Biography
My name is Francesco Chicchiriccò, and my surname has been a tricky challenge since I was born in 1977, every time I had to get in touch with any public office; the advent of Internet made things even more cumbersome, despite of Unicode effort 
My nickname at ASF is ilgrosso, meaning "the big one" because, yeah, I don't wear a size S since I was 10 
I am currently ASF member, Apache Syncope PMC chair and Apache Cocoon PMC Member.
Linux - then Debian, what else? - addict since 1997, I am Italian (and proud to be), married with a lovely wife called Cinzia, father of a wonderful boy called Davide. Since I was a child I've always loved comics and music, playing bass guitar in a few metal rock bands with some friends.
About Computer Science, I got a master degree in 2001 in L'Aquila, after six months spent at Nokia Research Center in Heksinki (about this, you can take a look at a photo I took at that time with a friend of mine :-P).
Since then I've been working as developer, analyst and architect for some companies until I've established in 2004 my first IT company (ePOSSE, now Everett Italia). After seven years, I decided to start again from scratch with a brand new Open Source based company, Tirasa, aiming to speed up the development and the adoption of Apache Syncope.
In 2006 I had the chance to meet Gianugo Rabellino, at a common customer's place, that introduced to me the world of Apache Software Foundation in general and Cocoon in particular. Having suddenly realized that Cocoon 2.1 had an almost vertical learning curve, I've been anyway fascinated by the upsetting beauty of its architecture and potential.
Besides ASF, I am project owner of ConnId, the Hippo Cocoon Toolkit and OpenJPA Azure. I've been also contributing to some other projects like Sync4j (now Funambol), and Hippo CMS.