Biography | Zoë Kooyman — The First LibrePlanet She Ran Was in This Gehry Building

People treat the Free Software Foundation as a Boston shop that only ever hired from its own code benches.

Her first public test as program manager was a weekend in a Frank Gehry building across the river.

On 23 and 24 March 2019 the Foundation held LibrePlanet at the Ray and Maria Stata Center, MIT Building 32, at 32 Vassar Street in Cambridge.

Badge pickup and coffee started at 09:00 on Saturday in that hall.

The theme printed on the program was Trailblazing Free Software.

Zoë Kooyman had joined the Foundation in early 2019 to run public activities and communications.

John Sullivan, then executive director, hired her on the combination of free-software literacy and a long record producing large live events.

She was already the lead organizer of this edition.

The Stata Center is not a generic campus auditorium.

Gehry opened it for occupancy on 16 March 2004 on the site of MIT's demolished Building 20, the wartime Radiation Laboratory shed.

LibrePlanet used that address because the Foundation's Boston office sat a short T ride away, and because the building is the daily home of MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory.

Students and associate members got in without a ticket.

Walk-ins were welcome if the rooms still had chairs.

On the Friday night before the doors opened, the Foundation also ran an open house at its own office so people could collect badges early.

The Cambridge weekend is the first pin where her name sits on a public schedule rather than a production call sheet.

She would run the conference again in 2020 and 2021.

Those later editions left this building.

This one did not.

The visitor who stands on Vassar Street is looking at the same folded metal and brick that held the first LibrePlanet she organized.

Photo: Ruben Rodriguez, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Venue photo: Stata Center, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.