Wichert Akkerman was elected to become Debian Project Leader in January 1999, succeeding Ian Jackson. He led Debian for two consecutive terms.
During this time, Debian 2.1 (slink) and 2.2 (potato) were released, and Debian unfortunately had to stop accepting new developers. With help from the leader, the new maintainer process was redesigned and reopened.
Wichert's "reign" ended in March 2001. The person who took his place was Ben Collins.
He's the (upstream) maintainer of strace and dpkg. He also maintained various Debian packages, notably modutils and vim.
Here's an interesting link: http://www.debian.org/vote/2000/leadership_debate/wichert-speech.html