Matthias Stuermer studied business administration and computer science at the university of Bern and graduated writing his thesis "Open Source Community Building". Since 2006 he works as doctoral student at ETH Zuerich at the chair of strategic management and innovation. His research focus is on open source software, free revealing strategies of firms and corporate R&D community building. So far, he has co-authored papers on software reuse in Debian and on the development process of the Nokia Internet Tablet.

In his spare time, he initiated the first national open source conference and exhibition called LOTS in 2004 and continues to organize open source events such as the OpenExpo, today as a board member of the Swiss Open Systems User Group /ch/open.