About

With a background in Engineering, Ahmed has started the first FOSS community in Alexandria in 2007. He started his career as a System Administrator and then a Team Leader, until he founded Spirula Systems in 2010. He is a renowned public speaker in technology events, and has made TV appearances concerning data privacy and protection. He has co-founded OpenEgypt organization that is concerned with FOSS strategy and culture, and also a board member in Mushtarak that is Egypt’s first tech hub. Mekkawy has worked as a consultant for the Ministry of Communications and Information Technology from 2012 to 2014. His notable work on Elections.eg portal has highly impacted the release of FOSS adoption strategy by the Egyptian government.

Ali has 10+ years of experience working for SMEs in Alexandria and as a freelancer. He holds a master’s degree in computer engineering from Arab Academy for Science and Technology and Maritime Transport (AASTMT), and a diploma from the Unix department in the Information Technology Institute (iTi) in Alexandria, where he worked as an external instructor afterwards. He is Oracle certified professional as Solaris 10 system administrator. Having the experience in both development and systems administration fields, he has deeper understanding of service architecture and performance issues.

Ehab is a customer oriented professional with a total of 9 years of experience in sales, managing teams, customer experience, among which a 6 years of experience in real time management (RTM) in an international telecom company. He was a part of the team who launched the largest english speaking call center in Alexandria, Egypt. In the same time, he started his private business in automotive services, while working as a soft skills trainer in his free time.

With a background in Engineering, Mohamed has 10+ years of work experience in the field of Linux systems operations, in both SMEs and large corporates, among which is TEData, the largest ISP in Egypt, where he lead the core systems team. He has a wide portfolio as a freelancer, and an active FOSS community member, as he delivered multiple technical sessions, and contributed largely in the GNU/Linux Installfest in Egypt twice. He has experiences also as an external instructor at the Information Technology Institute (iTi) in Alexandria.

Sabrine is a public relations consultant at the German-Arab Chamber of Commerce. She is also heading “UnTap”; the newly established innovation consultancy arm of “ThePlanet” - a leading Digital Marketing Agency in Egypt. She co-founded “SolverMine”; one of the first open innovation platforms in the Middle East.

Sabrine is a former teaching assistant of information systems at the German University in Cairo (GUC). She is a management consultant and a researcher at a number of entities such as Global Projects Partners e.V., General Authority for Investment, Nutty Scientists Egypt, and more. She is a graduate of the German University in Cairo with majors in Innovation and Information Systems.

Evronia has worked on establishing Spirula’s Business Development team and strategy, and is currently a researcher and a PhD candidate at the Royal Holloway University of London. She holds a Master’s degree in Management, Information Systems and Innovation from the London School of Economics, UK, along with other degrees in Computer Engineering, and Global Business from Alexandria. She has work experience at the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna, and technology startups in Alexandria, with a focus on managing ICT for Development projects, where young people are trained to develop their own ideas and projects for the society through FOSS.

Hussein graduated as the top of his Computer Science class, and then obtained a Systems Administration Diploma. He is a Red Hat Certified System Administrator (RHCSA), Cisco Certified Network Associate (200 - 120), and VMware Certified Associate Data Center Virtualization (VCA/DCV). He is also a technical writer, runs his own blog, and has contributions to multiple repositories on GitHub.

After studying Linux administration on a grant by the Egyptian Ministry of Communications and Information Technology, Shady got certified in LPIC1, LPIC2, and LPIC3 from the Linux Professional Institute. After which, he achieved four years of experience in SMEs in Alexandria.

Madonna holds a degree in accounting, specialized in modern accounting and has ability to handle different accounting software. She has work experience in different SMEs in Alexandria.