Jon "maddog" Hall is the Executive Director of Linux International (www.li.org), an association of computer users who wish to support and promote the Linux Operating System. During his career in commercial computing which started in 1969, Mr. Hall has been a programmer, systems designer, systems administrator, product manager, technical marketing manager and educator.

He has worked for such companies as Western Electric Corporation, Aetna Life and Casualty, Bell Laboratories, Digital Equipment Corporation, VA Linux Systems, and SGI. He currently works as an independent consultant, and is the CTO and Ambassador for VizzEco (www.Vizzeco.com) a Canadian firm that is involved with bringing environmentally friendly computing to emerging marketplaces.

Mr Hall has worked on many systems, both proprietary and open, having concentrated on Unix systems since 1980 and Linux systems since 1994, when he first met Linus Torvalds and correctly recognized the commercial
importance of Linux and Free and Open Source Software.

He has taught at Hartford State Technical College, Merrimack College and Daniel Webster College.

Mr. Hall is the author of numerous magazine and newspaper articles, many presentations and one book, "Linux for Dummies".

Mr. Hall has consulted with the governments of China, Malaysia and Brazil as well as the United Nations and many local and state governments on the use of Free and Open Source Software.

Mr. Hall serves on the boards of several companies, and several non-profit organizations.

Mr. Hall has traveled the world speaking on the benefits of Open Source Software, and received his BS in Commerce and Engineering from Drexel University, and his MSCS from RPI in Troy, New York.

Chris Wanstrath is a George R R Martin fan who lives in San Francisco
and cofounded GitHub. He's an active open source developer and speaker
whose projects and talks can be found at http://defunkt.github.com/

Obie is a recognized tech industry leader and was a successful independent consultant before founding Hashrocket with Mark Smith and Marian Phelan. Obie has been hacking computers since he got his first Commodore VIC-20 in the Eighties, and found himself in the right place and time as a programmer on some of the first Java enterprise projects of the mid-Nineties. He has been evangelizing Ruby and Rails online via blog posts and publications since early 2005 and specializes in the development and marketing of large-scale, web-based applications. Obie is the author of The Rails Way, a comprehensive guide to Ruby on Rails standards and development.

Yehuda Katz, a new member of the Rails Core Team, has been working with Ruby and Rails since before Rails 1.0. He is the lead developer of the Merb project, which recently announced a merger with Rails.

He is a member of the jQuery Core Team, and a core contributor to DataMapper. He contributes to many open source projects, like Rubinius and Johnson, and works on some he created himself, like Thor.

Yehuda is co-author of jQuery in Action, a contributor to Ruby in Practice, and is currently working on Merb in Action, set to be the first Merb book on the market.

He is currently employed by Engine Yard, where he works on internal development projects, and of course, Merb.

Eric Evans is a Debian Developer and Apache Cassandra committer. To the disgust of many he once coined the term "NoSQL", but has since apologized and promised to do better. Eric resides in San Antonio Texas where he works on distributed systems for The Rackspace Cloud.

Scott Chacon is a Git evangelist and Ruby developer working on GitHub.com. He is the author of the Pro Git book by Apress, the Git Internals Peepcode PDF as well as the maintainer of the Git homepage and the Git Community Book. Scott has presented at several conferences including OSCON, RailsConf, LinuxConf.au and PyCon. He also does corporate training on Git around the world.

Dan DeMaggio is the Cloud Wrangler for Animoto, a company infamous for
scaling from 50 servers to 4,000 servers in 3 days. His various interests
include electronics, embedded Linux, NoSQL, and Cloud Computing. Dan's Open Source street cred comes from writing the first version of the Perl database driver for Windows.

Talk:
"What the Enterprise Can Learn from Start-ups" - A backgrounder on how
software development is changing and what it's going to look like in the
future. I'll try to connect the dots from Development to Operations, from
the geek department to Cloud Computing, and from the IBM System/360 to Linux Kernel Development.

Christopher Zorn lives in Charleston,SC and is the co-founder of the real-time search engine, Collecta. He has used Open Source for work and play since 1998. Currently a member of the XSF (XMPP Standards Foundation), he is involved in the eXtensible Messaging and Presence Protocol (XMPP) community. His use of XMPP started with various projects for the Medical University of South Carolina, consulting work, the social chess site Chesspark, and continues with Collecta. These projects have allowed Christopher to contribute back to the XMPP community in a variety of different software libraries, clients and servers. This includes creating open source projects like the BOSH connection manager Punja and the multi-user chat component Palaver.

Aaron Bedra is a principal at Relevance, Inc. (http://thinkrelevance.com) where he works as a technical lead, speaker, and author. Aaron's current focus is Enterprise Systems Integration using Clojure and JRuby. He is the maintainer of the Ruby code coverage analysis tool, RCov, and is a contributor to many open source projects including Clojure Contrib, Compojure, and Ruby on Rails. Aaron is the author of the Rails Security Audit Peepcode.

Hew Sutton is an avid music fan, and he has dreams of being part of a
band when he grows up. After being cut by a Fortune 500 company in a mass layoff, Hew doggedly searched to synthesize the work part of his life with his passions and personal beliefs. Enter Automattic:
WordPress, technology, music, and engineering happiness. A perfect fit.

Presentation: "A Beginner's Guide to WordPress"

Chrys was a key figure in advocating (and educating) open source software
for use in programs supporting various multi-national communities within the
Department of Defense, Department of State, NATO and PfP. From the outset,
he championed an active participation in the development community and to
contribute all funded code (totaling millions) as the de facto policy.

Additionally, Chrys co-founded BarCamp Charleston, Charleston Co-working,
and Drupal User Group (DUG) Charleston.

Mark has been a software developer for over 12 years, working in diverse industries and technologies. He holds an undergraduate degree from Emory University but can't remember in what because he spent all his time in the computer lab and gym. He almost holds an Masters of Business Administration and almost a Masters of Decision Sciences but suffers from extreme attention deficit when it comes to any curriculum that contains Marketing.

Mark is a founding member of Catamorphic Labs, LLC, which specializes in mining massively large datasets, semantic web technologies, and software development using emerging technologies.