Melissa Draper is a web developer by trade, but invests most of her free time into Open Source advocacy. She has written a few articles for Linux.com but her primary focus area is the Ubuntu community.
Within Ubuntu, Melissa has helped coordinate the Local Community teams project at the global level, and has attended Developer Summits in California and Spain as part of this. She also leads the local Australian Ubuntu team, has contributed to the Ubuntu Marketing Team, and helps the projects 1400+ IRC users have a relatively sane IRC experience, among other things.
International speaker on the topics of (FOSS) documentation and DocBook, gender and IT and engaging ones physical community through the use of technology. Special interest in rural use of technology. Experience organizing community-focused technology conferences using local food and with energy offset credits. Several years as a community college instructor of PHP, MySQL, XHTML, ColdFusion, Dreamweaver (although she is a rabid Vim user) and standards-based Web development.