Keynote Speakers
OW2con'24 will welcome a range of high profile and world-class keynote speakers, including:
Thierry Carrez, General Manager, Open Infra Foundation
Thierry is General Manager at the Open Infra Foundation, a non-profit organization fostering open development of open source infrastructure solutions. Prior to that, he was OIF's VP of Engineering, in charge of the long-term health of the open source projects and has also been a long time Release Manager for the OpenStack project. He's also the vice-chair of the Open Source Initiative, the steward of the open source definition and licenses, as well as a Python Software Foundation fellow. Thierry spoke about open innovation and open source project management at various conferences around the world.
Frank Karlitschek, CEO, Nextcloud
Frank Karlitschek is a long time open source contributor and former board member of the KDE e.V. He founded Nextcloud to create a fully open source and decentralized alternative to big centralized cloud companies. Frank was an invited expert at the W3C to help to create the ActivityPub standard. Frank has spoken at MIT, CERN, Harvard and ETH and keynoted LinuxCon, Latinoware, FOSSASIA, Campus Party and many other conferences. Frank is the founder and CEO of Nextcloud GmbH. He is also a fellow of Open Forum Europe and an advisor to the United Nations regarding Open Source. Frank won the European SFS Free Software Award 2023 and the Acteurs du Libre European Award 2023.
Stefano Maffulli, Executive Director, Open Source Initiative
Stefano joined OSI in 2021 after decades of open source advocacy, both as a contributor and leader. He co-founded and led the Italian chapter of Free Software Foundation Europe from 2001 to 2007, structured the developer community of the OpenStack Foundation and subsequently led open source marketing teams in several international companies. An enthusiastic open source user, he’s contributed documentation patches, translations and advocated for projects as diverse as GNU, QGIS, OpenStreetmap and WordPress. His appointment was a key step for the transformation of OSI into a professionally managed organization, a process that the Board of Directors started in 2020.
Patrick Masson, Executive Director, Apereo Foundation
Patrick Masson has worked at the intersection of open source software and and higher education for almost 30 years. Before his current position as Executive Director at the Apereo Foundation Patrick served as General Manager for the Open Source Initiative. His experience in higher education IT includes roles as Director of the UCLA Media Lab, CIO within the State University of New York, and CTO at the University of Massachusetts' Office of the President. Patrick is an adjunct instructor in SUNY Albany's College of Computing and Information and speaks frequently on topics related to open source software, open education, and educational technology. Patrick is the co-founder of EDUCAUSE's "Openness" Constituency Group and served on his local school board from 2014-2018.
Invited Country: Tunisia
This year we are glad to welcome Tunisia as OW2con Invited Country.
This talk will be proposed by speakers working at Sofrecom Tunisia, reprensenting at OW2con'24 both their country and company.
Please see the abstract below:
We will begin by exploring the historical and social factors related to Tunisia, highlighting the increasing number of qualified profiles and the remarkable rise of women in the Information and communications technology (ICT) field. We will represent Sofrecom Tunisia as a leader in the telecom field. We will share key figures, and our active participation in Orange Group's Open-Source initiatives. As Open-Source Pole representatives, we will showcase major key points and collaborations with French and international Open-Source communities. We will talk about some ideas related to the future of Tunisia's Open-Source ecosystem: Join us as we discuss the opportunities and challenges, we face in nurturing Tunisia's Open-Source landscape. We will explore initiatives like Open Source Connect and share our vision for the future, emphasizing collaboration and knowledge sharing.
Speakers: Mariem SAIDI and Amani Jebali.