Machtelt Garrels is a Linux veteran and freelance consultant/trainer.

She is also a member of the Linux Documentation Project, where she initially found a fertile ground to make her work read throughout the world. She was invited last year to join the BSD Certification Group Advisory Board and shares her knowledge about organizing certifications, which she gathered as a Translation Coordinator for the Linux Professional Institute.

In cooperation with a group of Dutch colleagues, she founded the OpenDoc Society last year, which is a non-profit organization that promotes the use of open standards and Open Document Standard (ODF) in particular.