Born on August 30, 1977, Thorsten Harbig grew up at the Lake of Constance in Southern Germany. He studied computer science, spent seven months in Belgium working on his Diploma Thesis and finished his Master's degree about energy savings on mobile phones at the Aalborg University in Denmark.

In 2006, Thorsten started working for LogicLine, a software consulting company in Sindelfingen near Stuttgart (Germany). In his daily work, he is a Java software architect for an internationally-active corporation in the automotive industry. He is always looking for new interesting topics to work on and to share new achievements with colleagues and others who are interested.

Alan Lord has over 20 years' experience in the IT industry. He has worked for companies that were some of the pioneers of the early Internet through to global telecommunications vendors.

For the last 10 years or so Alan has been building and running Linux systems both for business and pleasure. Around four years ago he co-founded the Open Source consulting company, Libertus Solutions (libertus.co.uk), to offer expertise and advice on Free and Open Source Software to businesses and public-sector organizations alike.

As well as being a business-minded Free Software evangelist, Alan's specialist expertise includes Ubuntu Linux and several open source applications including vtiger, OpenERP, Joomla, and Alfresco.

Alan writes a blog at http://theopensourcerer.com and can also be found on twitter <@opensourcerer>.