Summary

Benjamin Mako Hill is a researcher, activist, and consultant working on issues of technology, intellectual property, and society. He is currently a researcher and PhD Candidate at the MIT Sloan School of Management and a Research Fellow at the MIT Center for Future Civic Media. He has been an leader, developer, and contributor to the Free and Open Source Software community for more than a decade as part of the Debian and Ubuntu projects. He is the author of several best-selling technical books, and a member of the Free Software Foundation board of directors. He is an advisor to the Wikimedia Foundation and the One Laptop per Child project. Hill has a Masters degree from the MIT Media Lab.

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Benjamin Mako Hill is an technology and intellectual property researcher, activist, and consultant. He is currently a researcher and PhD Candidate at the at the MIT Sloan School of Management where he studies free/open software communities and business models and a Fellow at the MIT Center for Future Civic Media where he coordinates the development of software for civic organizing.

Hill has over 12 years of experience as a developer, advocate, and leader in the FOSS and GNU/Linux movements. Over this time, he has authored, led, and maintained a number of FOSS projects including server-based, graphical and web-based applications. He has written two best selling books, published numerous articles, and given scores of talks around the world. He has sat on the boards of directors of several important free software organizations and is currently a director of the Free Software Foundation.

For almost a decade, Hill has been an active member of the Debian Project — by most accounts, the largest single active free/open source software development project in the world. He has served as a delegate of the Debian Project Leader managing money and equipment and is a founder and coordinator of Debian Non-Profit, a Debian custom distribution designed to fill the needs of small non-profit organizations. He served one year (2005-2006) on the five-person Debian project leadership team. Additionally, Hill served for several years as Vice President and an elected member of the board of directors of Software in the Public Interest, Inc., the non-profit organization that serves as the legal representative of the Debian developer community and supports a number of other free software projects.

Hill is also a core-developer, founding member, and active contributor to the Ubuntu Project. In additional to technical responsibilities, he coordinated the construction of a community around the Ubuntu Project as project "community manager" during the Ubuntu's first year and a half. During this period, he worked full time for Canonical Ltd. Within the Ubuntu Project, he continues to serve on the "Community Council" governance board that oversees all non-technical aspects of the project.

In addition to software development, Hill writes extensively. He has been published in academics books and conference proceedings and in magazines, newsletters, and online journals and magazines. He is the author of the Free Software Project Management HOWTO, the canonical document on managing FOSS projects, and has published academic work on FOSS from anthropological, sociological, management and software engineering perspectives and has written and spoken about intellectual property, copyright, and collaboration more generally. Hill is also the primary author of two books: The Debian Bible (2005) published by John Wiley and Sons and the bestselling Official Ubuntu Book (2006) published by Pearson Technical Publishing which is also distributed under a permissive Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license and which is currently being revised into a Third Edition.

Hill has worked for several years as a consultant for FOSS projects specializing in coordinating releases of software as free or open software and structuring development efforts to encourage community involvement. He spends a significant amount of his time traveling and giving talks on FOSS and intellectual property primarily in Europe and North America. Hill has served on the boards of directors of SPI and Software Freedom International and currently sits on the advisory boards of the Wikimedia Foundation, One Laptop per Child project, and the Free Software Foundation's board of directors.

Previous to his current positions, Hill pursued research full time as a graduate researcher at the MIT Media Laboratory. At the lab, he has worked in both the Electronic Publishing and Computing Culture groups on collaborative writing and decision-making software. One project, Selectricity is an award-winning voting tool which received prizes and grants from MTV and Cisco.