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Benjamin Mako Hill | |
|---|---|
.JPG) Benjamin Mako Hill in 2012 | |
| Education | Hampshire College (BA) Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MS,PhD) |
| Occupation | Associate Professor |
| Employer | University of Washington |
| Spouse | |
| Website | mako |
Benjamin Mako Hill (/ˈbɛndʒəmɪnˈmeɪkoʊhɪl/) is a free software activist,[1]hacker,[2] author, and professor. He is a contributor and free software developer as part of the Debian andUbuntu projects as well as the co-author of three technical manuals on the subject,Debian GNU/Linux 3.1 Bible,The Official Ubuntu Server Book, andThe Official Ubuntu Book.
Hill is an associate professor in Communication at theUniversity of Washington.[3]
Hill has an undergraduate degree in Literature & Technology fromHampshire College,[4] a master's degree from theMIT Media Lab, and a PhD in an interdepartmental program involving theMIT Sloan School of Management and theMIT Media Lab. As of fall 2013, he is an assistant professor in the Department of Communication at theUniversity of Washington.[5] He is also a Fellow at the MITCenter for Civic Media where he coordinates the development of software for civic organizing. He has worked as an advisor and contractor for theOne Laptop per Child project. He is a speaker for theGNU Project,[6] and serves on the board ofSoftware Freedom International (the organization that organizesSoftware Freedom Day). In 2006, he married Mika Matsuzaki and used mathematically constrained wedding vows at the marriage ceremony.[2][7]
Since 1999, Hill has been an active member ofDebian. He has served as a delegate of the Debian Project Leader, and is a founder and coordinator of Debian Non-Profit,[8] a Debian custom distribution designed to fill the needs of small non-profit organizations. In addition he served on the board ofSoftware in the Public Interest from March 2003 until July 2006,[9][10] serving as the organisation's vice-president from August 2004.[11]
Hill is also a core developer and founding member ofUbuntu, and continues to be an active contributor to the project.[citation needed] In addition to technical responsibilities, he coordinated the construction of a community around the Ubuntu Project as project "community manager" (later ceding the role toJono Bacon) during Ubuntu's first year and a half.[12] During this period, he worked full-time forCanonical Ltd. Within the Project, he served on the "Community Council" governance board that oversees all non-technical aspects of the project, until October 2011. His work included contributing to a code of conduct[13] and diversity statement for the project.[14]
In addition to software development, Hill writes extensively. He has been published in academic books and magazines, newsletters, and online journals,[15] andSlate Magazine republished one of his blog posts.[16] He is the author of the Free Software Project Management HOWTO, the canonical document on managingFree and open-source software (FOSS) projects, and has published academic work on FOSS from anthropological, sociological, management and software engineering perspectives and has written and spoken about intellectual property, copyright, and collaboration more generally.[17][18][19] He has also studied the sociology of community involvement in web communities, and been widely published and cited about projects likeScratch and Wikipedia.[20][21][22][23] He has talked about these topics publicly, as well as giving a keynote address at 2008OSCON.[24]
Hill has worked for several years as a consultant for FOSS projects specializing in coordinating releases of software as free or open software and structuring development efforts to encourage community involvement.[25] He spends a significant amount of his time traveling and giving talks on FOSS and intellectual property primarily in Europe and North America.
Hill earlier pursued research full-time as a graduate researcher at the MIT Media Laboratory.[26] At the lab, he has worked in both the Electronic Publishing and Computing Culture groups on collaborative writing and decision-making software. One project,Selectricity is a voting tool which received prizes and grants fromMTV andCisco. He was a fellow at the Harvard Berkman Center for Internet & Society[27] and the MIT Center for Civic Media.[28]
He served on the advisory board of theWikimedia Foundation,[29] the advisory council of theOpen Knowledge Foundation[30] and the board of theFree Software Foundation.[31] He was a founding member of theUbuntu Community Council[32] in 2009.
2018-2019 Fellow at theCenter for Advanced Study in the Social and Behavioral Sciences[33]
2019 Research Symbiont Award—General Symbiont[34]
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