Sahana Software Foundation Board (May 2009 - present)
The Sahana Software Foundation Articles of Incorporation of June 2, 2009 affirmed the appointment of the members of the transition board as the Sahana Software Foundation's initial Board of Directors. In October 2009, those director's affirmed their willingness to serve until the first meeting of the members, scheduled for May 2010, at which time the entire board shall be elected by the members of the Foundation. The board also appointed the first Officers of the Sahana Software Foundation - a Chair, President, Secretary, as noted, and a Treasurer - Dale Zuehls, the Foundation's CPA.

The initial Board of Directors of the Sahana Software Foundation are:

• Brent Woodworth (Chairperson)
• Mark Prutsalis (President)
• Chamindra de Silva (Secretary)
• Mifan Careem
• Darmendra Pradeeper
• Dr. Louiqa Raschid
• Martin Thomsen
• Gavin Treadgold
• Dr. Sanjiva Weerawarana
  

Transition Board (March 2009 - June 2009)
The Lanka Software Foundation, during the Sahana 2009 conference, gave the mandate to the a transition board to evolve and transition Sahana into it's own organisation and governance structure within this year. The establishment, the charter and governance structure of the Sahana foundation is currently being forged by this board. If you wish to contact the transition board please email transition-board [at] sahana.lk . Given below are the members of the transition board:

• Brent Woodworth (Chairperson)
• Mifan Careem
• Chamindra de Silva
• Darmendra Pradeeper
• Mark Prutsalis
• Dr. Louiqa Raschid
• Martin Thomsen
• Gavin Treadgold
• Dr. Sanjiva Weerawarana
  

Sahana Board (June 2006 - February 2009)
The following board members have served on the board in the past and we would like to thank and recognise them for their contributions to the project.

• Dr. Louiqa Raschid (Chairperson)
• Brent Woodworth
• Chamindra de Silva
• Darmendra Pradeeper
• Don Cameron
• Dr. Eric Rasmussen
• James Clark
• Michael Tiemann
• Paul Currion
• Martin Thomsen
• Gavin Treadgold
• Dr. Sanjiva Weerawarana
  

Board Member Bios

Mr. Woodworth, President & CEO of Global Crisis Services, Inc., is a well known international leader in global risk and crisis management. He has a distinguished history of working with governments, private sector companies, and non-profit organizations. Brent took his retirement from IBM in December 2007 following a 32 year career where he was responsible for the development and management of all worldwide crisis team operations. Brent is an active participant on several government, industry, and academic boards including: NIBS (The National Institute of Building Sciences), NEHRP (The National Earthquake Hazards Reduction Program), MMC (The Multihazard Mitigation Council), DRII (The Disaster Recovery Institute), and the Natural Hazards Research Center Advisory Board at the University of Colorado in Boulder. Brent is also President and CEO of the Los Angeles Emergency Preparedness Foundation. Notable achievements include:
* Founder and manager of “The Crisis Response Team” – a team of independent international specialists focused on helping governments and businesses to prepared, respond, and recover from catastrophic events. Brent has extensive experience in managing this team along with private sector, government sector, academic institution, medical personnel, and operational specialists. Brent and his team have responded to over 70 major events in 49 countries including floods, earthquakes, hurricanes / cyclones, volcanic eruptions, tsunami, fires, and man-made events including wars, civil unrest, and acts of terrorism.
* Concept creation, initial design support, and roll-out of the “Sahana” international emergency management system. Now considered a global standard for global crisis management, this open source system has been successfully implemented in over 17 countries.
* Developed business enterprise risk management procedures for early identification and mitigation of potential exposures reducing financial loss exposures by over 2/3 per incident.
* Co-Author of the US government principles for natural hazards reduction along with multiple position papers including congressional testimony on the benefits of government and private sector investment in pre-disaster mitigation.

Brent consults on a global basis with business leaders, elected officials and heads of state in the development and implementation of improved risk identification, disaster management, and global humanitarian relief services.

Brent is certified in disaster recovery, business continuity, incident management, disaster communication, search & rescue, and emergency medical services. He is a regularly featured speaker on radio and television broadcasts along with industry conferences, government sessions, and senior executive / board meetings. Brent has written multiple articles on disaster management and has been a guest lecturer at colleges and universities including Caltech, Stanford, Wharton School of Business, Harvard and Yale Law Schools. Brent and his team have worked for many years in cooperation with international UN relief agencies and NGO’s including WHO, WFP, OCHA, World Bank, UNHCR, World Vision, International Red Cross, and USAID.

Brent’s work has been recognized by multiple organizations including: Contingency Planning & Management Magazine where he was named their 2001 “Hall of Fame” winner for his distinguished industry leadership, dedication, and international humanitarian efforts. In 2002 Brent was awarded the Computerworld Magazine Honors “Laureate” for his role in the September 11th emergency management support efforts at the NY City Emergency Operations Center and at Ground Zero. In 2003 Brent was selected by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security to serve as Chairman of the American Lifeline Alliance (all major US utilities and lifelines) for their committee meetings on critical facility resiliency and collaborative information sharing. In 2005 Brent and his Crisis Response Team were recognized by the government of Sri-Lanka for their outstanding contribution to the Tsunami relief effort. In 2006 Brent received the PPBI (Public Private Businesses Inc.) achievement award for his leadership in responding to international disasters.

Mark has over 15 years of operational humanitarian relief and emergency management experience following major international and domestic natural and man-made disasters. He has a proven record of implementing complex operational projects in diverse and austere post-disaster environments through leadership, planning and appropriate use of tools and technology. He has also led and managed several planning, preparedness and mitigation projects, including tabletop and functional exercise design for governments, military, international organizations, and the public and private sector. Mark is a skilled trainer and has delivered both emergency management and operational end-user training in several subject areas, including emergency communications, security, continuity of operations, and humanitarian information system applications.

Mark has led humanitarian assistance missions in response to diverse natural disasters such as Hurricanes Mitch in Central America and Katrina/Rita in the United States, volcanic eruptions in Ecuador, earthquakes in Pakistan, Turkey, Taiwan and India, and the 2004 Asian tsunami in India, Sri Lanka and Indonesia. Mark has also responded to man-made disasters and conflicts in Cambodia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Central Africa, Southern Sudan and East Timor. For the past several years, he has been managing several emergency planning and preparedness projects for the City of New York, including for their Office of Emergency Management, Department of Information Technology and Telecommunications, and the Department of Health and Mental Hygiene. He has specific sectoral expertise in needs assessment, logistics management, humanitarian information systems, staff and site security, IT & telecommunications, and program administration.

Mark led the humanitarian mission to Sri Lanka for the IBM Crisis Response Team following the 2004 Asian tsunami and, in partnership with the Lanka Software Foundation, helped design the requirements and planned for the deployment of the first version of Sahana within weeks of the tsunami. Mark also managed the use of Sahana by the City of New York to manage staffing assignments and victim registration at hurricane shelters as part of the City’s Coastal Storm Plan, and supported the deployment and customization of Sahana following disasters in Pakistan (2005 earthquake), the Philippines (2006 mudslides), Indonesia (2006 earthquake), Peru (2007 earthquake), and Bangladesh (2007 cyclone).

Chamindra has been involved in the Sahana Project from inception following the 2004 Asian Tsunami that affected Sri Lanka. Subsequently he took the role of project lead cum chief architect and lead a complete re-write of the Sahana system into a generic and modular disaster management system, seeing it deployed also with the Governments and various NGOs in Pakistan (2005 Asian Quake), Philippines (2006 Mudslide Disaster), Indonesia (2006 Yogjarkata earthquake) and Sri Lanka (Terre des Hommes, Sarvodaya, Red Cross, CNO). He co-founded the Humanitarian-FOSS community (now 150+ strong) with Paul Currion along the more generic aspirations of applying FOSS to solve Humanitarian problems. He has co-authored several publications on Sahana and the concept of Humanitarian-FOSS in IEEE, CACM and BCS journals / magazines.

Past roles Chamindra has played includes the acting Executive Director of the Lanka Software Foundation, the global R&D manager at Virtusa (a 3000+ strong software IT consulting and technology services MNC headquartered in Boston, MA) and a Researcher at the Hardware Compilation Group of Computer Science lab at Oxford University. Other FOSS involvements include being an Apache committer (AXIS), a Google Summer of code mentor, a contributor to Taprobane (A Debian based distro), a contributor to the UNDP IOSN Portal (Humanitarian / Sri Lanka Sections), a member of the Ubuntu Sri Lankan loco team and strong advocate for FOSS in Sri Lanka. He has also been a delegate/representative of Sri Lanka in various conferences and forums including AsiaOSS Symposiums, UNDP IOSN, ISCRAM, UN WSIS, LinuxAsia and Emergency Management Asia. He is the founder secretary of the IEEE computer society Sri Lankan Chapter and also supported the information security working group of the Information and Communication Technology Agency (ICTA) of Sri Lanka. Chamindra is a Red Cross volunteer

Chamindra graduated from Magdalen College, Oxford University, where he earned a degree in Engineering & Computer Science.

Mifan Careem was involved with the Sahana project since its inception in January 2005, for the Sahana-Phase1 stage. He then joined the Sahana-Phase2 in August 2005, and has since been an active member of the Sahana community and the core team, whilst being the GIS development lead of the project. Mifan is also an active member of the Sahana research team which has produced many international research papers, and has represented Sahana in many conferences and events, including events at Indonesia, U.S.A and the Philippines.

Mifan is also an active and longstanding member of the Lanka Linux User Group and the Sri Lanka Free and Open Source Consortium, where he has organized and chaired many events. Being an avid FOSS advocate, Mifan has presented at many FOSS events around the country. He is a recipient of the coveted Google Summer of Code award for his contribution to the Sahana GIS module in 2005, and has mentored many FOSS projects as well.

Mifan is a graduate of the University of Moratuwa, Sri Lanka.

Pradeeper is a long standing Free/Open Source Software [FOSS] advocate and contributor in Sri Lanka. He is a committee member of the Lanka Linux User (LUG), which is the largest community of Linux volunteers in Sri Lanka and has participated in many FOSS advocacy events both as a speaker and organizer. Pradeeper also contributes globally as a Google Summer of Code (GSoC) mentor and the main coordinator of the SOC for Lanka Software Foundation.

He has more than 10 years of experience working as a system engineer and consultant both in the private and government sector in Sri Lanka. Since 2005, Pradeeper joined the Sahana project as one of it's leading contributors in the core team and has been involved in the deployments of Sahana globally. He contributes also to the operational aspects of the project including the administration of Sahana websites, all Sahana servers, Sahana code repositories and packaging/release of Sahana releases.

Louiqa Raschid is a Professor at the University of Maryland in College Park. She holds appointments in the Smith School of Business, the Institute for Advanced Computer Studies, the Department of Computer Science and the Center for Bioinformatics and Computational Biology. Louiqa has been a member of the Sahana team since January 2005 and has been the database architect/advisor for Sahana. She has co-authored several papers on the Sahana architecture and has identified key challenges for disaster data management (DisDM) to be addressed within the context of Sahana. She has a diversity of research interests focused around issues of information (data and knowledge) management, semantics and data integration, and performance. She investigates applications in the life sciences, health information systems, humanitarian IT applications and Grid computing. Her research utilizes a variety of methodologies and reference sub-areas such as optimization, large scale simulation using trace data, semantics and logic based reasoning, and data analysis techniques.

Her research has been published in journals and conferences including ACM SIGMOD, VLDB, AAAI, IEEE ICDE, ACM TODS, IEEE TKDE, IEEE ToC, the Journal of Logic Programming, and the Journal of Parallel and Distributed Computing. Her research is supported by grants from the National Science Foundation and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. She has been a Visiting Scientist/Professor at the French National Laboratories for Information Sciences (INRIA), Hewlett Packard Research Labs, Stanford Research Institute, and Humboldt University in Berlin. She serves on the editorial board of ACM Computing Surveys, the Very Large Data Base Journal, IEEE TKDE and the ACM Journal of Data and Information Quality.

Martin Thomsen is an acting Colonel and General Manager of the Danish Emergency Management Agency Staff College. He has initiated and managed restructuring, strategy development and goal setting inclusive budgeting and monitoring activities as manager of an executive team, and is experienced in both growing and winding down businesses. He has developed, initiated and managed organisational changes and human resource development inclusive operational efficiency and LEAN processes, HR Policy, Appreciative Inquiry, performance and development review systems for individuals or groups.

His previous positions the last decade has been as acting Colonel and Regional Commander at the Danish Emergency Management Agency Funen, Major and Chief of Staff within the same organisation, Head of Department at the United Nations Interim Administration Mission in Kosovo, Major and Head of Training at Danish Emergency Management Agency Bornholm, Major and Course Director at the Danish Emergency Management Agency Staff College. Martin Thomsen is a United Nations Consultant at the United Nations, Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (UN/OCHA) as a member of the United Nations Disaster Assessment and Coordination team (UNDAC) since May 2003. He is furthermore an EU High Level Coordinator at the European Commission within the European Commission, Community Mechanism for reinforced Cooperation in Civil Protection Assistance Interventions (EU/MIC) since March 2004.

Gavin is a Director of Kestrel Group – a risk and emergency management consultancy that operates in New Zealand and the South Pacific. His background includes tertiary studies in management science, information systems, geographical information systems (GIS) and emergency management. He has worked for a wide range of clients across a number of sectors – including central and local government, health, utility and private businesses. His areas of pecialtise include: response planning; exercise development, delivery and reporting; information communications technology for emergency management including geographical information systems (GIS).

Gavin is a member of the International Association of Emergency Managers, and has been involved on the International Development Committee, Communications
Committee, Website Taskforce and the formation of the Oceania region. Additionally he belongs to the Association for Computing Machinery, New Zealand Computer Society, the New Zealand Open Source Society, the New Zealand Society for Risk Management, and the Spatial Sciences Institute. He is also currently President of the New Zealand Recreational GPS Society.He is a certified Urban Search and Rescue (USAR) Category 1 Responder, and has been a Civil Defence Emergency Management (CDEM) volunteer for nearly ten years. One of his recent roles was in a team that manages light USAR response teams.

Sanjiva founded WSO2 after having spent nearly 8 years in IBM Research, where he was one of the founders of the Web services platform. During that time, he co-authored many Web services specifications including WSDL, BPEL4WS, WS-Addressing, WS-RF and WS-Eventing. Sanjiva is currently a member of the W3C Web Service Description Working Group where he is a co-editor of the specification. Not content with working on specifications, Sanjiva lead a team in IBM Research that did implementations of these and other specifications as they were being created. Sanjiva lead the creation of IBM SOAP4J, which was released just 2 days after the SOAP 1.1 specification was released and which later became Apache SOAP. He went on to architect and implement many other products, including Apache Axis, Apache WSIF, the IBM Web Services Gateway and IBM BPWS4J, a BPEL4WS implementation. Sanjiva was a key driver of IBM’s Web services technical strategy and coordinated overall Web services architecture for IBM. In recognition for his company-wide technical leadership, Sanjiva was elected to the IBM Academy of Technology in 2003. In March 2005, he and several others of IBM’s Web services leaders jointly published a book on the overall architecture of the Web services platform. That book was the first (and still only?) book to explain the design and architecture of Web services as a platform rather than as a set of point specifications. While Sanjiva joined IBM Research in Hawthorne, New York, he moved to Sri Lanka in August 2001 but continued to work for IBM Research in New York, albeit from a bit far away.

Sanjiva has been involved with Open Source software both in IBM and in Apache for several years. In addition to the Apache Web services projects, Sanjiva is the father of Apache Jakarta BSF and also contributed to Apache Xalan. In recognition for his contributions to Apache, he was elected a member of the Apache Software Foundation in 2003. In Sri Lanka, Sanjiva founded the Lanka Software Foundation, a non-profit organization formed with the objective of promoting Open Source development, not usage, by Sri Lankan developers. He is currently LSF’s Executive Director. Operating with very little funding, LSF has been quite successful, with more than 50 Sri Lankan developers becoming active Apache committers within a short period of time. In recognition of Sanjiva’s role in promoting Open Source participation from developing countries, Sanjiva was elected to the Board of the Open Source Initiative (OSI) in April 2005. Sanjiva also teaches and guides student projects part-time in the Computer Science & Engineering department of the University of Moratuwa. He’s also a member of the academic advisory board of the School of Computing of the University of Colombo and of the Faculty of IT of the University of Moratuwa.

Prior to joining IBM, Sanjiva spent 3 years at Purdue University as visiting faculty, where he received his Ph.D. in Computer Science in 1994.

Former Board Member Bios

Don spent ten years as a fire brigade Captain with the NSW Rural Fire Service, was promoted to Group Officer, Superintendent, and later progressed to Regional Officer with command and coordination responsibilities for 11,000 fire-fighters. Don has extensive disaster management experience gained through more than two decades of working in the field and emergency operations centres managing floods, fires, aircraft, major traffic and hazardous chemical incidents, storm events, natural and man-made disasters including some the largest Fire-Storms in Australian modern history. Don has been a member of the Sahana team since February 2005.

Don's background includes tertiary studies in emergency management,information systems management, fire cause determination and business management. A member of the International Association of Arson Investigators, he is certified in ICS, Emergency Leadership, SCBA; is an experienced disaster planner, aerial observation analyst, responder, CISM manager (Critical Incident Stress), operational train-the-trainer and emergency communications systems designer. Don has chaired Local and District Fire Management Committees, participated on Emergency Management Committees and contributed to the development of Australian DisPlans (Local, State and National Disaster-Plans). As Superintendent he designed and managed emergency communications and control centres; the construction of GPS, wireless and mobile enabled disaster response and forward-command vehicles. During 1995 Don worked with CSIRO scientists and was instrumental in the proof-of-concept design of systems incorporating ARMS (automated real-time mapping systems), GPS, mobile telephony and real-time data transfers as a toolkit to empower disaster mitigation through improved real-time data transfers from aerial reconnaissance operations.

Not content with existing disaster management systems, during 1997 Don established the role of 'IT Special Projects Officer' within the RFS. In this position he coordinated ICS trainers and incident coordination teams to establish the prerequisites for a computerised methodology for ICS; a computerised model for establishing a 'Standards of Fire Cover' (a fire pre-planning tool used to assess fire cover requirements based on risk analysis) and logistical tools for mitigating risk to people and property's surrounding public lands. During the later part of the '90's he extended this work in a consultancy capacity and commenced developing the freeware 'Emergency Management System'; a modular disaster management tool providing facilities in support of ICS command and response, logistics, hazard identification, staff and volunteer management, training, resource and financial support for any type of disaster. EMS provides several of the domain methodologies employed within Sahana and is still used by many emergency operations centres today.

Recognising the value to disaster management of developments in public ICT infrastructure, open source and other community networking initiatives, Don spent 2000-2001 assisting in the establishment of Community Telecentre's andr ural/remote ISP's. This work was recognised by the NSW Innovation Council as an outstanding community contribution. Don has several papers published on Community Informatics in the texts "Community Networking and Community Informatics" and "Using Community Informatics for Regional Transformation". He contributed in a technical capacity to the Australian national livestock identification project to prevent Pandemic, and demonstrated his commitment to Open Source by working with local community groups to establish Australia's first OSS Telecentre Youth Cafe.

Don currently works on ICT systems and developments relating to safety, production, disaster response and mitigation in the Underground Mining Industry. He serves on the editorial board of the Journal of Community Informatics, and since November 2001 has been a TechSoup forum host and advisor to US-based NPO's seeking technical disaster recovery assistance. He has several articles published on TechSoup. Don is a Life Member of two Rural Fire Brigades for services rendered and continues to provide support to persons impacted by disaster in an operational capacity. Don is a strong advocate for volunteerism as a tool for personal, professional and social development.

James Clark has been contributing to the Open Source community for nearly 20 years. In the past 15 years, his work has focused on SGML/XML, where he is a renowned pioneer of these technologies. Since its publication in February 1998, XML has achieved widespread industry acceptance as a key technology for the future development of the Web. In 2001, James was awareded the first XML Cup.

After visiting Thailand in 1995, he eventually became a permanent resident there and now runs a small company, the Thai Open Source Software Center which provides a legal framework for various Open Source activities in Thailand. James also promotes Open Source in the Software Industry Promotion Agency (SIPA) of the Ministry of Information and Communication Technology in Thailand. He supports a number of charitable projects in Thailand, mostly related to education, particularly in rural areas, partnering with PDA.

James has a degree in Mathematics and Philosophy at Merton College, Oxford, where he obtained Class I Honours.

Paul Currion runs a consultancy specialising in information management for humanitarian operations. He is currently Manager of Initiative 4 of the Emergency Capacity Building Project of the Interagency Working Group (an NGO consortium comprising CARE, Save the Children, Oxfam, World Vision, International Rescue Committee, Mercy Corps and Catholic Relief Services), developing ways of improving NGO use of ICT to respond to emergencies.

For the first half of 2005, Paul was the Regional Information Manager for WFP for the Indian Ocean Tsunami response. Previously, he developed the concept of the Humanitarian Information Centre (HICs) for the United Nations Office for the Co-ordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), working on HICs in Kosovo, Afghanistan, Iraq and Liberia. He also wrote the IASC statement that formalised the HIC as a key part of the UN’s response to emergencies, wrote the HIC Handbook and developed the HIC training package.

Paul draws on a range of experience, including humanitarian relief, human rights, conflict resolution, training development and NGO coordination. He has worked for UN offices (including OCHA and WFP), the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, NGO co-ordination bodies (including the International Council for Voluntary Agencies and the Agency Coordinating Body for Afghan Relief), donors (such as DFID), and a range of international NGOs. He is an Observer Member of ALNAP, and is a member of Advisory Panels for Aidworkers.net (communities of practice for development workers), the BrightEarth Project (visualisation tools for human rights advocacy) and HumanLink (field-based technical support).

Dr. Eric Rasmussen spent seven years enlisted in nuclear submarines before leaving the Navy to receive his undergraduate and medical degrees from Stanford University. After graduate work in molecular biology at Los Alamos National Laboratory, and after teaching for several months within a remote village in Haiti, he completed a Residency in Internal Medicine and re-entered the Navy as Chief Resident in Medicine at the Navy Medical Center in Oakland, California, later advancing there to Assistant Program Director in Medicine. Subsequent Navy positions beyond academic medical practice have included time as physician-at-sea aboard the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln (CVN-72) and deployment aboard the USS Yorktown (CG-48), as well as three brief deployments on the ground in Bosnia, and more than three years as Fleet Surgeon for Third Fleet. Dr. Rasmussen has also been a Principle Investigator for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) since 1995, coordinating research in machine-based medical translation and effective civil-military interaction during humanitarian operations. His resulting work in humanitarian medicine has taken him to afflicted areas in Europe, Africa, Southeast Asia, Columbia, Israel, and several other locations in the Middle East. After receiving a Masters in Disaster Medicine from the European Center for Disaster Medicine and the World Health Organization, he deployed to the Iraq humanitarian support planning staff within US Central Command Headquarters in 2002. He was later selected as one of the physicians for the Iraq Disaster Assistance Response Team (DART) for the Iraq War in 2002-2003. While in Kuwait during 2003 he was appointed physician to the International Humanitarian Operations Center in Kuwait before entering Iraq, later serving in Umm Qasr, Basra, Al Hilla, and Baghdad. For his work on the design and implementation of effective humanitarian information flow during the Iraq war he was selected for the DARPA 2003 “Sustained Excellence in a Principle Investigator” award. Further work as director of the Strong Angel series of international civil-military support demonstrations led to his deployment to Afghanistan in 2004 and 2007, and to Indonesia as head of a Civil-Military Coordination Team for the tsunami response in Banda Aceh in early 2005. Later in 2005 he deployed with Joint Task Force Katrina as Joint Force (Maritime) Surgeon (Forward) in New Orleans, assisting in the implementation of medical relief.

Currently Commander Rasmussen is Chairman of the Department of Medicine within Naval Hospital Bremerton near Seattle, Washington. He is also appointed Special Advisor in Humanitarian Informatics for the US Office of the Secretary of Defense, and additionally serves on the Afghan Medical Reconstruction Team in Afghanistan, having returned from Kabul in March of 2007. Dr. Rasmussen holds multiple academic positions at several institutions, and is a Principle Investigator for both DARPA and for the National Science Foundation. He is a Reviewer for the Journal of the
American Medical Association (JAMA) and the American Journal of Public Health, and sits on several advisory boards, including the Crisis Management Resources Board for the National Academy of Sciences. He has multiple publications across several topic categories, and has been awarded three Meritorious Service Medals in addition to other personal, unit, and theater military decorations.

Michael Tiemann is Vice President of Open Source Affairs at Red Hat Inc, as well as President of the Open Source Initiative. He used to be the Chief Technical Officer of Red Hat. Michael serves on a number of boards, including the Embedded Linux Consortium, the Jabber Technical Advisory Board, the GNOME Foundation Advisory Board, and the Board of Directors of ActiveState Tool Corp. He co-founded Cygnus Solutions in 1989. His programming contributions to free software include authorship of the GNU C++ compiler and work on the GNU C compiler and the GNU debugger. Tiemann is featured in the 2001 documentary Revolution OS.

He earned a bachelor's degree from the Moore School of Engineering in 1986 at the University of Pennsylvania.
pending official bio