Deb Nicholson is a free software policy expert and a passionate community advocate. She is the Community Outreach Director for the Open Invention Network, the world's largest patent non-aggression community which serves Linux, GNU, Android and other key FOSS projects. She’s won the O’Reilly Open Source Award for her work with GNU MediaGoblin and OpenHatch. She is a founding organizer of the Seattle GNU/Linux Conference, an annual event dedicated to surfacing new voices and welcoming new people to the free software community. She also serves on the Software Freedom Conservancy's Evaluation Committee, which acts as a curator for it's new member projects. She lives with her husband and her lucky black cat in Cambridge, Massachusetts.