Program Description

Six leading members of European and Asian open source and/or free software organizations or businesses will answer five questions about their own organizations. We hope to show the variety of organizational models and business models for successful open source organizations in Europe and Asia as well as their similarities. A limited number of questions will be answered by the presenters. We hope that this will lead to additional innovation in open source in Asia, Europe and beyond.

The questions to be answered

• What is the purpose of your organization?
• Where would you consider that your organization has not yet succeeded?
• How and to what extent do you rely on community(ies) for reaching success?
• What has the Internet made possible in your organization (that was not possible before)?
• What has made Open-Source / the Free Software movement possible for your organization?

Speakers (in alphabetical order)

• François Bancilhon, Chief Executive Officer, Mandriva (presentation from Paris)
  Prior to joining Mandriva, François Bancilhon gained extensive experience in successfully managing software companies as well as developing businesses in the information technology sector. He is a founder and was CEO of O2 Technology -- an object-oriented database company that he successfully merged with Unidata in 1997.
  In 1999, he founded and ran as CEO Arioso, an ASP company that provides Human Resource and benefit management services to small and medium-sized businesses in the US. More recently, he was Chief Technology Officer of SomaLogic, a Biotech company based in Boulder, Colorado. He is also a founder and Chairman of the Board of Xyleme -- an XML tools company based in Saint-Cloud, France.
  François's career began in the academic world, both in Europe and in the US, in the field of relational and object-oriented databases.
  Graduate of the "Ecole des Mines de Paris", François holds, among other academic works, a PhD in Computer Science from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.
• Pierre Beaudouin, President, Wikimedia France (presentation from Paris)
  Pierre Beaudouin is the chair of Wikimedia France and a contributor to Wikimedia projects, starting with the French Wikipedia, since July 2004. Currently he is a PhD student at the University of Paris 1, where his research focuses on the economic effects of human migration.
• Tristan Nitot, President, Mozilla Europe (presentation from Paris)
  Tristan Nitot is the founder and current president of Mozilla Europe, the international affiliate of the Mozilla Foundation, home of the Firefox Web browser. He has been contributing to this project since 2001. With the help of Mozilla Europe, Firefox is translated into more than 40 languages worldwide. Tristan Nitot was with Netscape from 1997 to 2003, first in charge of Product marketing in Southern Europe and then Technology Evangelist, managing developer relations in Europe. Tristan Nitot has also helped launching the OpenWeb.eu.org project in 2002, aiming at promoting Web standards and accessibility. Tristan publishes on the Web since 1996 and started blogging in 2002 on Standblog.org. His blog reaches 12,000 readers daily on average.
• Charles-H Schulz, Lead of the Native-Language Confederation, OpenOffice.org (presentation from Paris)
  Charles-H. Schulz, graduated in the ISEG Paris, has a Master of International Trade and Negociation, co-founder of Ars Aperta. He worked in many FLOSS companies including Mandriva and Novell. He is the lead of the Native-Lang Confederation of Openoffice.org. He works at fostering the international development of this successful project. He is in charge of the worldwide coordination of the communities of users, developers and documentation teams of the OpenOffice.org project.
• Dr. Virach Sornlertlamvanich, President, Association of Thailand Open Source Federation (TOSF) (presentation from Thailand)
  Co-Director, Thai Computational Linguistics Laboratory, NICT Asia Research Center, Thailand
  Virach Sornlertlamvanich received his B.Eng. and M.Eng. in Precision Mechanics from Kyoto University in 1984 and 1986 respectively. He received his D.Eng. in Computer Engineering from Tokyo Institute of Technology in 1996. He was a researcher involving in Machine Translation research and development at NEC Corporation (Japan) during 1988 to 1992. He founded Linguistics and Knowledge Science Laboratory (LINKS) of NECTEC in 1992. He was the project leader for the collaboration project of Multi-Lingual Machine Translation (MMT) research and development since then. He is currently Co-Director of Thai Computational Linguistics Laboratory (TCL), NICT Asia Research Center.
  Besides the research on several components in the machine translation system, he initiated many other projects related to the research in natural language processing such as Thai electronic dictionaries, namely LEXiTRON and the Royal Institute dictionary system, English-Thai web-based machine translation, namely ParSit, probabilistic search engine, namely SanSarn and so on. He has led the ORCHID project for the development of natural language resources, in collaboration with CRL and ETL (Japan) since 1996. He had published many research papers ranging from the areas of machine translation, natural language processing, information extraction and knowledge engineering. He is currently a board member of Asia-Pacific Association for Machine Translation, and also serving as a committee member in many academic journals and conferences.
  He received the award of "The Most Outstanding Researcher of the Year 2003" in the field of Information Technology and Communications from The National Research Council of Thailand.
• Larry Stefonic, Senior Vice President, Asia Pacific MySQL AB; President, MySQL K.K. (Japan) - (presentation from Tokyo)
  Larry Stefonic is responsible for the company's wholly-owned Japanese subsidiary and oversees its Asia Pacific sales channels. He has over 18 years of successful database business experience, including the introduction of three companies to the Japanese market. Prior to MySQL, Larry was in charge of Worldwide Embedded Sales at Mbrane in Seattle, Washington. He has also led international sales and business development teams at Centura Software, Raima Corporation and Micro Database Systems.

Moderator

• Gen Kanai, Director of Marketing, Mozilla Japan (moderation from Tokyo)
  Gen Kanai is Director of Marketing for Mozilla Japan, the official Japanese affiliate of Mozilla, a California-based not-for-profit organization that develops, manages and freely distributes the open source Mozilla Firefox web browser. Prior to Mozilla, Gen was on the team responsible for the launch of the weblog search engine, Technorati Japan. Prior to Technorati Japan, Gen worked for Sony Marketing of Japan, Sony Electronics Inc. and Toyota Motor Sales, USA, Inc. on various Internet-related businesses in both the US and Japan.
  Gen is a fellow of the US-Japan Foundation's "US-Japan Leadership Program" as well as a fellow of the Asia Society's "Asia 21 Young Leaders Initiative." Gen received a BA in Geography from Dartmouth College in 1996. Gen was born and raised in New York City and currently resides in Tokyo.

Program Description

Mozilla's open source software is available in well over 50 languages around the world. In fact volunteers around the world localize each version of Firefox or Thunderbird outside of the English version. Three key Mozilla employees who help to manage the volunteer localizers in Europe and Japan will share their processes and procedures for how to localization is possible in so many languages for Mozilla. With this information we hope to see more volunteers to help with localization at Mozilla and we hope to spur additional localization efforts at other open source software projects.

Speakers

• Dr. Axel Hecht, member of the Board of Directors, Mozilla Europe
• Pascal Chevrel, Website Localization Coordinator, member of the Board of Directors, Mozilla Europe
• Tomoya Asai, Localization Manager, Mozilla Japan

• 
  Axel Hecht
• 
  Pascal Chevrel
• 
  Tomoya Asai