The staff are listed alphabetically by surname.
Rosanne DiMesio is the Technical Bookkeeper at the Software Freedom Conservancy where she handles incoming and outgoing accounting activities for all its member projects as well as financial operations for Conservancy itself. Rosanne has been volunteering with the Wine Project since 2008 where she focuses on user support and documentation. She has worked as an English teacher, a freelance writer and as IT support. She is passionate about helping free software projects improve their user experience. Rosanne received her Masters in Communication & Theater at the University of Illinois at Chicago and her Bachelor’s degree in English from the University of Chicago.
Denver works part-time managing the technical side of Conservancy's license compliance work, triaging new reports and verifying complete and corresponding source (C&CS). His roles elsewhere have recently included financial trading software development on GNU/Linux and previously involved writing system software for hardware companies, including driver writing for the kernel named Linux at ATI (now AMD) and Qualcomm. He founded a company that designs and builds magnetic stripe readers for security hobbyists where he designed the hardware and developed the device's tools and firmware, which are both free software. Denver also writes free software in his spare time, with patches accepted into Wine, the kernel named Linux, and GNU wdiff. Denver received his BMath in Computer Science from the University of Waterloo. He gives presentations about digital civil rights and protecting the free software ecosystem, having spoken at conferences such as CopyCamp Toronto, FOSSLC's Summercamp, and the Open Video Conference.
Bradley M. Kuhn is the Policy Fellow and Hacker-in-Residence at Software Freedom Conservancy and editor-in-chief of copyleft.org. Kuhn began his work in the software freedom movement as a volunteer in 1992, when he became an early adopter of Linux-based systems, and began contributing to various Free Software projects, including Perl. He worked during the 1990s as a system administrator and software developer for various companies, and taught AP Computer Science at Walnut Hills High School in Cincinnati. Kuhn's non-profit career began in 2000, when he was hired by the FSF. As FSF's Executive Director from 2001–2005, Kuhn led FSF's GPL enforcement, launched its Associate Member program, and invented the Affero GPL. Kuhn began as Conservancy's primary volunteer from 2006–2010, and became its first staff person in 2011. Kuhn holds a summa cum laude B.S. in Computer Science from Loyola University in Maryland, and an M.S. in Computer Science from the University of Cincinnati. Kuhn's Master's thesis discussed methods for dynamic interoperability of Free Software programming languages. Kuhn received the O'Reilly Open Source Award in 2012, in recognition for his lifelong policy work on copyleft licensing. Kuhn has a blog and co-hosts the audcast, Free as in Freedom.
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 Outreachy, the award-winning outreach program for women globally and for people of color who are underrepresented in US tech. Karen is a recipient of the O’Reilly Open Source Award and cohost of the oggcast Free as in Freedom.
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.
Sage Sharp is the Senior Director of Diversity & Inclusion at the Software Freedom Conservancy. Sage runs Outreachy, which is Conservancy's diversity initiative that provides paid, remote internships to people who are subject to systemic bias or impacted by underrepresentation in tech. Sage is a long-standing free software contributor, and is known for their work as a Linux kernel maintainer for seven years. They also founded their own company, Otter Tech, which has trained over 400 people on how to enforce a Code of Conduct.
Pono joined Conservancy to help fill a community need for bridging technical and non-technical roles. Having worked at FOSS foundations and organizations for over a decade, his background in FOSS infrastructure led him to think more deeply about how to better use community intelligence instead of technology to solve governance questions. He is passionate about making FOSS a more equitable and inclusive space. With a background in mathematics and physics, he looks forward to mobilizing social intelligence and community goveranance as a basis for solving both technical and non-technical problems.
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