Cat Allman (Fundraising 101) has been involved with the free and Open Source community since the mid 1980s, including stints at Mt Xinu, Sendmail, Inc, and the USENIX Association. Along with speaking at conferences including LinuxTag, SCALE, OSCON, SELF, SIGCSE, LCA, and the Ohio Linux Fest, I co-chaired the 1st Open Source Track at the 2010 Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing, and moderated a panel there. My current job as manager of the outreach team in the Open Source Programs Office at Google requires me to evaluate countless sponsorship pitches.

Joe Brockmeier (How to Create Your Own Cloud) is a open source evangelist for Citrix, working on the Apache CloudStack (incubating) project. Joe has a long history of involvement with open source, and has also worked for Novell as the openSUSE community manager. He has also spent many years working as a technology journalist, and has written for ReadWriteWeb, Linux.com, LWN, Linux Magazine, NetworkWorld, ZDNet, and many others.

Neil Clopton (Switching From Proprietary to Free Software For Audio and Video Production) is an IT Specialist (formal title) and system administrator at The University of Northern Iowa.  I first worked with music software in the early 1990's and have been involved in serious electronic production since 2005.  I first used Linux in the late 1990's and now use it daily both at work and at home.  I switched to Linux for my own music production in 2010.

Ethan Dicks (Physical Computing with Arduino and Linux) has a long and varied career in embedded and low-level programming stretching back to when 8-bit machines roamed the face of the Earth.  Currently, Ethan coordinates electronics and 3D Printing activities at The Columbus Idea Foundry including monthly meetups of the MakerBot group and the upcoming Columbus Mini Maker Faire.

Beth Lynn Eicher (Computer Reach, Ghana, and Free Software: Resolving the digital divide 100 desktops at a time) is the Chicago Technical Lead and Free Software Liaison for Computer Reach. She has over 12 years of professional experience in the Linux desktop. In October 2012, she is boldly putting her IT career on hold to serve Ghanan schools and community centers with 100 Edubuntu desktops. With Computer Reach, Beth Lynn will resolve the digital divide and bug one with Free Software.

Richard Gingerich (Imaging with FOG) has recently graduated from ITT Technical Institute with a B.S. in Information Systems Security. Taking night classes allowed for full-time IT employment where I had worked at a small IT shop providing services to corporate clients and included value-added hardware sales where I successfully built and maintained a FOG server.

Samuel Greenfeld (What are Open Source Communities Like?) is the Lead Quality Assurance Engineer for the One Laptop per Child Association, whose mission is to empower the world's poorest children through education.  There he tests an open-source user environment called Sugar as well as a Fedora remix.

Prior to OLPC, Samuel worked for a few commerical software firms, and also helped work on the first Ohio LinuxFest held in 2003.

Mark R. Hinkle (It Takes an (Open Source) Village to Build a Cloud) is a passionate open source advocate who currently serves as the Senior Director of Cloud Computing Community at Citrix Systems Inc. At Citrix he is responsible for their open source cloud computing efforts with the Apache CloudStack and Xen open source projects. Previously he was the VP of Community for open source ISVs Cloud.com (acquired by Citrix in July 2011) and Zenoss (an open source systems management company. Prior to that he was the Editor-in-Chief of LinuxWorld Magazine and author of the Book, Windows to Linux Migration for Desktop Users.   He often shares his thoughts on technology and open source on his blog at socializedsoftware.com and on Twitter @mrhinkle.

Alan Jachimiak (Amahi - Powerful, Simple, Home Server) is currently the director of bands at the John G. Borden Middle School in Wallkill, NY. In his spare time he has built, rescued, installed, rooted, jailbroken, and hacked innumerable systems. His personal interests lie in paperless solutions for institutions and mixed operating system environments. His foundling venture - Catalyst Custom Technology Consulting - is a jumping off point for future IT opportunities.

Mike Kasick (Facilitating Android Custom ROM Development with Kexec) is a developer and device maintainer for the CyanogenMod project's Team Epic, and has been active in the Android customization/development community for two years. Mike originally developed the kexec "hardboot" approach to facilitate porting of CyanogenMod to the Samsung Epic 4G, and has continued as one of the lead maintainers for that device.  As a memeber of Team Epic, Mike has also contributed towards CyanogenMod ports for the Samsung Epic 4G touch, the Sprint-model Samsung Galaxy S III, and has participating in bug fixing and develpoment of the CyanogenMod project as a whole.

Profesionally, Mike is an Electrical & Computer Engineering Ph.D. student at Carnegie Mellon University where his research focuses on automated problem diagnosis in the context of large-scale distributed storage systems.

Kirk Kimmel (Freebase, Big Data and Archiving) is a Linux user since 1995 and has 10 years Perl programming experience. I have been developing web applications for years using big data. In addition, I have worked on archiving large scale data which lead to developing skills in the field.

Christopher H. Laco (Servers So Easy A Caveman Can Do It) has been a jack of all trades Webmaster of some since Mosaic 1.0 hit the scene and dial up ISDN circuits were the hot new thing when using a modem was too slow. For the last 16 years he's programmed in Perl, PHP, VB, .NET and Rails and administered Unix/Windows servers for various companies in Ohio including a large aftermarket automotive retail parts company as the Webmaster for 13 years. He currently works at a company in Cleveland called Within3 doing Rails development with a side of server jockeying.

Dru Lavigne (Customizing FreeNAS 8.3 Using Plugins Jail) is the Community Manager of the PC-BSD project and the lead documentation writer for the FreeNAS project. She is author of BSD Hacks, The Best of FreeBSD Basics, and The Definitive Guide to PC-BSD. She is founder and current Chair of the BSD Certification Group Inc., a non-profit organization with a mission to create the standard for certifying BSD system administrators, and serves on the Board of the FreeBSD Foundation.

Brian Likosar (Highly Available Applications) is a Principal Solutions Architect and Technical Team Lead at Red Hat.  He has been leveraging Linux in the enterprise since 2003, including environments established for high availability, databases, and virtualization.  He also acts as the lead for the Subject Matter Expert group for Storage and High Availability within Red Hat.  His hobbies include technology, music, and an unnatural obsession with all things Disney.

John J. McDonough (Embedded Development with Linux) is a Fedora contributor, Six Sigma Master Black Belt, Section Emergency Coordinator for Michigan, retired software architect, and author of the wildly successful Elmer 160 course on PIC programming.  John has taught software development process at the Motorola University in Shaumburg, as well as to specific corporations in Ohio, Germany and India, and, of course, during his 35 year employment at Dow.  John lives in Michigan with his wife and cat, and besides geeky pursuits, enjoys photography and fast cars.  He holds a degree in chemical engineering from the New Jersey Institute of Technology and an Amateur Extra class license.

Steve McMaster (Creating a Self-Defending Network with Open Source Software) is the Director of Internal Operations at Hurricane Labs. Steve leads a team of network administrators and programmers responsible for the management and operation of the Hurricane Labs network and servers, as well as behind the scenes management of many of the Hurricane Defense line of services. Steve's team works on projects ranging from the Hurricane Defense portal, to management of a 12-node Icinga deployment, to coordination of the technology that powers the new ISS Training Center.

Carl T. Miller (SSH: the easy way) [FRIDAY] is a Linux fanatic who has been active in the community since the mid 1990's.  He managed the network and servers at the Canton Public Library in Canton, Michigan for ten years before moving to Marketing Associates as a Linux Systems Administrator for 3 years.  Carl currently loves his job at Secure-24 as a Linux Engineer and attends many local LUG meetings and regional Linux conferences.

Kris Moore (Introduction to PC-BSD 9) is the founder and lead developer of the most popular BSD based desktop, PC-BSD. He has authored several unique tools for the desktop, including the PBI package management format, and the Warden, a BSD Jails management utility. He resides in the Knoxville area of East Tennessee with his wife and 4 children.

Mo Morsi (Aeolus: Deploying across clouds the Open Source Way) is a Software Engineer working on next generation open source cloud computing tooling for Red Hat where he maintains Ruby and Rails for Fedora and is lead developer on the Snap project, a cross-platform system snapshotter and restoration utility. Mo has presented at many conferences in the past including the Fedora Users and Developers Conference and the Upstate New York Engineering Expo. He has a masters degree in Computer Engineering from Syracuse University and in his spare time practices the martial art of Aikido and plays guitar.

Jonathan Nadeau (The Importance of Free Software and Accessibility) is a husband and father who is a blind GNU/Linux user. I'm an advocate of Free software and accessibility. I'm the host of 4 podcasts at frostbitemedia.org.  I'm the executive director of the Accessible Computing Foundation. I also interned at the Free Software Foundation and helped Ruben from the Trisquel GNU/Linux distrobution make his distro accessible. This was done by making the installer accessible to blind and low vision users, allowing them to install Trisquel without any sighted help.

Deb Nicholson (Software Patents: What You Can Do and We Will Be Legion: Decentralizing the Web) works at the intersection of technology and social justice. She has been a free speech advocate, economic justice organizer and civil liberties defender. After working in Massachusetts politics for fifteen years, she became involved in the free software movement. She is the Community Outreach Director at the Open Invention Network and the Community Manager at Media Goblin. She also serves on the board at Open Hatch, a non-profit dedicated to matching prospective free software contributors with communities, tools and education. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Todd Robinson (The Road to 31 Flavors) is the co-owner and systems development engineer for Webpath Technologies and On-Disk.com, with over thirty years of on-and-off computer systems design and programming experience.  His wife, and Partner, Karlie Robinson has given numerous FOSS and Linux talks in Eastern U.S. and Canada, including 'The Business of Linux" at OLF last year.  Todd is currently best known as the source behind the custom distributions and flash drive options at On-Disk.com.  Demonstrating his propensity for being out front, Todd was the first U.S. Marine to earn the combat action ribbon in the first Gulf War, and the 7th across the border while serving as a Nuclear/Biological/Chemical defense specialist.  Later he became the first Buddhist Monk with the U.S. Chaplain Corps (Navy branch).

Raul Suarez (Automating Video Editing with Open Source) has been developing software and breaking hardware for 28 years (24 of them professionally). I am a computer generalist that has worked in almost every area related to computer systems, with a special passion for hands-on software development and practices. I am currently a Systems Development Consultant for a large corporation, providing technical direction to remote teams both in Canada and India. In the past I've contributed to Puppy Linux in a truly distributed environment.
I am a current Toastmaster who enjoys sharing my thoughts in public.

Kartik Subbarao (Collabograte: Integrating the Software and Experience of Open Source Collaboration) is an independent consultant with 20+ years of industry experience including open source strategy, architecture, and implementation. His career includes over 16 years at Hewlett-Packard in a variety of engineering and technical leadership positions. He was the founding Global Lead for HP's Open Source and Linux Profession, a community of practice for thousands of open source technologists across the company. Kartik has a BSEE from Princeton University and an MSEE from Stanford University.

Dru Streicher (Level Up: Linux and the Original Gameboy) is originally from Columbus but currently living in Cleveland. I am one half of the chiptune band _node (www.nodetransmission.com). We make forward thinking electronic music on out of date gaming hardware. We have released several recording including one that was available as a Nintendo Cartridge. We play shows several times a year in the Cleveland area. My day job is a Project manager for Hurricane Labs a Linux based Security Company in Cleveland. I have been using various flavors of Linux since 2000. I have attend the Ohio Linux Fest for the last three years and have really enjoyed it every year.

Daniel Thau (Bedrock Linux) has been an active member of The Ohio State University's Open Source Club since 2009, and has held both the position of Vice President and President. He has given numerous presentations at the club and hosted a handful of events on campus to help raise awareness of F/OSS. During the academic year, Daniel is employed at OSU's Math department's IT department, working on the Linux systems used there and setting up the F/OSS math program Sage to help foster F/OSS options other than Mathematica and Matlab. He has attended two prior Ohio Linuxfests and found them quite enjoyable experiences.

Sarah White (Ike's Crew: The extraterrestrial adventures of an open source community) is the content strategist for the Arquillian Testing platform and a Fedora project contributor. She's been an open source user and contributor for almost 15 years.

Josh Williams (Yes, You Can Run Your Business on PostgreSQL. Next Question?) is a Postgres DBA and engineer working with End Point Corporation. He's worked with PostgreSQL for a number of years, and gets involved with the open source community surrounding it and other projects as time permits.