User:Missvain/Danese Cooper

Danese Cooper (b. January 19, 1959) is a programmer, computer scientists, and an advocate of open source software. Since February 2010 she has served as Chief Technical Officer of the Wikimedia Foundation.

Personal life
Danese Cooper obtained her B.A. University of California, Los Angeles. Upon graduation she spent time in Morocco as a volunteer in the Peace Corps. Cooper credits her time with the Peace Corp as fostering her desire to travel and work within the developing world to explore policy, education and how open source software can "give certain kids another alternative". She is married to a software developer and enjoys knitting.

Career
"'Open source allows people with a confluence of interesting ideas and an intellectual courage to really synthesize amazing newness. It's an accelerator of the synthesis of amazing ideas and for that I think it will end up being the most important change in the way that we do technology that has happened in my career lifetime,' - Danese Cooper, 2008"

Cooper has held many prominent leadership roles within the computer science sector. She has managed teams at Symantec and Apple Inc. and for six years served as chief open source "evangelist" for Sun Microsystems before leaving to serve as senior director for open source strategies at Intel. In 2009 she worked as "Open Source Diva" at REvolution Computing. She is currently a board member of the Open Source Initiative, Mozilla, and serves as a member of the Apache Software Foundation.

A passion for open source
"T'he point of the open source movement is...to allow everyone to have access to the technology so it can be improved faster.'-Danese Cooper, 2003"

Cooper's major work within the open source area of computer science has garnered her the nickname "Open Source Diva". She was hired at a sushi bar by Sun to work towards making Java open source. Within six months she quit, frustrated by the claims of open source development with Java that Sun made, only to find that little "open sourcing" was taking place. Sun sought to keep Cooper, understanding her need to further open source software and hired her as their corporate open source officer. Her six years with Sun Microsystems is credited as the key to the company opening up its source code and lending support to Sun's OpenOffice.org software suite, Oracle Grid Engine, among others. In 2009 she joined REvolution Computing, a "provider of open source predictive analytics solutions", to work on community outreach amongst developers unfamiliar with the programming language R and general open source strategies. She has also made public speaking appearances discussing open sourcing, speaking at the Malaysian National Computer Confederation Open Source Compatibility Centre, OSCON, gov2.0 Expo, and the Southern California Linux Expo. In 2005 Cooper was a contributing author to Open Sources 2.0: The Continuing Evolution.

Wikimedia Foundation
In February 2010 Cooper was appointed Chief Technical Officer of the Wikimedia Foundation, leading their technical team and developing and executing the Foundation's technical strategy. She will also be working on outreach with Wikimedia volunteers to expand on development and localizing of software. Cooper credits the open source community in helping her obtain the position at Wikimedia.