I'm a contributor to various free and open source software projects and I work for HP's Open Source and Linux Organization as an Open Source Community Expert. I'm also interested in science and philosophy. I have Master degrees in Psychology, Philosophy, and Software Engineering and a PhD in Technology Management, and I'm working on getting a better understanding of other important areas of science.

Broadly speaking, I have two main research interests and passions:

• Free software: unlike traditional software, free software comes with certain freedoms, such as the right to freely distribute, study and improve the software. I'm interested in free software for two reasons. First, I believe in the concept of free software and that users should be given those freedoms. Second, free software projects are often carried out by volunteers and I see project and quality management in distributed volunteer projects as an exciting challenge. I have been involved in various free software projects for over 10 years. I used to be the volunteer coordinator for the GNUstep project and acted as publicity director for Linux International. In 2000, I joined the Debian project, an association of roughly 1000 volunteers working on an operating system completely based on free software; I acted as the leader of Debian for two years. I also completed a PhD on the question of how to ensure and further improve quality in free software projects.
• Understanding how the mind/brain works: my main areas of interest are theory of mind (how we understand and predict what other people think), consciousness, and evolution of language. I have degrees in psychology and philosophy which allow me to study cognitive functions from a top-down approach. Recently, I have developed an interest in the relationship between genes and the formation of cognitive structures and for this question the application of a bottom-up approach is more appropriate. Unfortunately I currently lack the background in a number of areas needed to approach this question and at the moment I don't have time to do anything about it. However, I hope to find time for this again at some point in the future. In my opinion, we will only be able to understand how the mind works by combining bottom-up and top-down approaches and I feel by learning more about the lower levels I will be able to understand the whole better. I am interested in a number of related areas, such as biological anthropology and animal behaviour, but my background is clearly in cognitive psychology. Anyway, at the moment I don't really have the time to follow the literature.

Apart from spending my time on those two interests, I like to read, listen to music, talk to friends or to go to the movies. I also travel a lot and I'm interested in photography. I have a curious fascination with the ocean and one of my favourite pastime activities is to spend time at a beach. While I'm currently not in the best physical location to do this, I have been to a number of amazing beaches over the last few years (such as Manly and Coogee beach in Sydney and Copacabana in Rio de Janeiro).

I'm fairly busy but I'm quite approachable and actually pretty good at responding to e-mail. If you'd like to get in contact to discuss anything found on this web site, see my contact page. I also maintain a journal which I update every now and then.