Nico Rikken is an Electrical Engineer turned Software Engineer. He combines both disciplines in his work at the Dutch public start-up MPARE to bootstrap a service for exchanging energy data. This also ties to his personal interest in Free Software, Open Standards and federated services to enable security and privacy. The software component in his work has grown from application usage via architecting and testing to strategic planning and development.

In retrospect Nico was introduced to software freedom early in his youth, but he adopted it heavily after he kept on hitting anti-features in proprietary software. Having become aware of the importance of software freedom, he joined the Fellowship of the Free Software Foundation Europe to help spread the word on this issue.