Founders

Fen Labalme is a primary developer of OpenPrivacy, an Open Source, cryptographically secure, distributed platform for creating, maintaining, and selectively sharing profile information (e.g., a marketplace for anonymous demographic profiles). Since creating the first personalized information system in 1979 (NewsPeek, at the then-nascent MIT Media Lab), Fen has been continuously evolving his goal of privacy-enhanced personalization. As part of his research into personalized information, he coined the term "broadcatch" to describe a suite of "many-to-one" technologies designed to provide information the way people really want it: timely, trusted, and on target. Fen continued to push the personalization-with-privacy envelope as co-founder of Lumeria Inc., where he furthered his work in agent and infomediary technology. He is the primary author of the seminal white papers An Infomediary Approach to the Privacy Problem and Enhancing the Internet with Reputations. Fen is currently the CTO of the Identity Commons which is applying OpenPrivacy concepts to portable, user controlled identity. He believes that current technologies such as XRI, XDI, and public key cryptography, combined with greater power and bandwidth at the desktop, will at last enable his vision to become a reality.

Kevin Burton is a long-standing contributor to the Apache Software Foundation (ASF) and has concentrated on Open Source, distributed systems, Java, XML, object oriented design, performance analysis, scalability design, and security. He has created a number of Open Source projects including, Apache Jetspeed, Apache Alexandria and also co-founded the Apache Turbine project. All have been very successful, with Jetspeed attracting involvement from companies such as IBM, SAP, and NEC and Turbine now driving some of the most complex applications on the Internet. He is also involved in next generation Software Engineering, and is trying to use the distributed, evolutionary Open Source model to build quality, stable, and scalable software. Recently Kevin has been busy working on the OpenPrivacy project. After being co-founded in late 2000, the project has released its first Open Source project, Reptile.