Matthias Stürmer studied business administration and computer science at the University of Bern and finished his doctoral dissertation at the Chair of Strategic Management and Innovation at ETH Zürich. His research focused on open source communities and firm involvement, thus the title of his PhD thesis is "How Firms Make Friends: Communities in Private-Collective Innovation". Today he works in the business development team at Liip AG, a software company creating agile Internet solutions based on open source technologies.

Matthias is member of the board of the Swiss Open System User Group /ch/open, secretary of the Parliamentarian Group for Digital Sustainability, and organizer of OpenExpo and the Open Source Forum.