The freenode #live team are excited to announce more confirmed speakers for the freenode #live conference taking place at the At-Bristol Science Centre in Bristol, UK on 28-29th October this year, with plenty more still to be announced.

Of the variety of speakers, talks and workshops we've had submitted, we're pleased to announce the following confirmed lineup:

Deb Nicholson (Community Outreach Director for the Open Invention Network, winner of several awards including the O'Reilly Open Source Award)

Karen Sandler (Executive Director of the Software Freedom Conservancy, former executive director of the GNOME Foundation)

Matthew Garrett (technologist, programmer, and free software activist - a major contributor to various projects including Linux, GNOME, Debian, Ubuntu and Red Hat. He is a recipient of the Free Software Award from the Free Software Foundation for his work on Secure Boot, UEFI, and the Linux kernel.

James Wheare (founder of IRCCloud)

Christopher Baines (Debian packager, OSM contributor)

Kaspar Emanuel (freelance electronic design engineer and software developer working on projects ranging from musical instruments to robots to Braille displays)

Nathan Handler (freenode staff member, Ubuntu and Debian GNU/Linux Developer, Site Reliability Engineer at Yelp)

Errietta Kostala (Perl developer at FairFX London, keen open source contributor including Mozilla)

Maxigas (postdoctoral researcher at the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya and a fellow at Central European University)

Michael Walker (working on a Ph.D, open source contributor, started Arch Hurd distribution, author of Déjà Fu Haskell concurrent testing library)

Another 12+ talks yet to be confirmed will be announced soon, plus workshops on various topics.

Want to watch these talks and/or take part in these workshops? Get your tickets now to ensure you have the chance to experience these and the other speakers and workshops to be announced soon!

If you represent a FOSS project and would like to exhibit, please contact us - FOSS projects exhibit for free, and it's a great way to meet your current users and attract others!

Corporate sponsors are very much welcomed also, with a variety of sponsorship packages available providing different exposure levels to a FOSS-centered, technical audience - get a warm fuzzy feeling by supporting the community which most likely contributed in no small way to the success of your business!

For any questions, please feel free to email us - 2017-team@freenode.live - or join us in #live on freenode!

We look forward to seeing you there.