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Generalists
Deborah Bryant is Public Sector Communities Manager at Oregon State University’s Open Source Lab (OSU OSL), where she creates collaborations between public, private and academic concerns in pursuit of the successful adoption of open source technology and models and is internationally recognized for her expertise. She directs the annual Government Open Source Conference (GOSCON), the preeminent event and platform for collaboration amongst government IT management at all levels of government.
She speaks frequently on open source and government collaborative and the use and adoption of open source in government operations. Most recently she facilitated a national round table discussion on behalf of the Department of Homeland Security, gathering state and local public safety practitioners and industry along with senior DHS personnel to consider the use of the collaborative model for information sharing.
Bryant’s government service included consultation with the Oregon State Legislature during the Year 2000 legislative session and continued at Oregon’s Department of Administrative Services for five years where she served as Manager of Enterprise Strategic Planning and Policy in the Office of the State CIO and also as Deputy State CIO. During the Year 2002 legislative session she represented the State’s Executive Branch position on proposed Open Source legislation and earned a reputation for an open, constructive approach to working with diverse and often conflicting views.
Her interest in open source software and its implication for government is also reflected in her civic involvement; she serves as a Board Director for DemocracyLab.org; as an Advisor for the Open Source Digital Voting Foundation (OSDV.org); and on the Oregon Statewide Distance Learning Advisory Council. She is also an elected official, serving as Commissioner in a local special services district and is known for her advocacy of transparency in government.
Prior to entering the public sector, she held management positions in several emerging technology areas; parallel and high-speed computing and commercialized internet and web applications in the 80s, commercial wide area networks, advanced telecommunications and data/voice convergence in the 90s.
Gunnar Hellekson is the Chief Technology Strategist for Red Hat’s US Public Sector group, where he works with systems integrators and government agencies to encourage the use of open source software in government. He is co-chair of Open Source for America and one of Federal Computer Week’s Fed 100 for 2010. He is also an active member of the Military Open Source working group, on the SIIA Software Division Board, and sits on the Board of Advisors for CivicCommons. He is especially interested in cross-domain security, edge innovation, and interagency collaboration through the open source model.
Ean has been a critical participant in the Free Java movement from the very beginning. Brainfood released its first commercial Java-based website on Acme.Serve in 1997, before Sun’s Jeeves server hit the market. Ean was also an early maintainer of the Debian Kaffe package and currently is active in the Apache OFBiz effort to create a Free Software ERP system.
Ean is Chairman of the OSFA technical committee. With the help of other committee members they built a sophisticated OFBiz based community management system.
John Weathersby is the founder and executive director of the Open Source Software Institute, a U.S.-based non-profit organization whose mission is to promote adoption of open source software solutions within government IT environments.
Weathersby currently serves as an adviser on open source issues to a number of Federal government entities including the Department of Homeland Security, Science and Technology Directorate, the Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD), the Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA), and the Department of the Navy. He also serves as an adviser for technology to The University of Southern Mississippi’s Office of Technology and Economic Development.
Weathersby is a member of the International Advisory Panel for Enterprise Open Source Magazine and a founding executive board member of the National Association of Call Centers (NACC).
Defense and Security
John Scott is a Senior Systems Engineer and Open Technology Lead for RadiantBlue Technologies, Inc. with deep expertise in engineered systems and bridging the gap between decision-makers, scientists, and engineers to develop policies for acquiring and deploying new technologies in the Department of Defense and US Government. He has focused his career on investigating and developing ideas for how large organizations design, construct, and evolve extremely complex systems to meet National Security needs.
Scott led the Defense Department’s Open Technology Development (OTD) initiative, sponsored by the Office of Secretary of Defense Advanced Systems & Concepts. OTD lays the groundwork for streamlined adoption of open source methodologies within DoD, which includes both the adoption of private sector open source software and the formation of internal communities of interest around DoD systems, including classified systems. The impact of these shifts in policy and business process include not only increased agility for the U.S. military, but also an enhanced ability to securely share capabilities with allies and bring both data and technology to bear in disaster response and humanitarian assistance operations.
Previous work as a consultant to DoD includes the development of new design and testing methodologies for military networks, and the development of complex systems modeling applications for distributed systems. In tandem with his work for OSD, Scott serves as the chairman of the National Defense Industrial Association’s Command, Control, Communications and Computers (C4) division and is a member of the Editorial Board of the DoD SoftwareTech Journal.
Mr. David A. Wheeler is a well-known expert in developing secure software and open source software. His works on security include the book “Secure Programming for Linux and Unix HOWTO,” his developerWorks column “Secure Programmer,” and the article “Countering Trusting Trust through Diverse Double-Compiling (DDC).” He is a co-author of the NDIA document “Engineering for System Assurance,” and the author of “Why Open Source Software? Look at the Numbers!”