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I nominate Patrick Ball [1], director of the Human Rights Data Analysis Group [2] and lead on Martus (which is FLOSS) [3]. I've never heard him talk but I admire the project, which is about gathering and analyzing enormous amounts of data and making it accessible and understandable to make the world a better place, like we do---except they do it about torture and human rights violations. Here's a video of him leading a panel at Berkeley recently: http://fora.tv/2009/05/04/Human_Rights_Databases_Data_Sharing_and_Data_Security "Benetech HRDAG develops database software, data collection strategies, and statistical techniques to measure human rights atrocities. Our technology and analysis is used by truth commissions, international criminal tribunals, and non-governmental human rights organizations around the world. Our analysis identifies the trends and patterns which is the evidence of crimes of policy. " "Martus is a secure information management tool that allows you to create a searchable and encrypted database and back this data up remotely to your choice of publicly available servers. The Martus software is used by organizations around the world to protect sensitive information and shield the identity of victims or witnesses who provide testimony on human rights abuses. Martus is the Greek word for witness." [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patrick_Ball [2] http://www.hrdag.org/ [3] http://www.martus.org/ Bill -- William Denton, Toronto : miskatonic.org www.frbr.org openfrbr.org