John M. Scott III

John is the Director of Open Integration & Open Source Software at Mercury Federal Systems (subsidiary of Mercury Computing, www.mc.com). John is a technologist with deep expertise in engineered systems and bridging the gap between decision-makers, scientists and engineers to develop policies for acquiring and deploying new technologies in the Department of Defense and US Government. John currently leads the Defense Department’s Open Technology Development initiative, which lays the groundwork for streamlined adoption of open source methodologies within DoD, which includes both the adoption of private sector open source software and the formation of internal communities of interest around DoD systems, including classified systems. He has focused his career on investigating and developing ideas for how large organizations design, construct and evolve extremely complex systems to meet National Security needs. Previous work as a consultant to DoD includes the development of new design and testing methodologies for military networks, and the development of complex systems modeling applications for distributed systems.

John holds an M.S. in Systems Engineering from Virginia Tech and a B.S. in Mechanical Engineering from Lehigh University. He has been a repeat speaker at the O’Reilly Emerging Technology Conferences (and served on the conference committee of its predecessor, Peer-to-Peer) and was a featured speaker at the 2006 O’Reilly Open Source Conference.