Lead Story: Mark Shuttleworth
Mark was born and raised in South Africa, and studied finance and information technology at the University of Cape Town. He went on to found Thawte, a company specialising in digital certificates and internet privacy, developed using Open Source software. He sold Thawte to the American company VeriSign in 1999, and founded HBD Venture Capital and The Shuttleworth Foundation. In April 2002 Mark became the first African in space, as a cosmonaut member of the crew of Soyuz mission TM34 to the International Space Station. Mark maintains that 'If we are to lift Africa from her current circumstances, we will need a generation of learners that are gifted with curiosity about the world in which they live, and the tools to understand and shape that world'. With this in mind he and his Foundation have invested in projects such as TuxLabs, HIP2B2, The School Tool Project and The Ubuntu Project.
Big Gun: Dirk-Willem van Gulik
Dirk-Willem van Gulik is a Partner at the Tribal Knowledge Group, with 15 years of Internet engineering, consulting and project management experience. His work on Apache has revolved around large enterprise systems such as portals, entitlement systems and Web interfaces to legacy systems. He has worked with a broad range of international standards bodies, such as the IETF on metadata, protocols, URIs GIS and other Internet standards. Prior to TTKG, Dirk held both VP of Engineering and VP of Research positions with Covalent Technologies, and prior to Covalent he worked on projects at the European Commission, the United Nations, telecommunications firms, satellite and space agencies. He has been on the board of directors of the Apache Software Foundation since its inception. In his free time he works on a co-operative Wireless network in his home town, Leiden. The network currently covers virtually the entire inner city.
