Disaster Tech: What is Working and What is Coming

Jesse Robbins is Cofounder & Chief Community Officer of Opscode, the leader in Cloud Infrastructure Automation, and served as the company’s founding CEO. Robbins is a widely recognized expert in Infrastructure, Web Operations, and Emergency Management.

Opscode makes Chef , the powerful open source tool used by tens of thousands of developers & systems administrators to automate, manage and scale infrastructure of any size and complexity.

Robbins served as founding chair of the Velocity Web Performance & Operations Conference and contributes to the O’Reilly Radar . Prior to co-founding Opscode, he worked at Amazon.com with a title of “Master of Disaster” where he was responsible for Website Availability for every property bearing the Amazon brand.

Robbins is a volunteer Firefighter/EMT and Emergency Manager, and led a task force deployed in Operation Hurricane Katrina. His experiences in the fire service profoundly influence his efforts in technology, and he strives to distill his knowledge from these two worlds and apply it in service of both.

• Web site

Mikel is co-Founder of Mapufacture (now part of GeoCommons), and specializes in Open Geospatial and Wiki technologies. He’s been active in the standardization of GeoRSS and in the OpenStreetMap collaborative mapping project, and several open source projects. He’s developed two of the first Wikis in use at the UN. Previously, Mikel worked as senior developer of My Yahoo! and researched evolutionary models of ecosystems for an MSc at the University of Sussex.

• Web site