<p>Deb Nicholson is the Director of Community Operations at the Software Freedom Conservancy where she supports the work of its member projects and facilitates collaboration with the wider free and open source software community. After years of local organizing on free speech, marriage equality, government transparency and access to the political process, she joined the free software movement in 2006. While working for the <a href="https://www.fsf.org/">Free Software Foundation</a>, she created the Women&rsquo;s Caucus to increase recruitment and retention of women in the free software community. She piloted messaging and directed outreach activities at the Open Invention Network, a shared defensive patent pool for free and open source software. She won the O’Reilly Open Source Award for her work as <a href="https://mediagoblin.org/">GNU MediaGoblin</a>&lsquo;s Community Liaison and as a founding board member at <a href="https://blog.openhatch.org/2017/celebrating-our-successes-and-winding-down-as-an-organization/">OpenHatch</a>. She also continues to serve as a founding organizer of the <a href="http://seagl.org/">Seattle GNU/Linux Conference</a>, an annual event dedicated to surfacing new voices and welcoming new people to the free software community.</p>

<p>Deb received her Bachelor of Fine Arts from Bradford College and lives with her husband and her lucky black cat in Cambridge, Massachusetts.</p>

<h2 id="karen">Karen M. Sandler - Executive Director</h2>

<p>Karen M. Sandler is the executive director of Conservancy. Karen is known

as a cyborg lawyer for her advocacy for free software, particularly in

relation to the software on medical devices. Prior to joining Conservancy,

she was executive director of the GNOME Foundation. Before that, she was

general counsel of the Software Freedom Law Center. Karen

co-organizes <a href="http://www.outreachy.org">Outreachy</a>, the

<p>Karen received her law degree from Columbia Law School in 2000, where she

was a James Kent Scholar and co-founder of the Columbia Science and

Technology Law Review. Karen received her bachelor’s degree in engineering

from The Cooper Union.</p>

<h2 id="brett">Brett Smith - Director of Strategic Initiatives</h2>

<p>Brett Smith began his FLOSS advocacy in 2000 at college, organizing

student groups and discussing the issues with professors and journalists.  He

also spent a couple of those summers interning at the Free Software

Foundation, and working in various assisting roles there when he returned to

campus.  Later on he worked as the FSF's License Compliance Engineer from