For the Kick-off conference program see: http://isoc.nl/self/kickoff

SELF Conference on Free Software Training platform

International SELF Project Kick-off in The Hague

List of speakers

Frits Huffnagel

Frits Huffnagel is currently alderman in the Den Haag City Council for City marketing, International Affairs and ICT.

Tom Kok

Tom Kok has been chairman of Internet Society Netherlands since 2003. In daily life he runs his own company Coolgroup, providing interim management, high level consultancy and advising goverments, not-for-profit organisations and businesses on innovation strategy. Before starting his own company he led various financial and ICT-related enterprises, such as Scaramea, FBTO Verzekeringen and LeCard (part of AMRO Bank). He started of his career as an officer and teacher of international law for seagoing officers at the Royal Naval Academy. He is chairman of the board of AVRO, a large public broadcasting organisation in The Netherlands. He is member of the General Board of VNO-NCW, the national association of employers in The Netherlands. He is an active member of D'66, a Netherlands political party which he served as president of the board for several years.

Wouter Tebbens

Wouter Tebbens was born in the Netherlands at the 6th of May 1974. Although technology has been his interest from an early age, he has a broad interest in social changes. He achieved a Master of Science in Mechanical Engineering and Production and Operations Management at the University of Twente in the Netherlands. He has been working in project management functions in various organisations, most in Europe. He is founder of the Barcelona based company xlocal.com, offering solutions in Free Software web applications. He has more than ten years experience in internet projects and Free Software in the Netherlands, Spain and Latin America. Wouter is currently presiding the Free Software expert group in the Internet Society Netherlands, from where local and national initiatives for the Dutch government ICT strategy are being developed. He is involved in two main projects: one is the promotion of Open Standards in governments and private organisations and the second is the creation of an international platform of training material on Free Software (SELFproject.eu).

Jan Willem Broekema

Drs Jan Willem Broekema is managing the governmental open source awareness programme OSOSS (at ICTU) and is also the national co-ordinator open standards for the government (at GBO.Overheid). Previously he was commissioner for the national Data Protection Authority CBP and before that he fulfilled roles as management consultant, marketing manager and sales representative in several companies. The social effect of ICT is his primary focus of interest.

Georg Greve

Initiator and president of the Free Software Foundation Europe. He studied physics at the University of Hamburg, Germany, where he finished in January 2001 with an interdisciplinary computer-science and physics diploma thesis in the nanotechnology area. Since 1998 he has been busy as European speaker for the GNU Project; an activity which also led him to write the Brave GNU World, a monthly column about Free Software that is published in up to 10 languages on the web and printed in several magazines around the world. During his work for the FSF Europe Georg Greve has (among other things) participated in the Commission for Intellectual Property Rights in the UK and gotten particularly involved in the long-term and strategic issues of Free Software in the social, legal and economic area. He participated as member of the German governmental delegation to United Nations (UN) conferences on the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) as representative of the WSIS coordination circle of German civil societies and is also the person responsible for the AGNULA (IST-2001-34879) project in FSF Europe.

Mathias Klang

Mathias Klang is a lecturer and researcher in legal informatics at the School of Economics and Commercial Law at the University of Göteborg, where he teaches courses in electronic commerce, computer ethics and IT law. He has a diverse teaching background with teaching areas such as introduction to Swedish law, EU law and hospitality law. Mathias is an online tutor at the University of Strathclyde, Dean of Studies at the Department of Informatics and a Visiting Fellow at the London School of Economics and Political Science. His research interests are primarily in the areas of democracy, human rights and ethics in relation to technology and cyberspace. Mathias is currently working on the completion of his PhD thesis on freedom of expression in digital environments, while at the same time carrying out research on surveillance, civil disobedience and theories of science.

David Megias

Dr. David Megías achieved the PhD in Computer Science in July 2000, the Master Engineering degree in Computer Science (Advanced Automatic Control) in October 1996 and the Engineering degree in Computer Science in July 1994, all of them by the Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona (UAB). He has made research stays at the Department of Engineering Science de la University of Oxford (with a grant by the Comissionat per a Universitats i Recerca de la Generalitat de Catalunya) and at the Departamento de Ingeniería de Sistemas y Automática de la Universidad de Valladolid, in both cases as an invited lecturer. He was an assistant lecturer at the UAB from September 1994 to October 2001. Since October 2001, he is a lecturer at the UOC (Universitat Oberta de Catalunya) with a permanent position. Since October 2002, he is also the co-director of the International Master Program in Free Software which is currently offered at the UOC. His current teaching activities are mostly related to free and open source software and has participated in several forums and conferences concerned with this field.

His current interests include Free Software and Open Source Software, security and copyright protection schemes, and process control. He has published several research papers in different international conferences and journals. He has participated in several national joint research projects both as a contributor and as a manager (main researcher). He has also experience in European projects, such as the European Network of Excellence of Cryptology (joint group with the Universidad de Vigo) of the FP6.

Nagarjuna G.

Dr. Nagarjuna G. is an M.Sc. in Biology, M.A in Philosophy from Delhi University, and Ph.D in philosophy of science from Indian Institute of Technology at Kanpur in India. He joined Homi Bhabha Centre for Science Education, Tata Institute of Fundamental Research as a postdoc in 1995 and is working as a regular faculty. Currently he is the head of the computer lab and principal investigator of the knowledge lab carrying out research and development in the area of cognitive science and information technology.  His current areas of research are semantic web, knowledge organization, AI, philosophy of science, biological roots of knowledge and modelling complex systems with specific interest in cognitive development. He is coordinator of the gnowledge.org project, a community portal, which is to be launched before the end of 2006. His lab produced a knowledge distribution system, specially crafted for science and mathematics education. He is the author of the system GNOWSYS5, which is recognized as an official GNU project by Free Software Foundation6, since December 2004. He is a well known advocate of free software and is serving as a Chairperson of Free Software Foundation of India. As an advocate of free software for education and research, he travelled around the country and gave more than 120 speeches/workshops/keynotes during the last eight years. He works with engineering students, who join his lab as interns (final year thesis projects) and do a number of developmental and experimental projects with them every year contributing to development of free software and training. He teaches several graduate courses in philosophy of science, conceptual dynamics and cognitive development.

More information about the project, its partners and the speakers can be found at the project website: http://selfproject.eu and at http://isoc.nl/SELF.