Speaker biographies

Agnès Bradier is the Deputy Head of Unit of the eGovernment unit at the Directorate General for Information Society in the European Commission. She has been working for 15 years in the Commission in IST RTD research activities, in the domains of knowledge management, high performance computing and advance information processing. She is currently involved in the elaboration and the follow-up of the Commission’s strategy to support eGovernment policy and research activities.

Mark Bressers leads the Dutch Government’s Programme Open Standards and Open Source Software (OSOSS) since it was started in 2003. He studied Public Administration at the University of Nijmegen, and has previously worked as a senior advisor for the programme Public Counter 2000, part of the Dutch organisation for e-government (ICTU). As project leader he was also responsible for setting up the Dutch Consumerportal, a web portal which provides information about consumer rights.

Colm Butler is Director, Information Society Policy, Department of the Taoiseach (Prime Minister), Ireland. The Information Society Policy unit (ISPU) has overall responsibility for developing, co-ordinating and driving implementation of the Information Society agenda. Its aim is to ensure that Ireland develops as a fully participative, competitive, knowledge-based Information Society, with all of the benefits that entails. While it has a predominantly policy development and advisory, monitoring and co-ordination role, it also has specific functional responsibility for eGovernment, among other areas.

Rishab Aiyer Ghosh is Founding International and Managing Editor of First Monday, the most widely read peer-reviewed on-line journal of the Internet. He is Programme Leader at MERIT/International Institute of Infonomics at the University of Maastricht, Netherlands, where he coordinated the European Union -funded FLOSS project, the most comprehensive study of free/libre/open source users and developers, and coordinates the follow-on FLOSSPOLS project on policy support. He is involved in research and policy supported by the European Commission, United Nations organisations, the Dutch government and the US National Science Foundation.

Christian Hardy is Chief of the Information Systems Department of the Forecasting Directorate at the French Ministry of Economics, Finance and Industry. He is the author of the first report recommending the use of OpenOffice in French Administration. He led the trial of using OpenOffice in one of the most important administrations of the Ministry of Finance. Since 2002 he has been a volunteer in the OpenOffice.org developer community’s Fr_project..

Dr Barbara Held is presently working as Detached National Expert at the European Commission where she is Programme Manager at the unit for Interchange of Data between Administrations (IDA). She is project officer of the European Interoperability Framework (EIF) and related projects. Barbara Held formerly served at the German Government’s Coordination and Advisory Board for IT in the Administration in the Federal Ministry of Interior (KBSt).

Thomas Myrup Kristensen is a special adviser in the Danish Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation. His areas of responsibility include policy issues related to the Danish software strategy, open source software, IT architecture as well as the EU IDAbc (Interchange of Data between Administrations) programme. He holds a degree in political science.

Gregor Lietz is Director, Government, EMEA Central Region of EDS. In his current position Mr. Lietz is responsible for EDS Consulting and Operations Services in civilian and defence government in Germany, Austria and Switzerland. He is also leading the advisory software strategy team of EDS in Federal Ministry of Interior working (among others) on the Open Source Migration Guide and TCO-Model of the federal administration.

Alasdair Mangham is Head of the E-Services Development Team, London Borough of Camden. He has experience of managing and developing several Open Source developments for Local Government specific applications. These include the Accessible Personalised Local Authority Website project that produced the first open source content management system built for local government purposes. He is currently working on an application to create a deliberative online citizen's panel in partnership with the University of Oxford's Internet Institute.

Flavia Marzano is Strategic Consultant for Innovation at the Union of Italian Provinces. She has been active for more than twenty years in the management of advanced technologies. In recent years her activity has been mainly addressed to supporting Public Administrations in e-government and Open Source in Public Administration. She is a Member of the Open Source Committee of the Italian Ministry for Innovation and Technology. She is also a Member of the Permanent Panel for e-government of Italian Provinces.

Frans J. Nauta is member and secretary of the Dutch Innovation Platform, which is chaired by the Prime Minister. The platform coordinates the Dutch policies for education, research, technology and innovation. Mr. Nauta is founder & CEO of the Knowledge Land foundation (KL). KL is a think tank based in Amsterdam. It aims at developing the full potential of regions and countries in the knowledge economy, in a way that creates both economic and social value. KL has gained some fame in the Netherlands as an unconventional change agent with several innovative projects. KL’s vision for the Netherlands as one of the world’s key regions in the knowledge economy was embraced in 2003 by the new cabinet, resulting in the creation of the Innovation Platform.

Bernhard Schnittger is Head of Unit (acting) for the European Commission’s Unit for Interchange of Data between Administrations (IDA), DG Enterprise. He has been at the European Commission since 1995 has worked on a number of IDA's horizontal measures, including TESTA (a secure telecommunications network for public administrations) and more recently open source-related activities such as a study on pooling public sector software, the migration guidelines and the work on encouraging open document formats.

Giovanna Sissa is Director of the Osservatorio Tecnologico (Technology Observatory) of the Italian Ministry of Research and Education. The Osservatorio is the national service for technology transfer of ICT to schools. She has been involved as Independent expert for the European Commission in several R&D programmes. In Italy, she has advised the Information Society working group of the “Community Support framework for Ob.1 Italian region”. She has been Involved in ICT since the 1980s, and in 2003 she contributed to the Italian Survey of Open Source Software in Government conducted by the Italian Minister for Innovation and Technologies.

Antonella Sfettina, Province of Genova, Italy

Rolf Theodor Schuster is the Chief Information Officer of the German Ministry of Foreign Affairs. He has been at the Ministry for fifteen years. Since 2001 he was Head of IT Strategy at the Ministry. He has previously worked as Deputy Consul General in the German consulate in Houston, in the Protocol Department of the Ministry, and in the German Representation at the OSCE, Vienna. He holds a PhD in Economics from Münster University.

Wilbert Stolte is vice-mayor of the city of The Hague since 1998 and responsible for ICT, sports, environment and the city area of Scheveningen. He is in charge of ICT innovation for the internal organisation of the municipality and ICT-projects for the citizens of The Hague. He is also Steering Committee Member of the regional authority of Haaglanden; Chair of Stedenlink, a network of cities with big ICT-projects, Member of the Board of Commissioners of Dutch Companies and Member of Committees of the Dutch Union of Municipalities.

Jan van de Straat is Director of R&D at the City of Haarlem. He has 25 years of experience in the IT world, has programmed in several languages including Assembler, Basic, Visual Basic, Visual C++, Eclipse and supervised Haarlem’s study of and migration to open source. He shares the experience of Haarlem by giving frequent presentations regarding Open Source, server consolidation and IT strategy for the public sector.

Luis Casas Luengo is Managing Director of the Foundation for the Development of Science and Technology (FUNDECYT), initiated by the Government of Extremadura in 2003. At FUNDECYT, and in his previous positions in the Government of Extremadura, he has been responsible for also leading and implementing the Regional Information Society Strategic Plan for Extremadura, in support of the Regional Government’s goals.

Robin Weissenberger is one of the most experienced project managers of the EDP department of the City of Vienna. He was responsible for and one of the leading authors of the Study on the feasibility of Open Source Software on the Workstations of Vienna’s City Administration. In addition to his core business he also specialized on project information and knowledge management.

Douglas Heintzman is the Director of Technical Strategy for IBM Software Group. He is responsible for coordinating the overall technical strategy for Software Group as well as specific responsibility in the areas of government standards compliance, Linux and open source. He is the executive chair of IBM’s Open Source Steering Committee with corporate wide responsibility to authorize any usage of open source code as well as open source strategy. He is also a member of IBM’s Global Standards Council. He has represented IBM on various international standards and specifications bodies and was Director and Chairman of the Board of the SyncML initiative.

Phil Zamani is European Vice President for Linux Business Development & Sales at Novell. He has extensive experience in working with large organisations that are adopting solutions based on Open Source technologies such as GNU and Linux. Having worked for the major OSS service providers (Cygnus, Red Hat and now SuSE/Novell) he has a unique multi-vendor insight in regard to where OSS is being deployed in commercial organisations today, from corporate intranets to embedded Internet appliances.