Deb Nicholson

Software Freedom Conservancy

Deb Nicholson is a free software policy expert and a passionate community advocate. She is the Director of Community Operations at Software Freedom Conservancy where she supports the work of its member organizations and facilitates collaboration with the wider free software community. Formerly, she has served as the Community Outreach Director for the Open Invention Network, a shared defensive patent pool on a mission to protect free and open source software and the Membership Coordinator for the Free Software Foundation. She’s won the O’Reilly Open Source Award for her work with GNU MediaGoblin, a federated media-hosting service and OpenHatch, free software’s welcoming committee. She is also a founding organizer of the Seattle GNU/Linux Conference, an annual event dedicated to surfacing new voices and welcoming new people to the free software community. She lives with her husband and her lucky black cat in Cambridge, Massachusetts.