Geoffrey Knauth, FSF President and Treasurer

GPG key: 2C31 130B F7D5 A459 AFF2 A3F3 C9DF FE4A 33AA 52D9

Geoffrey is an independent software contractor, has worked as a programmer, senior associate, systems engineer, and systems analyst at various companies and has contributed to the GNU Objective-C project. He is fluent in Russian and French and has a working knowledge of German, which helps him maintain relationships with computer scientists, mathematicians, and physicists of the Russian Academy of Sciences and with United States economists, scientists, and agencies. He holds a BA in Economics from Harvard University and is the treasurer of the FSF.

Christina Haralanova

Christina is an academic researcher, free software activist, technicaltrainer, and university lecturer. She has been an active free softwaresupporter since 2000, helping over 30 women's rights-defendingorganizations and community centers understand the importance ofsoftware freedom and migrate to free software. Founding member of theFree Software Association, Bulgaria, and later Board member of Koumbit,member ofFACIL – for the adoption of free software in Quebec(FACiL, pour l'appropriation collective de l'informatique libre),Christina has been working in the intersection of technology, feminism,and social justice. Christina's Master's thesisanalyzed women'scontribution to free software development (2010). Her Ph.D. thesisdiscovered how to transform hacking spaces to become more accessible, diverse, and pedagogically engagingdiverse, andaccessible to everyone (2019). In her current practice,Christina is exploring ways to help Canadian community organizationscreate strategic and sustainable technological practices in their dailyusage.

Gerald Jay Sussman, Professor of Electrical Engineering at MIT

Gerald has been involved in artificial intelligence research at MIT since 1964. He co-authoredStructure and Interpretation of Computer Programs andStructure and Interpretation of Classical Mechanics and is the recipient of numerous awards, including ACM's Karl Karlstrom Outstanding Educator Award and the Amar G. Bose award for teaching. He is a fellow of numerous institutions including the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Association for Artificial Intelligence, the ACM, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the New York Academy of Arts, and Sciences.

Henry Poole, founder of CivicActions

Henry Poole is an Internet strategist with three decades' experience in information technology and more than a decade's with online communities and commerce. He was the first technologist to set up a blog for a member of the US House of Representatives. He has presented at conferences in Europe and in the US, and was the technical editor ofDemystifying Multimedia. He co-founded CivicActions, a grassroots campaign technology consulting firm in 2004, helping provide network-centric free software technology solutions focusing on transforming the world.

Ian Kelling

Ian holds a bachelor's degree in computer science and is a continuous user, developer, and advocate for free software. His past experience working as a software developer for proprietary software companies, while using, learning, and contributing to GNU/Linux on his own time, solidified his personal belief in complete software freedom. He now works exclusively on GNU/Linux. He has contributed to pieces of free software like GNU Emacs, community efforts like the Free Software Directory and others, and has been a speaker at the Seattle GNU/Linux conference (SeaGL). Ian joined the Free Software Foundation in 2017, where he is a senior systems administrator.

John Gilmore

John Gilmore is a philanthropist, computer engineer, entrepreneur, civillibertarian, and nonprofit board member. He is a pioneer with thirty years ofexperience in the computer industry, including applications programming,systems programming, language implementation, management, andinvestment. He was the fifth employee at Sun Microsystems, cofounder ofthe Electronic Frontier Foundation, and a cypherpunk privacy activist.He co-designed the DHCP protocol that your phone or laptop uses daily to getits Internet address. He also contributed decades and more than $12million to improving United States drug laws. Gilmore has served as amember of many nonprofit and for-profit boards for four decades.

He cofoundedCygnus Support, the successfulcommercial free software company that polished and supportedGCC,Binutils, and GDB; and invested tens of millions of revenue dollars intoengineers improving GNU tools. Gilmore also wrote, maintained, orimproved many free software programs. He wrote the program that becameGNU Tar, was theGDB maintainer for years, improved theGNU Binutils and theGNU manuals, and catalyzed and funded GNURadio andGnash.

Maria Chiara Pievatolo

Maria Chiara Pievatolo is a professor of political philosophy at theuniversity of Pisa, Italy. She is one of the earliest Italianproponents and practitioners of open (as in "free") scholarlyprinciples. She founded one of the oldest Italian Open Access journalsin the humanities and social sciences, the "Bollettino telematico difilosofia politica." Chiara is also a founding member of the ItalianAssociation for the promotion of Open Science (AISA), of which she iscurrently president."Openness" of science refers to the freedomof knowledge commons from obstacles due to monopolies and secrecy,bureaucratic evaluation obligations, or academic hierarchy. Inspiredby the philosophy of GPL, free software, and copyleft she isinterested in alternative non-monopolistic forms of copyright (such asKant's), and thus that are capable of taking seriously the interest ofthe public use of reason and the knowledge commons.

Richard M. Stallman

Richard Stallman founded the free software movement in 1983 when he announced he would develop the GNU operating system, a Unix-like operating system meant to consist entirely of free software. He has been the GNU project's leader ever since. In October 1985 he started the Free Software Foundation.

Since the mid-1990s, Stallman has spent most of his time in political advocacy for free software. Before that, Richard developed a number of widely used programs that are components of GNU.

Stallman pioneered the concept of copyleft, and is the main author of the GNU General Public License, the most widely used free software license.

Stallman graduated from Harvard in 1974 with a BA in physics. During his college years and after, he worked as a staff hacker at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Lab, learning operating system development by doing it. He wrote the first extensible Emacs text editor there in 1975.