Sam Ramji

Sonoa Systems

Sam Ramji is Vice President of Strategy at Sonoa, a provider of analytics, management and cloud governance solutions for APIs and cloud services. Sonoa is focused on accelerating the arrival of the open cloud economy.

Prior to Sonoa, Ramji was the senior director of platform strategy at Microsoft and led open source strategy across the company. In this role he led the company to contribute to a range of strategic open source technologies including PHP and Linux, driving sustainable business growth through customer demand for interoperability. Ramji had previously served at Microsoft as director of emerging business for the Silicon Valley Campus, where he managed relationships with venture capitalists and entrepreneurs. Other experience includes leading technical product strategy at BEA Systems, leading engineering teams building large-scale applications on Open Source software at Ofoto.com, as well as hands-on development of client, client-server and distributed applications on Unix, Windows and Macintosh at prior companies.

Sam holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Cognitive Science from the University of California at San Diego, and is a member of the Institute for Generative Leadership.

Bill Staples

Microsoft

Bill Staples is a long time web enthusiast currently employed at Microsoft Corporation as General Manager of the Web Platform and Tools engineering teams including IIS, ASP.NET, Visual Web Developer, Media Server and Commerce Server. Bill began his involvement with the web community in the early nineties, developing rudimentary CGI applications on Apache server and Linux. Over the past ten years he has worked on web technologies running on OS platforms from Solaris to Windows, using dynamic scripting technologies including Cold Fusion, PERL, ASP, and ASP.NET. For the past several years Bill has led the IIS team at Microsoft, including the IIS 5.1, 6.0 and 7.0 projects.

Stephanie Davies Boesch

Microsoft

Stephanie Boesch has an extensive systems engineering background. Since graduating from the University of Virginia, she has worked on operating systems ranging from AT&T Unix and OS/2 to Windows Server and Client. Stephanie has 15 years of experience at Microsoft. She recently joined the Developer Division as Director of Program Management, shipping VS2008 SP1 & .NET Framework 3.5 SP1. Integration with open source is a key concern in her current role, taking responsibility for project management of .NET Framework and developer tools/platform interoperability strategy.

Miguel de Icaza

Novell

As an open source developer, Miguel has made code contributions on projects ranging from the Midnight Commander file manager to the Linux Kernel. He is the creator of Gnome, a desktop environment and component model for Linux and other Unix–like operating systems, and the co–founder, with Nat Freidman, of Ximian, which was acquired by Novell in 2003. Currently Miguel works on the Mono project, an implementation of Microsoft's new .NET development platform on Linux, and on Moonlight, a Silverlight implementation on Mono. Miguel has been a passionate and long–standing advocate for open source, receiving the Free Software Foundation's Free Software Award in 1999.

D. Britton Johnston

Product Unit Manager, Data and Modeling Group – Microsoft

Britt currently works at Microsoft Corporation as part of the SQL Server product team focused on delivering a great data developer experience through SQL Server and Visual Studio. Britt encouraged early engagement with the PHP community at Microsoft which led to improved PHP support in Windows and SQL Server. Prior to joining Microsoft in March 2005, Britt was a CTO at Progress Software Corporation where he pioneered the concept of Occasionally Connected Computing (OCC) through the use of database replication in P2P networks. Britt co–founded NuSphere Corporation, an early entrant in the open source database marketplace with MySQL and PHP, creating an early commercially supported xAMP stack for Linux, Unix, and Windows as well as PHPed, a popular PHP development tool. At NuSphere, Britt actively worked with Monty Widenius and Rasmus Lerdorf to promote MySQL and PHP worldwide. Britt was Director of Database Development at Progress Software Corporation in the 90's where he led the redesign of the storage engine for the Progress RDBMS – at that time the Progress RDBMS was recognized as the #1 embedded application database and #5 overall. In the 1980's after graduating with a B.S. in Computer Engineering from the University of Connecticut, Britt worked for Digital Equipment Corporation on the Rdb/VMS database where he helped build the first widely deployed shared disk cluster database. At Digital he also managed the SQL engine development effort for the RdbStar project that pioneered portable database and distributed query technology. Britt co–designed DSRI V2 (Digital Standard Relational Interface) as a formal database instruction set and designed SQL Module Language which served as the foundation for SQL/PSM in ANSI/ISO SQL–92.

Shaun Bruce Walker

DotNetNuke

Shaun Walker is Co–Founder and Chief Architect of DotNetNuke Corporation. Shaun has 18 years professional experience in architecting and implementing enterprise software solutions for private and public organizations. Shaun is the original creator of DotNetNuke®, an open source web application framework and web content management system for ASP.NET which has spawned the largest and most active open source developer community native to the Microsoft platform ( 700,000 members and 6.5 million downloads ). In order to fulfill its stewardship responsibility for the open source project and accelerate the growth of the vibrant commercial ecosystem, DotNetNuke Corporation raised venture capital in late 2008 with top tier firms August Capital and Sierra Ventures.

Paula Hunter

Executive Director

Paula Hunter brings a compelling combination of industry insight, executive-level business savvy and experience working with not-for-profits to the position of Executive Director. Previously Hunter served as Director of Operations for SEMPO, the Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization, a non-profit professional association working to increase awareness and promote the value of Search Engine Marketing worldwide. Prior to SEMPO, Hunter was director of worldwide marketing and business development for the Open Source Development Labs, where she was instrumental in driving membership growth of industry advocacy group and lead initiatives to increase industry awareness and engage large enterprise IT organizations with OSDL programs. Previously, Hunter was general manager of UnitedLinux, a joint venture formed to create a unified Linux offering. She began her career at Digital Equipment Corporation, where she managed marketing programs for DEC's UNIX Workstation and PC product lines. Hunter received a BS in Computer Information Systems from Bentley University.

Mark Stone

Deputy Director

Mark Stone has a long history with collaborative communities. At O'Reilly he was Executive Editor for Open Source, Editor–in–Chief of the Journal of Linux Technology, co–edited the seminal essay volume Open Sources, and participated in the first Open Source Summit. At VA Linux Systems (now SourceForge Inc.) Mark led the web arm of VA's open source evangelism effort, supervising the Linux.com launch team and working as part of the executive team behind SourceForge.net and Slashdot.org. As director of SourceForge's developer relations program, Mark provided guidance to technology companies looking to interface with the open source community. Mark has been widely published online and in print, including the sucessor essay volume Open Sources 2.0. More recently Mark has been working with collaborative communities in non–technology areas, first at ManyOne Networks where he led product development culminating in the launch of the Encyclopedia of Earth and then at Wizards of the Coast leading product management for their social media infrastructure. Most recently Mark has been working with Microsoft's Platform Strategy team helping evolve Microsoft's open source strategy.