Adriane Knopper, married to Klaus Knopper and mother of two children, is responsible for accessibility and ease-of-use issues at Knopper.Net consulting, especially in the area of software-alphatests and usability improvement. She went blind at the age of 15, and is today using a GNU/Linux system, customized especially for the need of blind users, for internet and mobile services access. From the non-technical perspective of a person just using computers, rather than programming by herself, she works with developers designing blind-friendly interfaces.

Aingaran Pillai is the Applications Development Manager at London Borough of Camden and is responsible for the development and integration of the Council’s corporate applications. He joined Camden while working on APLAWS, an open source e-Government content management system for local government in the UK and organising a user group of government organisations to take the product forward. As the technical lead on the APLAWS project, Aingaran has been evangelising the sustainable open source development model of APLAWS within the UK and European government sector by speaking EU open source conferences, running workshops and writing case studies. He is currently working with the APLAWS community on the next version of APLAWS+. Ainga has worked closely with InfoAxon Technologies on the APLAWS+ initiative with London Borough of Camden and helped develop several enhancements to APLAWS+.

Aruna Sundararajan is a senior IAS bureaucrat and the Ex-State Secretary for Information Technology of Kerala. She has over two decades of professional experience in government. Aruna has held key administrative positions both in the Center and the State and has been Director (Industries) and Secretary (Industries) prior to taking over as the Secretary in the Department of IT in the Government of Kerala.

Bill Maimone is Senior Vice President of engineering at Ingres Corp., leading a world wide team in architecting and delivering open source database solutions. Prior to Ingres Mr. Maimone spent 20 years as VP for development at Oracle, where he led Oracle’s innovation in data security, scalability, languages, and globalization.  Most recently he had the responsibility for collaboration software, including content services and records management. Maimone holds both masters and bachelors degrees in Computer Science and a bachelor’s degree in Journalism (Science) from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

C Umashankar is the Managing director of ELCOT ( Electronics Corporation of Tamil Nadu). He has made OSS adoption in Tamil Nadu a reality.

He works in the Global Solutions Engineering group at Dell. He has been working with Linux and Open Source Software since 1999. His main areas of focus at Dell include getting various Linux based distributions working on Dell Enterprise line of products. This involves resolving Linux kernel and driver related bugs, tracking driver updates and interacting with the various vendors of Linux based distributions.

Dibya Prakash, a well known open source advocate in the community, is the CEO of OsconLab India. He is also a recognized expert on the Ruby on Rails stack. He has been selected as a mentor -- through Ruby Central -- for the Google Summer of Code contest. Dibya is a mentor for Red Hat's Lord of Code Contest, 2006 - a program designed to encourage the young programmers of India to contribute to the Open Source community.

Dr B. Thangaraju received a PhD in Physics and worked as a research associate for five years at the Indian Institute of Science, India. He is presently working as a tech lead in the Embedded Systems Focus Group at Talent Transformation, Wipro Technologies, India. He works in the areas of Linux internals, the Linux kernel, Linux device drivers and embedded and real-time Linux.

Dr. Deepak Phatak is Nilekani Chair Professor of the School of Information Technology at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Bombay. His vision is to see a resurgent India catching up with the world using Information Technology as the spring board. He hopes to make Linux and Open Source work for millions of Indians.

Dr. Madan Mohan heads the consulting for ICT practice in the region and is responsible for building the firm’s Consulting business presence. Prior to his current role, Dr. Mohan has been Associate Professor (Technology & Operations) at Indian Institute of Management Bangalore for more than a decade. He holds an adjunct research professor position at Eric Sportt School of Business, Carleton University, Canada and has taught at Brisbane Graduate School of Business, Queensland University of Technology, Australia. Madan Mohan was involved with numerous consulting/research engagements in India, and North America with leading companies and start ups. Recently, he completed a major study in association with NASSCOM on software product companies in India. He has published over 20 research article on technology management, Open source, Standard setting.

Dr Sasikumar is a senior research scientist and technical in-charge at the Navi Mumbai centre of CDAC Mumbai. He has been involved in a number of research projects at the centre for over 15 years, in various capacities. He is a regular faculty in CDAC Mumbai (formerly NCST)'s educational programmes. He has authored two books and a number of papers/articles. His group on educational technology has worked on a number of open source technologies in the area of e-learning. He is currently the main resource person for open source and localisation activities in CDAC.

Manpreet has done his engineering from Thapar Institute. A system and network administrator, his major interests include using open source applications in proprietory environments. He is currently working with eSolutions R&D Lab India Pvt. Ltd. Prior to his current profile he was associated with Netaquila Solutions Pvt Ltd. and Future Computing Solutions India Pvt. Ltd.

Nicholas Negroponte is a Computer Scientist, Founder and Chairman Emeritus of Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Media Lab. He is perhaps best known as the founder of the Media Lab and for his deep involvement in the One Laptop per Child project.

Paul Kangro, Applied Technology Strategist for Novell, is responsible for introducing Novell products and solutions to the market-place and working closely with product development to ensure market needs are meet. He also provides direction to major companies on strategic choices of net services technology; including directory, security, e-business and content delivery services. Paul has been instrumental in the introduction of Novell's Linux product portfolio into the Asia Pacific Market. He has been with Novell for over five years and is a regular presenter at industry and trade shows. Prior to joining Novell in 2000, Paul spent 16 years in technical, sales, marketing and management assignments. He has also worked for Cable & Wireless Optus and Nortel Networks in technical, marketing and project management roles. Paul studied Electrical Engineering at the University of New South Wales and holds a Post Graduate Diploma in Marketing Management and a Masters of Management from the Macquarie Graduate School of Management in Sydney.  

Prof Krishnan is the director of AU-KBC and one of the top people at NRC-FOSS. He specialises in HR and higher education aspects of open source software.

Ravi Sankar is a technology evangelist at Microsoft. In his current role he works closely with the IT Professional community through online and offline events and helps them learn and adopt cutting edge technologies from Microsoft. He is a regular speaker on technology topics at various seminars and events. He is passionate about computer networking and information security. His biggest hobby is to experiment with every piece of software that comes on his way. In his career he wore the hat of a support engineer, system administrator, trainer and consultant before taking up the current job. He has many industry standard technology certifications to his credit.

Robert Adkins is co-founder of Technetra, a Silicon Valley based technology consulting company which implements software projects specializing in Open Source solutions. Mr. Adkins has over 20 years of experience in the Information Technology industry having managed products and services groups at Apple Computer, IBM Corp., BBN Communications, Litton/PRC. He has a MS in Computer Science from the Johns Hopkins University. Mr. Adkins has published in many technology magazines and journals including Linux Journal, Linux For You, the ACM and Government Computer News.

Shubham Nagar is CEO of InfoAxon Technologies and has been widely involved in solutions based on professional open source technologies. He has been based out of UK for last 10 years and has been involved with leading UK E-Government initiatives such as Govtalk and LAWS projects for development of open source based solutions for E-government in the CMS, portals and information architecture areas. He has worked closely with leading UK Public Sector organizations such as London Borough of CAMDEN, London Borough of Islington and United Nations Development Programme and developed a deep understanding of EGovernance issues. As part of InfoAxon, Shubham has been instrumental in Professional Open Source technology based solutions specifically to promote E-Government.

Vineet is an evangelist with Microsoft India and has been involved in building large scale distributed computing solutions for over 8 years, though he has been writing code for much longer. He's been at Microsoft India for more than five years, first working as a Technology Specialist on integration middleware and since last two years in his present role. Prior to joining Microsoft he worked with an Internet startup as a middleware expert and dev-process owner.  His interests include reading sci-fi & fantasy, algorithm design, gaming, 70s Rock, theology, playing flute and checking out new eating joints!

Zaheda Bhorat works for Google Inc., managing global open source programs with a keen interest in the emerging markets. An open source advocate she has been associated with OpenOffice.org since its inception and NetBeans project. With her experience of building communities of contributers, she created one of the first open source marketing projects with a global team of passionate volunteers to promote both open source and launch the office suite around the world. She has advocated open source software language translations and supported the many native language projects. Zaheda holds a BSc in Computer Science and has experience in building successful online communities for companies such as Apple Computer, and British Telecom prior to her open source endeavours. Zaheda was born in India, raised in the UK, and now lives in California.