Kate Stewart works as the Ubuntu Release Manager at Canonical.  Prior to that, she spent way too much time reviewing package metadata while working at Freescale Semiconductor, Inc in her role as Open Source Development Manager.  After attend LinuxCon in 2009, and finding others interested in getting together to to solve the package metadata review problem, the project that would become SPDX was started.  Kate is chair on the SPDX technical working group.