Danese Cooper PayPal

Danese describes herself on Twitter as an ‘open source diva’ and it’s not hard to see why. An American programmer, computer scientist, and open source software advocate, Danese has been a leader in the tech sector for nearly 20 years. She managed Quicktime research teams at Apple Inc. and for six years served as Chief Open Source Evangelist for Sun Microsystems, and then an additional 4 years as Senior Director for Open Source Strategies at Intel. She was an advisor on open source policy to the R community while at Revolution Computing (now Revolution Analytics), and as Chief Technical Officer for the Wikimedia Foundation. She currently works for PayPal as Head of Open Source.

Danese also runs DaneseWorks, a successful consultancy to companies wishing to pursue open source strategies. DaneseWorks counts the SETI Foundation, Harris Corporation and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation among its clients. She is Chairwoman of the Node.js Foundation and has served since 2005 as a Member of the Apache Software Foundation. She was a board member for 10 years at Open Source Initiative, 6 years at the Drupal Association and 4 years at the Open Source Hardware Association. She is an advisor to the Linux Foundation, the Mozilla project and to Ushahidi.

She has also been known to knit during meetings…

@DivaDanese