PyCon 2014 Keynote Speakers

## John Perry Barlow John Perry Barlow was, for several decades, a Wyoming rancher and a songwriter for the Grateful Dead. He co-founded the Electronic Frontier Foundation, an organization that has been protecting the free flow of information on the Internet since 1990. He remains actively engaged in running that organization. He has been writing about society in Cyberspace since 1988 and was first to apply that name to the global social space it presently describes. In 2013, he was inducted into the Internet Hall of Fame. He was a founding Fellow at Harvard Law School's Berkman Center for Internet and Society and recently created the Freedom of the Press Foundation with Daniel Ellsberg to fund WikiLeaks and other conduits of transparency journalism. In 2013, He was inducted into the Internet Hall of Fame, his second Hall of Fame induction after Rock and Roll. His startup company Algae Systems, is presently building a plant in Alabama to turn sewage into carbon negative jet fuel. He is the father of three daughters and his primary aspiration is to be a good ancestor. ------------------------------------------------ ## Guido van Rossum Guido van Rossum is the author of the Python programming language. He continues to serve as the "Benevolent Dictator For Life" (BDFL), meaning that he continues to oversee the Python development process, making decisions where necessary. He is currently employed by Dropbox.




------------------------------------------------ ## Jessica McKellar Jessica McKellar is an entrepreneur, software engineer, and open source developer from Cambridge, MA. She is a Python Software Foundation board member and an organizer for the largest Python user group in the world. With that group she runs the Boston Python Workshop -- an introductory programming pipeline that has brought hundreds of women into the local Python community and is being replicated in cities across the US. Jessica is a veteran open source contributor and a maintainer for several open source projects, including OpenHatch and the Twisted event-driven networking engine; she wrote a chapter on Twisted for The Architecture of Open Source Applications Volume II and the second edition of O'Reilly's Twisted Networking Essentials.


------------------------------------------------ ## Fernando Pérez Fernando Pérez is a research scientist at UC Berkeley, working at the intersection of brain imaging and open tools for scientific computing. He created IPython while a PhD student in Physics at the University of Colorado in Boulder. Today, with all the hard work done by a talented team, he continues to lead IPython's development as the interface between the humans at the keyboard and the bits in the machine. Fernando Pérez is a founding member of NumFOCUS, a PSF member, and received the 2012 FSF Award for the Advancement of Free Software for IPython and contributions to scientific Python.

------------------------------------------------ ## Van Lindberg Van Lindberg is Vice President of Intellectual Property at Rackspace. He is trained as a computer engineer and lawyer, but what he does best is “translate” to help businesses, techies and attorneys understand each other. Van likes working with both computer code and legal code. For the past several years, he has been using natural language processing and graph theory to help him digest and map the U.S. Patent Database. Van is currently chairman of the board of the Python Software Foundation, as well as the author of Intellectual Property and Open Source.

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