What aspects of open source technology interest you most?

There are two aspects that interest me most about open source. The first is the community aspect - the fact that I can go anywhere in the world and sit down and have a coffee or a beer with someone who has the same underpinning values as me: the values of freedom, anyone getting involved in technology, anyone being able to make it from zero to hero. There's such a great support base.

I found, in the proprietary world, there's far less of a support base for technical people; finding information is hard, and often enough, because people don't have access to the source code, it takes a bit of guesswork to fix things. Whereas in the open source world, it really is so easy to get things fixed. It's technically such a brilliant set of solutions.

The second aspect about open source that I love is that you can innovate so much because you have access to what's going on. What you do create, you can trust because you can see the source code, and what you do create is sustainable because anyone can build on it in the future rather than having to start from scratch.

So I guess the sustainability and transparency of systems is something I care about deeply, because our lives are so based on technology. Why should my generation and future generations not be able to access our history, read our love letters and all this stuff that we've developed, just because our lives are recorded digitally?

Open source, for me, is a way of making sure that we can trust and rely upon technology that we use everyday to not limit our personal rights.

Have you any professional role models?

Bdale Garbee [Linux CTO of HP]. I listened to a talk of his about four years ago, because he was the project leader of the Debian project at the time. I'd just been nominated for president of Linux Australia, and had no idea about how to lead an organization. So I went and had a chat to him, and he is the one that talked to me about how to establish common values in the community in order to establish common goals, and he's just been such a great role model for me since then, both technically, in terms of the work that he does, and also professionally, in terms of how to build my own career, how to lead a community, and how to take this whole open source thing forward.

And - this is going to sound really w-nky, and I don't care - my husband, Jeff Waugh. He has done a lot in open source, he's just a great open source professional, and it's been really good working with him because we both have different skill-sets and so we're able to make those work together in our own company.

And can I have one more role model? My dad. He is a refrigeration mechanic and the savviest business-person I know. My mum and dad always have run multiple businesses and it's their business-savvy that has made me feel comfortable and confident with setting up our own business.