his family in the Seattle WA area.

Stephen Spector brings more than 15 years' experience and success in software engineering, product marketing, and developer and alliance marketing programs to the Xen.org community as the current community program manager. He has spent more than 10 years at Citrix founding the Citrix Developer Network and supporting the release of the first Windows CE 1.0 client, as well as working on various marketing and alliance programs. He has previously held various positions at Turbolinux, Racal Datacom, and Siemens. Stephen holds an MBA from Florida Atlantic University, an MS in computer science from the University of Florida, and a BS in computer engineering from The Ohio State University.

Steven Doran is a software developer in the Aerospace field and has developed a variety of embedded software applications for Space, Air, and Sea including the F-22 Inertial Navigation System, the Expendable Mine Detection System, and Satellite Attitude Control. Steven Doran graduated at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University with a degree in Computer Science and is currently enrolled in the Computer Science Graduate program at Loyola Marymount University.