Biography | Zoë Kooyman — The Boston Dateline That Named Her Executive Director

People treat a leadership change as something that happens in a closed room and leaks later.

This one carried a Boston dateline and a morning timestamp.

On Tuesday, 1 March 2022, the Free Software Foundation announced from Boston that its board had appointed Zoë Kooyman executive director.

She was thirty-eight.

She succeeded John Sullivan, who the Foundation said had held the post for twelve years and would stay a few months to hand the work over.

The selection process, the Foundation wrote, included a staff committee and a list of tests: management, fundraising, business and finance, legal, and technical skill.

Kooyman had joined as program manager in early 2019.

By the announcement she had already run three LibrePlanet conferences, moved the 2020 edition online in five days, commissioned a set of animated advocacy films, and handled the twice-yearly member and fundraising drives.

The pin is 51 Franklin Street, fifth floor, Boston 02110, the office the Foundation occupied from May 2005 until the last day of August 2024.

That address is the one printed for years in the GNU GPL header.

It is not the Franklin Street in Allston or the Franklin Street in Newton.

The building is an ordinary downtown block at Downtown Crossing.

A short staff page later summarized her start as February 2022.

The public record the Foundation itself issued is the 1 March news item.

This memory follows the dated release, not the later shorthand.

The office is gone now.

The announcement is not.

Photo: Ruben Rodriguez, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.