Benjamin Mako Hill

2019 Research Symbiont Award—General Symbiont

Hill has a master's degree from the MIT Media Lab and received a PhD in an interdepartmental program involving the MIT Sloan School of Management and the MIT Media Lab. As of fall 2013, he is an assistant professor in the Department of Communication at the University of Washington. He is also a Fellow at the MIT Center for Civic Media where he coordinates the development of software for civic organizing. He has worked as an advisor and contractor for the One Laptop per Child project. He is a speaker for the GNU Project, and serves on the board of Software Freedom International (the organization that organizes Software Freedom Day). In 2006, he married Mika Matsuzaki and used mathematically constrained wedding vows at the marriage ceremony.

Hill is also a core developer and founding member of Ubuntu, and continues to be an active contributor to the project. In addition to technical responsibilities, he coordinated the construction of a community around the Ubuntu Project as project "community manager" (later ceding the role to Jono Bacon) during Ubuntu's first year and a half. During this period, he worked full-time for Canonical Ltd. Within the Project, he served on the "Community Council" governance board that oversees all non-technical aspects of the project, until October 2011. His work included contributing to a code of conduct and diversity statement for the project.

He served on the advisory board of the Wikimedia Foundation, the advisory council of the Open Knowledge Foundation and the board of the Free Software Foundation. He was a founding member of the Ubuntu Community Council in 2009.

In addition to software development, Hill writes extensively. He has been published in academic books and magazines, newsletters, and online journals, and Slate Magazine republished one of his blog posts. He is the author of the Free Software Project Management HOWTO, the canonical document on managing Free and open-source software (FOSS) projects, and has published academic work on FOSS from anthropological, sociological, management and software engineering perspectives and has written and spoken about intellectual property, copyright, and collaboration more generally. He has also studied the sociology of community involvement in web communities, and been widely published and cited about projects like Scratch and Wikipedia. He has talked about these topics publicly, as well as giving a keynote address at 2008 OSCON.

Since 1999, Hill has been an active member of Debian. He has served as a delegate of the Debian Project Leader, and is a founder and coordinator of Debian Non-Profit, a Debian custom distribution designed to fill the needs of small non-profit organizations. In addition he served on the board of Software in the Public Interest from March 2003 until July 2006, serving as the organisation's vice-president from August 2004.

Benjamin Mako Hill (born December 2, 1980) is a free software activist, hacker, and author. He is a contributor and free software developer as part of the Debian and Ubuntu projects as well as the co-author of three technical manuals on the subject, Debian GNU/Linux 3.1 Bible, The Official Ubuntu Server Book, and The Official Ubuntu Book.