Kicking off a conference like this is always a challenge, and therefore we are bringing you five experts in the world of VoIP and Free and Open Source Software from all over the world.  Each will talk on an area of their expertise and interest, and we will have plenty of time for questions
afterwards.  Hosted by the never-quiet "maddog", this will be a panel looking at today and tomorrow.

Alan Duric is co-founder and Chief Technology Officer at Telio, the fastest-growing Nordic Broadband Telephony/Multi-Modal service provider. Mr. Duric is an early pioneer of VoIP and brings almost a decade of experience in VoIP and active contribution through his development and standardization work (as a co-author and/or contributor to number of IETF, ETSI, and ITU standards). Beside his standardization work, as a developer and senior systems architect at Ericsson, Mr. Duric was involved in the early deployment and development of some of the world's largest VoIP networks such as deltathree. At Global IP Sound (suppliers of voice components for Skype), Mr. Duric worked as Senior Systems Architect, where he steered standardization efforts and was responsible for iLBC (internet Low Bitrate Codec), an IETF and CableLabs standard codec for VoIP.

Denis Galvao is the co-founder and President of iSolve, a Brazilian IT company that offers to the corporate market a complete set of Open Source and Linux based solutions, called Linux4Business.
Denis holds a degree in Engineering from Federal University of Parana (Universidade Federal do Parana). He is the technical person responsible for the iTalk Network PBX Solution, an appliance IPBX that is totally based on Asterisk software. Before that, he worked as a security officer and network manager for about six years at Sigma Dataserv Informatica, one of the most important Brazilian IT companies.  After almost ten years working with and contributing to Open Source projects, he founded the
AsteriskBrasil.org community, that is supporting the Asterisk adoption and development in Brazil.

Jon "maddog" Hall is the Executive Director of Linux International (www.li.org), a non-profit association of computer vendors who wish to support and promote the Linux Operating System. During his career which spans over thirty years, Mr. Hall has been a programmer, systems designer, systems administrator, product manager, technical marketing manager, college educator and author. He has worked for such companies as Western Electric Corporation, Aetna Life and Casualty, Bell Laboratories, Digital Equipment Corporation, VA Linux Systems, and is currently funded by SGI. Mr. Hall serves on the boards of several companies, and several non-profit organizations, including the USENIX Association.

Henry Hall is the President and CEO of Wild Open Source, Inc. an Open Source technology consulting company that develops, deploys, and supports Open Source solutions for telecom and other industries. Prior to WOS, Henry led research and engineering groups at Digital Equipment, Compaq and Linuxcare in managing the development of breakthrough technologies. His technical background includes post graduate work on distributed operating systems (Locus) and in computer security including development of the "Trusted Computer System Evaluation Criteria" (the "Orange Book") at the MITRE Corporation and development of Digital Equipment's first commercial UNIX security offering.

Mark Spencer is President and founder of Digium, formerly Linux Support Services, Inc., a Huntsville, AL based company focused on the development and support of low-cost, innovative telecommunications hardware and open source software. Mark, originally from Auburn, AL, graduated in 1999 from Auburn University with a BS in Computer Engineering and founded his company in 2000. Mr. Spencer is the original author of GAIM, the widely popular, multi-protocol instant messanging program for Linux, BSD, and Windows. Mark is also responsible for Asterisk, the Open Source PBX for Linux, BSD, and MacOS.