Aaron Searle is an Engineer leading the release automation effort at Morgan Stanley as part of the wider DevOps transformation initiative. He believes in fostering a work culture built around continuous customer cooperation. In particular, he is interested in exploring how we can apply open source concepts and practices to increase engagement by giving greater control to the community.

Danese Cooper is vice president of special initiatives at NearForm, an Irish tech firm. Previously, she was head of open source software at PayPal, CTO of the Wikimedia Foundation, chief open source evangelist for Sun, and senior director of open source strategies for Intel. Danese was also the inaugural chairperson of the Node.js Foundation. She concentrates on creating healthy open source communities and has served on the boards of Drupal Association, the Open Source Initiative, the Open Source Hardware Association, and has advised Mozilla and the Apache Software Foundation. Danese also runs a successful open source consultancy that counts the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the SETI Institute, Harris, and Numenta as clients. She’s been known to knit through meetings.

Aaron chairs the Foundation’s Open Source Readiness working group, helping members to develop policies that enable productive engagement with open source. Aaron has counseled both commercial software producers and nonprofit foundations on legal issues related to open source software. As counsel for the Software Freedom Law Center, he advised some of the most significant open source software foundations. At IEEE, he advised internal clients on open access and open licensing matters. And as a partner at Tor Ekeland P.C., he advised startups and commercial software companies on establishing open source policies, designing open source business models, and on license compliance.