Richard M. Stallman (GNU Project and Free Software Foundation), Karel de Vriendt (EU/IDABC), Carlos Castro (Extremadura Government, Spain), Steven Downes (National Research Council Canada) and many more well known speakers will form the elegant mix between keynote speakers, panel discussions and parallel tracks.

Richard Matthew Stallman is a software developer and software freedom activist. In 1983 he announced the project to develop the GNU operating system, a Unix-like operating system meant to be entirely free software, and has been the project's leader ever since. With that announcement Stallman also launched the Free Software Movement. In October 1985 he started the Free Software Foundation.
The GNU/Linux system, which is a variant of GNU that also uses the kernel Linux developed by Linus Torvalds, are used in tens or hundreds of millions of computers, and are now preinstalled in computers available in retail stores. However, the distributors of these systems often disregard the ideas of freedom which make free software important.
That is why, since the mid-1990s, Stallman has spent most of his time in political advocacy for free software, and spreading the ethical ideas of the movement, as well as campaigning against both software patents and dangerous extension of copyright laws. Before that, Stallman developed a number of widely used software components of the GNU system, including the original Emacs, the GNU Compiler Collection, the GNU symbolic debugger (gdb), GNU Emacs, and various other programs for the GNU operating system.
Stallman pioneered the concept of copyleft, and is the main author of the GNU General Public License, the most widely used free software license. For more information check http://www.stallman.org/#serious

Karel De Vriendt is the IDABC Head of Unit in DIGIT. IDABC is the EC's agency responsable for Interoperable Delivery of pan-European eGovernment Services. The basics of IDABC' s software strategy are interoperability based on standards + open specifications and interfaces. IDABC defined the European Interoperability Framework for pan-European eGovernment services (EIF V1.0). After having obtained a degree in nuclear engineering and a post-graduate degree in informatics, he worked 7 years in the private industry (as a software engineer) before joining the European Commission. Within the Commission he worked as a project officer for what is now the Information Society and Media DG and then spent 12 years in various operational IT functions. He has been involved in the introduction of electronic mail within the Commission - the connection of the Commission network with the Internet - and later became responsible for user support and IT training. His last function before joining the IDABC unit has been head of unit responsible for the development of a number of the Commission's internal administrative systems.

Carlos Castro is the General Director of the Department of Telecommunications and Information Society of the Junta de Extremadura, the autonomous government of the region. A former professor and Dean of the Faculty of Library and Information Science of the University of Extremadura, he has been one of the architects of the regional strategy for the Information Society, in which Free Software plays a capital role.

Born in Montreal, Quebec, Stephen Downes lived and worked across Canada before joining the National Research Council as a senior researcher in November, 2001. Currently based in Moncton, New Brunswick, at the Institute for Information Technology's Internet Logic Research Group, Stephen has become a leading voice in the areas of learning objects and metadata, weblogs in education, content syndication, digital rights and related issues. His complete biography can be found here: http://www.downes.ca/me/index.htm