User:Littlebtc~wikimania2007wiki/speaker
Here are some of the speakers of this year:
Achal Prabhala is a researcher and writer based in Bangalore, India, whose research work concerns access to knowledge and to medicine. Recent projects include an initiative to collect and publicly archive literary journals from Kenya, Nigeria, India, South Africa, the Middle East and the US; a report to the Indian Government for an overhaul of country's copyright act; essays on piracy and the legal commons; a commission to evaluate Botswana's patent law and medicines registration system; and an evaluatory framework for assessing copyright law and access to knowledge.
Benjamin Mako Hill is a Debian hacker and author of the Debian GNU/Linux 3.1 Bible and "The Official Ubuntu Book". He works in the Computing Culture group of the MIT Media Lab, and is on the boards of Software Freedom International (the organization that organizes Software Freedom Day) and the Ubuntu Foundation. Hill was on the board of Software in the Public Interest from March 2003 until July 2006, serving as the organisation's vice-president from August 2004.
Heather Ford is the Executive Director of iCommons and is based in Johannesburg. iCommons is a relatively new organisation, incubated by Creative Commons, with the goal of bringing together the various 'streams' of the global commons movement. Once a year, iCommons hosts the iCommons Summit (last year in Rio http://www.icommons.org/isummit/, this year in Dubrovnik) where we bring together people who practice commons-based peer production in the areas of free software, open access, Creative Commons, access to knowledge and free culture communities around the world.