FLOSS has changed the way products are developed and the way community members interact. In many ways, the community surrounding a software is more important than the software itself. This panel introduces four women who built community. What is their experience? How have they succeeded?

Teresa Giacomini is a Senior Program Manager at Sun Microsystems. She joined the OpenSolaris team four years ago to build a relationship with students and professors around the globe. Over time, this role expanded to include other types of community outreach such as conferences, trade-shows, and user groups. Through her efforts the number of user groups for OpenSolaris have nearly doubled in the last several months. Prior to OpenSolaris, she held a number of program management and administrative roles at Sun, Oracle, and several other software companies. In her spare time (what's that?) she spends too much time running fund raising auctions for her children's schools.

Alix Franquet is a Product Marketing Manager for Mozilla Corporation. She joined Mozilla in 2007 and is focused on community marketing, consumer insights, and user engagement. She works closely with worldwide Mozilla community members to spread the word about the Firefox Web browser and the Open Web, in particular in Brazil and India. Before joining Mozilla, Alix was a software engineer at AltaVista and Cisco's Technology Center, and an entrepreneur developing anti-spam and news aggregation technologies. Alix earned her MBA and an AB in Computer Science from Harvard University.

Danese Cooper has a 15-year history in the software industry and has long been an advocate for transparent development methodologies. Danese worked for six years at Sun Microsystems, Inc. on the inception and growth of the various open source projects sponsored by Sun (including OpenOffice.org, java.net and blogs.sun.com). She was Sun\'s Chief Open Source Evangelist and founded Sun\'s Open Source Programs Office. She has unique experience implementing open source projects from within a large proprietary company. She joined the OSI Board in December 2001 and currently serves as Treasurer. As of March 2005 Danese has joined Intel to advise on open source projects, investment and support. She speaks internationally on Open Source and Licensing issues.

Yara Mascarenhas Hornos Senger graduated in Computer Science from the University of São Paulo, Brazil. She is one of the founders of Globalcode (1), the leading Java training company in South America and responsible for \'The Developer\'s Conference\'. Yara has been working with Java for the last 7 years. Nowadays she is Product Manager and Lead instructor. One of her main activities in both scenarios is studying new technologies for applying in software development, and consequently writing training books for Globalcode. She also publishes monthly articles for \'Java Magazine\' (2) (including two Java One Coverage articles) and speaks regularly in Java Conferences, proudly including JavaOne.