Danese Cooper

She held many prominent leadership roles within the computer science sector. Cooper managed teams at Symantec and Apple Inc. and for six years served as chief open source "evangelist" for Sun Microsystems. She then served as senior director for open source strategies at Intel. In 2009 she worked as "Open Source Diva" at REvolution Computing.

Her six years with Sun Microsystems was credited as the key to the company opening up its source code and lending support to Sun's OpenOffice.org software suite, Oracle Grid Engine, among others. Major work within the open source area of computer science garnered Cooper the nickname "Open Source Diva". She served as a board member at Open Source Initiative and Mozilla, and as a member of the Apache Software Foundation.

In 2009 Cooper joined REvolution Computing, a "provider of open source predictive analytics solutions," to work on community outreach amongst developers unfamiliar with the programming language R and general open source strategies. She also made public speaking appearances discussing open sourcing, speaking at the Malaysian National Computer Confederation Open Source Compatibility Centre, OSCON, gov2.0 Expo, and the Southern California Linux Expo. In 2005, Cooper was a contributing author to "Open Sources 2.0: The Continuing Evolution."

In February 2010 she was appointed Chief Technical Officer of the Wikimedia Foundation, leading their technical team and developing and executing the Foundation's technical strategy. Cooper also worked on outreach with Wikimedia volunteers to expand on development and localizing of software.