Speakers & Events

Renowned FLOSS experts, entrepreneurs and developers from all over the world will meet at eLiberatica to share their expertise and experience with their Romanian peers.

Speakers

  • Rasmus Lerdorf
    The father of PHP – a language which helps power websites on over 20 million domains.
  • Monty Widenius
    The main engineer and supervisor of MySQL – the most popular Open Source DBMS.
  • Brian Behlendorf
    One of the Apache Project initiators – the server which is behind over 60% of the web.
  • Zak Greant
    FLOSS evangelist known for his work with PHP, MySQL, the Free Software Foundation, eZ systems and the Mozilla Foundation.

Beside the aforementioned, other important speakers that will present: Jim Willis (Director of eGovernment and Information Technology, Rhode Island, USA), Aleksander Farstad (OS/FS entrepreneur, CEO and founder of eZ systems), Kurt von Finck (from GNOME Foundation and Ubuntu).

The complete list of speakers will be published in the next period, after the guests will confirm their participation. Together with the international speakers presented above, personalities, specialists and representatives from the most important IT Romanian companies and organizations who are doing activities related to open source and free software, will present at eLiberatica.

Latest news!
We have confirmed all the speakers and their flights to Bucharest. Related to it, there are a few important last-minute changes to the list of speakers for eLiberatica: Unfortunately, Rasmus Lerdorf and Bogomil Shopov will be unable to attend. Thankfully, Georg Greve - president of the Free Software Foundation Europe - will be able to cover Bogo's topic of Open Standards, while Rasmus is recording a short video session for us. For this, Mircea Sarbu created a page where you can post questions to Rasmus - http://msarbu.wiki.zoho.com/Ask-Rasmus.html. He is going to record a video and send it to us. Zak will introduce and present that video Friday at 11:40am . The reason Rasmus couldn't come is the fact that Yahoo!, the company he works for, is sending him to China to speak in their name exactly when eLiberatica is happening .

Events

Currently, we are discussing with renowned organizations and companies to hold events inside the conference tracks. More details will follow and will be presented here as the discussions advance.

International confirmed speakers

Aleksander Farstad
Aleksander Farstad Aleksander Farstad is the co-founder and CEO of eZ systems AS, a Norwegian Enterprise Open Source company. Aleksander has unique view on FLOSS that is shaped by a background uncommon for an Open Source entrepreneur: at the Norges Handelshøyskole, he studied commerce and achieved a master's level specialization in mathematical finance, and in his early career he worked as a derivatives trader at Oslo's Den norske Bank. eZ system's major software is eZ Publish, an Open Source CSM that is used by thousands of companies worldwide, including prominent clients such as the United Nations, MIT and National Geographic.
eZ systems employs nearly 100 people spread across 5 offices in Europe and North America (including one Romanian in the Norwegian headquarters office), being a perfect example of an Open Source based business model.
Brian Behlendorf
Brian Behlendorf Brian has a long history of involvement with free culture, the Web and Open Source. In the early nineties he co-founded the first web development company and worked on the ground-breaking HotWired project for Wired magazine. In the mid-nineties, he helped start the Apache project and co-founded the Apache Software Foundation. Along with leading the Apache project for a number of years, he served as technology guru for influential counter-culture event Burning Man. Brian is also a board member of the Mozilla Foundation and is CTO and co-founder (together with O'Reilly & Associates) of CollabNet, sponsors of popular FLOSS tool SVN.
In January 2006, Brian was named a Young Global Leader by the Forum of Young Global Leaders, an affiliate of the World Economic Forum. Brian is one of only 41 people in North America chosen to join this powerful international community tasked with making a positive impact on the global future.
Georg Greve
Georg Greve Georg is initiator and president of the Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE). He has worked as a programmer, is author of many articles, and has a classic scientific background as a Physicist with an interdisciplinary diploma thesis in nanotechnology at the University of Hamburg.
You can more information on his blog and his FSFE profile.
Jim Willis
Jim Willis From 2003 until 2006, Jim Willis served as the Director of eGovernment and Information Technology for the Rhode Island Office of the Secretary of State. While in this role, he helped introduce FLOSS technology and ideas to many parts of Rhode Island's IT infrastructure and is widely recognized as being instrumental in US Federal and State government adoption of open source software.
Jim's primary interest in technology lies in using it as a tool to build social capital and lower the barrier to civic and community engagement. His experience can be a strong argument for the advantages brought by open source products in the Romanian public administration.
Jim has too many portfolios to be listed here; you can find more details about on his presentation website http://www.jim-willis.com/about.
Kurt von Finck
Kurt von Finck Born in Princeton in 1965 he used to program PDP computers in the late 70’s. He lead the technical support department for BeOS, worked at TechTracker sites (VersionTracker, MacFixIt and MacFixIt Forums) and now he is a member – and sysadmin - of the GNOME Foundation, Senior Ubuntu Systems Support Analyst at Canonical and a dedicated supporter of OS/FS.
Kurt has a reputation as being affable and approachable, and his presentation at eLiberatica promises to be fun and rewarding for both technical and non-technical attendees.
Lucian Savluc
Lucian SavlucLucian is the initiator and coordinator of the ROSI group (Romanian Open Source and Free Software Initiative) and the eLiberatica conference.
He was born in Romania and moved to Canada four years ago. Together with his wife and son, he lives in Vancouver and works as a user interface designer and data architect.
While he is more man of bits and pixels (and man of action) than a man of words, but he will still share a few stories and thoughts about his experiences working on ROSI and eLiberatica.
He writes more about FLOSS, eLiberatica, ROSI and his life on his blog: www.cianblog.com
Michael (Monty) Widenius
Michael (Monty) Widenius Born in Helsinki, he studied in Helsinki and lives in Helsinki. In 1985 he founded TCX DataKonsult specialized in data warehousing. Ten years later (in Helsinki, of course) he started to develop his first version of a data base administration system designated to be compact, fast, easy to manage and perfectly suitable for web applications. A bit later this system got the name MySQL.
Monty began writing the first version of the MySQL database with David Axmark, he is the co-author of the "MySQL Reference Manual", and in 2003 he was awarded the The Finnish Software Entrepreneur of The Year prize. In the present he is the chief technical officer of MySQL AB.
Rasmus Lerdorf
Rasmus LerdorfIn 1994, Rasmus wanted to solve a simple problem - adding a counter to a web page. He wrote some simple code for the task and showed a few friends. He named the code Personal Home Page – PHP. The friends were impressed and wanted to use the code, but wondered if Rasmus could add just another feature or two. More than a decade later, PHP has grown into one of the most popular programming languages in the world with hundreds of thousands of projects developed in PHP and tens of millions of websites powered by PHP.
Rasmus was born in Greenland and spent his early years in Denmark and Canada. Currently he lives in Fremont, California and works as an infrastructure engineer for Yahoo! In 2003 he was added to MIT/TechnologyReview's list of Top 100 Young Innovators.
You can find more information about Rasmus on his website http://lerdorf.com.
Thomas Koch
Thomas Koch Thomas Koch works as a programmer and consultant. He has been involved in youth and social work in Romania since 1998 and has studied three semesters in Cluj. Thus he has acquired an extensive knowledge about Romania from a foreigner's point of view. After doing a survey of the different open source accounting projects available, he started working on a groupware and accounting project on top of eZ Components. In his spare time he's involved in the organizing of a local Linux-Day in his hometown, especially for the topics "open source culture" and "Linux for local government".
More information you can find on his blog http://blog.ruhrgebietswiki.de/.
Zak Greant
Zak Greant Surprisingly, Zak is the same person whether his business card says Mozilla Foundation or Executive Director for eZ Systems, North America. Among other things, he is also an associate member of Free Software Foundation and the author of some very popular PHP/MySQL books, published by O'Reilly. In fact, in all these aspects, Zak is an advocate and an evangelist – sometimes official like when he advocated MySQL – for Open Source and Free Software ideals.
Special attention should be paid to the fact that Zak was - since the very beginning - helping and participating on ROSI and eLiberatica organization. Probably, without him, eLiberatica would have few chances to succeed.
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Romanian confirmed speakers

Bogdan Manolea
Bogdan Manolea Bogdan is the Executive Director of A.P.T.I. - Asociatia Pentru Tehnologie si Internet (www.apti.ro). He has a legal background and a vast experience in the Law and IT&C. Owner of the only Romanian web page dedicated to the IT Law - Internet Laws - www.legi-internet.ro. Author of over 50 presentations and articles on subject related to IT&C Law in national and international conferences. He is also the Creative Commons Romania Co-project lead.
Carmen Holotescu
Carmen Holotescu Carmen teaches for Automation and Computer Science Faculty, Politehnica University of Timişoara. She also coordinates the eLearning firm Timsoft and is an online instructor for University of Maryland, University and College, USA, since 2001.
Her research activities and projects are focused on new educational technologies, online courses facilitation, and design and implementation of learning and collaborative virtual environments. She has developed and facilitated many online courses on IT topics, also for training the eTrainers.
She wrote two eLearning guides, has published articles related to online learning and new educational technologies, she also takes part in eLearning European projects.
Notes on her projects, on OER and FLOSS projects, on Romanian blogosphere could be found on eLearningBlog.
Daniel-Constantin Mierla
Daniel-Constantin Mierla Daniel graduated in 2001 the Polytechnic University of Bucharest, Faculty of Computer Science. Main interests were parallel programming, compilers and network communications. His experience was accumulated working as consultant for Orange Romania, branch of French Orange mobile operator, and researcher in network communications at FOKUS Fraunhofer Institute, Berlin, Germany. In June 2005, he co-founded OpenSER.org, a scalable and flexible open source SIP server, being also core developer of SIP Express Router (SER) from its early beginning in 2002. He currently works as VoIP consultant and CTO for Voice-System, being board member and core developer of OpenSER project. He is sustaining a continuous activity in promoting and developing Open Source and Free Software, most if his programming outcome being released under GPL.
Sabin Corneliu Buraga
Sabin Corenliu Buraga Sabin achieved the title of Doctor in Information Sciences (Cum Laude) at "A.I.Cuza" University of Iasi. Some of his fields of interest and experience domains are Web technologies distributed computing, and human-computer interaction. He tries to balance technical "pleasures" with artistic "difficulties", in the large frame of open source initiatives.
More info on his blog: thor.info.uaic.ro/~busaco
Adina Riposan
Adina Riposan Adina is the General Manager of the Contact Net company, Romania, and an active researcher in Computer Science. Adina has completed her Ph.D at the Military Technical Academy (MTA) in Romania, were she is an Associate Lecturer giving graduate courses on Grid and Mobile Grid technology, Grid Security and Virtual Organizations.
Adina has 7 years experience in international research projects and she has co-ordinated R&D projects such as IOSSPL and EK-HR. She has been collaborating with Cardiff University for the past 2 years in research activities on Triana workflows, P2P and Grid computing, Biomedical Informatics and translation research, her current research interests including Biomedical applications and infrastructures, and the integration of P2P and Grid technologies in this regard.
Alina Stefan
Alina Stefan Alina is specialized in marketing and interested in new methods of promotion, strategy and innovation management. Besides that she has a special interest in writing articles on a wide range of topics, from behavioural finance, to literature, mass dynamics and innovation.
While viewing the open-source concept as a way of dealing with, testing, improving and spreading innovation, at eLiberatica she will focus on what makes open-source a viable model.
Cezar Spatariu Neagu
Cezar Spatariu Neagu Cezar works for a German bank, in the IT Security & Threat Analysis department, where he conducts security audits and threat analysis for the bank and bank partners applications and infrastructure.
He is specialised in threat analysis for a wide-range of applications such as: single sign on, web-server and web-based applications,web-services, operating systems, database security, computer forensics, code analysis. Sometimes, in his Computer Forensic work process and/or when the case is, he collaborates with the German and Romanian police.
He is spending his free-time writing about computer security on his blog securityaspects.wordpress.com and on ferma-animalelor.ro (a computer security site maintained by he and some other computer security enthusiasts).
Tiberiu Socaciu
Tiberiu Socaciu Tibi is gradueted in Computer Science and M.Sc. in Design and Implementation of Complex Systems at Mathematics and Computer Science Faculty of Babes-Bolyai University Cluj-Napoca. He is doctoral sudent in Computer clusters with Applicatons in High Performance Computing. He works for Romanian Air Forces, in parallel is independent IT&C consultant.
Tibi wrote 7 books and 4 manuals, is columnist at Gazeta de Informatica and senior editor at InfoData Publishing House. Main interests are clusters, distributed computing, colaborative computing, supercomputing, symbolic calculus, data transmisions, INFOSEC, triangle inequalitaties.