ABLEconf Free Software for Free Enterprise

Thanks to everyone who proposed a talk! Thanks especially to those who are travelling to town in order to speak for us. Double-especially to those needing a passport to join us!

This year's ABLEconf has a variety of great presentations. We have talks for small- and medium-sized businesses. We have talks for educational environments. We have talks on security, desktop applications and even for finding a career.

Speakers include a KDE core developer, a senior Red Hat engineer and several local stars from our community.

See you Saturday the 24th at ABLEconf.

Aaron Seigo
Talk: Meeting Modern User Expectations (F/OSS Across the Device and Experience Spectrum)
Aaron has been a software developer since the early 1990s and has extensive experience in software project and business management. As one of the lead developers in the KDE community, he heads up the Plasma software project and contributes to several other KDE products. As a community leader, Aaron speaks at events around the world each year, has served as President of KDE's global non-profit foundation, sat on its Board of Directors for 3 years and was named one of the 50 most influential people in IT in 2008 by Silicon.com.

Kaia Taylor
Talk: ITIL: The Dreams, the Wake-Up
BA, BSc, MIS University of Toronto; 3 years Rogers Cable, 3.5 years IBM Global services, 1.5 years private contractor, now works in the financial industry.

Debbie Christofferson
Talk: How to Land a Job and Career in Information Security
Experienced Information Security Manager with more than 15 years in Fortune 500 roles across the US, Europe and Japan, including Intel Corporation and Apollo Group, Inc. Debbie's a high-energy speaker who's passionate and engaging. She knows security from the ground up from a holistic business view. Debbie's a published author, columnist and platform speaker who can bring your audience to life. Security certifications: CISSP, CISM. President of Phoenix ISSA and ISSA International Board Member.

M Vening
Talk: OpenOffice.org 3.x
M Vening has worked in a variety of technology-related jobs. She is currently employed as a freelance non-fiction writer and is the ABLEconf 2009 Women in Technology Chairperson.

Steven DuChene
Talk: Small / Medium Business FOSS Reliable Server Solution
* Fifteen plus years as Linux and Unix systems administrator, technical support specialist, and systems architect
* HPC Technical architect/engineer for SGI, VA Linux Systems, FreddieMac, and Honeywell
* Installed and maintained the first permanent Linux systems on Slippery Rock and YSU college campuses in 1993 - 1994
* Formal paper presentation and publication at 2008 Ottawa Linux Symposium on Green Computing for HPC and Data Center
* IPMI introductory paper published at DevChannel.org in 2002

Dennis Kibbe
Talk: Using Moodle Class Management Software
Dennis has been and active Phoenix Linux Users Group member for many years and teaches the GNU/Linux operating system at Mesa Community College.

Antonio Cárdenas
Talk: Sage: Free Software for the research and teaching of mathematics
Computer Science PhD student at ASU.

Bryan O'Neal
Talk: Disaster Recovery
Bryan O'Neal holds degrees in Accounting and Computer Information Systems Management from the W. P. Carey School of business and is a former president of ASULUG. He is committed to the implantation and integrations Linux and F/OSS products into business environments wherever it makes financial sense. Bryan possesses nearly 15 years of IT experience working as a Network Engineer, a Database Administrator, a System Administrator, a Integration Engineer, and a Java Developer. He is a strong believer in continuous improvement and while working as a Director of IT, first for Cornerstone Homes, and then Loop Advertising, he has had the opportunity to integrate Linux and Open Source applications into nearly every level of the IT environment. Using strict Change Management to ensure smooth transitions and focusing as much on the business process as the technology he has been able to leverage F/OSS to achieve exceptional improvements to each company’s bottom line. However, with the recent insolvency of Loop Advertising (Speekback.com) Bryan is now seeking other career opportunities.

Christopher Lewis
Talk: The Penguin, the Daemon, the Gnu and your Bottom Line
Christopher started his computer career in the mid 90's by working at Iomega's technical support center in Phoenix, AZ. He quickly moved up the ranks from first level support to experimental online support projects in his brief 9 month tenure. Over the next half dozen years Christopher developed his love of open source software. This love of tinkering with open source systems lead to many successful High Availability Systems projects in the manufacturing sector. Christopher also became a regular participant at DefCon, the world's largest annual hacker convention. This real world experience in Systems Security lead him to the financial world and a position at eboCom, LLC, a backend processor for 5 Star hotels world wide. Originally tasked with migrating their existing live Microsoft infrastructure to RedHat Linux, Christopher was also responsible for preparing their networks for a full PCI-DSS audit. eboCom was able to pass it's PCI-DSS audit with a 100% compliance score with no mitigation factors. Christopher currently lives in Tempe, AZ with his wife and five children.

Lisa Kachold
Talk: Email Deliverability Science and Solutions for Customer Relationship Management, MultiLevel and Email Marketing using FOSS for responsible business use
American systems administrator and computer security consultant.

Matthew A Coulliette
Talk: Using Mozilla Firefox & ChatZilla
Talk: Using Mozilla Thunderbird & Lighting
Matthew used to be an electrician, then became AutoCAD certified and drew residential electrical plans. Later, he got a job as a Drafter working on plans/circuits for SRP (Salt River Project) using MicroStation. Finally, he was made an associate electrical designer for SRP.

Matthew started using Linux when Rad Hat 9 was released in March of 2003. From there he started moving from distro to distro trying to find the one that had solved all his problems. Matthew has probably tried over a hundred of them but here is the gist of it: he migrated from Rad Hat 9 to Mandrake 9.0 to Suse 9.3 where I stayed for a couple of years. He left openSuse around version 11.0 and finally, he moved to the Ubuntu Community (Ubuntu 8.10) where he plans on staying for quite some time.

He is currently working on the BlenderCAD project, which is slowly gaining momentum. In his opinion, BlenderCAD is our best hope for an open source full featured CAD program.

Ryan Rix
Talk: The Fedora Project
Talk: The Dangers of Software as a Service
Ryan Rix is a member of the Phoenix Linux User Group. He has been a Free Software advocate for a few years now, and is looking to pursue a career in Free software. Ryan works for a company who produces an online application for state government organizations. This application is not "hosted in the cloud" per se, the government entities hold full control over the application and the data. Ryan is also a member of the Fedora Project working on the KDE Special Interests Group and serving as the project's Phoenix Arizona Ambassador. He occasionally writes on Fedora Weekly News, as well.

Eric Shubert
Talk: Applying FOSS with Business Servers

Kristy Westphal
Talk: Selling Open Source
Talk: Using Forensics to Prove Your Case
Talk: Metasploit: A Pen-Testers Best Friend
Kristy Westphal is a versatile information technology professional of 16 years with specific experience in providing advisory and management services in the area of information security, with a concentration on risk management. Experience in the Information Security field has led to the achievement of the CISSP and CISA, as well as competencies in security awareness programs and disaster recovery planning. Skilled in troubleshooting and process analysis, specific expertise in security areas includes: operating system security, intrusion detection, firewalls, VPNs, incident handling, vulnerability analysis and policy development.

Rick Spurgeon
Talk: Red Hat in the Context of the Open Source Community and Development Process
Talk: Green IT
Talk: Whys and Hows of Server Consolidation Through Virtualization

Red Hat Certified Datacenter Specialist, Senior Solutions Architect with Red Hat. Rick has seen a lot of change in his 30+ years in Information Systems and Technology, with Virtualization being the latest and one of the most important developments. Rick has an MS in Information Systems from the University of Texas at Dallas, and has worked in software development, ISO-9000/CMM quality assurance, consulting, training, and systems integration. He has been with Red Hat for the past 5 years and provides technical support to Red Hat's top-tier resellers in the western U.S. Rick is based in Dallas/Fort Worth and his email is spurgeon at redhat.com.

Craig A. Eddy
Talk: Netbooks: What Good Are They?
Ubuntu-Arizona LoCo Team.

Joseph Sinclair
Talk: Virtualization In The Open Enterprise
Joseph Sinclair is a Software Engineer currently residing near Phoenix, Arizona. Joseph has been writing software for networked and web-based systems for almost 20 years. A local leader in the Free/Open Source Software community, Joseph is a strong advocate for open innovation, greater access to technology, and greater attention to accessibility in developing web-based content and applications. Joseph's recent work has focused on enterprise distributed computing, virtual machine technology, and efficient network-based mixed sequential/parallel processing technologies.

Barbara Atkinson
Talk: If it wasn't for people! Conflict Management 101
In 2004, Barbara walked away from a near 20 year career in systems engineering and IT management for Fortune 100 and Fortune 500 companies in the Washington, DC metro area. In her last position she was a Senior Manager/Senior Oracle DBA for a $5 billion company and managed a global virtual DBA team. Aside from a short contract in 2006 for Perot Systems, she has not had an IT centric position. Although her Oracle skills are too deprecated to be employable, she would like to get back into the IT arena and is actively looking for a job.

David Huerta
Talk: My Social Network Can Beat up Your Social Network
After arriving in Arizona from Idaho, David Huerta founded the DeVry Linux User Group (DeLUG) in 2003, an originally student organization that drew members and activities from the greater West Valley Free software community, including other students at GCC and ASU West. An IEEE member, David was also the chair for the IEEE Computer Society Student Branch at DeVry in 2005, and was a proponent of the foundation of the IEEE EMB Society Student Branch at DeVry, which formed shortly after his graduation in 2006. He remains a member of the IEEE Computer Society and currently serves as the chair of the Phoenix IEEE GOLD Affinity Group.

David presented on a home-built duck hunt arcade machine for the Hak5 podcast at Shmoocon in 2007 in Washington, D.C. Last year, he spoke at the first ABLEconf, in Tempe, on the open-source GP2X portable gaming system. Most recently, he spoke at Toorcamp 2009 on the subject of search engine history obfuscation, a talk presented in the middle of the Washington desert atop a dismantled missile silo. David is currently employed as a developer of ethical e-mail marketing systems in downtown Phoenix and resides in Tempe where he plans on continuing his education at ASU in the spring of 2010.