Dirk-Willem van Gulik is a Senior Partner at the Tribal Knowledge Group, a specialist Apache consultancy company, with 15 years of Internet engineering, consulting and project management experience. Along with his work at the European Commission, the United Nations, telecommunications firms, satellite and space agencies, Dirk also held both VP of Engineering and VP of Research positions with Covalent Technologies.

At this moment Dirk-Willem van Gulik holds the position of President at the Apache Software Foundation where he was a volunteer since the days of NCSA. Van Gulik's work on Apache has revolved around large enterprise systems such as portals, entitlement systems and Web interfaces to legacy systems. He has worked with a broad range of international standards bodies, such as the IETF on metadata, protocols, URIs GIS and other Internet standards. He currently is a board member of the Apache Software Foundation, the not for profit entity behind the Apache web server, tomcat, and xml. Dir-Willem is also one of the founders of @semantics, a firm that’s going to make the ‘Semantic Web’ reality.