2015 Invited Speakers Nominations

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Nominations are now closed. Thanks to everyone who submitted one!

Nominations for invited speakers/keynotes for Code4Lib 2015. Please include a description and any relevant links and try to keep the list in alphabetical order.


Please follow the formatting guidelines:


== Nominee's Name ==

Description of no more than 250 words.

[[Link(s) with contact information for nominee]]

Amelia C. Abreu

Amelia Abreu lives in Portland, OR and works as a UX researcher. She is a PhD candidate at University of Washington's School of Information, where her dissertation research looks at the social aspects of data collection. Much of her recent writing, such as for Model View Culture and Medium, addresses the intersection between UX, data collection, communities, and gender. She has written about small data, watches, and the minimum viable responsibility of tech companies performing user research in the wake of the Facebook emotional contagion experiments. Before starting her PhD program, Amelia worked as an archivist, a librarian, and a writer.

Amelia Abreu

Chris Bourg

Chris Bourg is Assistant University Librarian (AUL) for Public Services for the Stanford University Libraries, serves on the Steering Committee for Taiga Forum, and is a sociologist by training. Chris is an outspoken advocate for diversity in libraries and lead Stanford University Libraries to implement a policy of not supporting conferences that lack a code of conduct. She was an organizing member of the "#libs4ada" campaign which raised over $16,000 for the Ada Initiative. Chris has written extensively on a number of topics, including gender, the military, and leadership. She blogs at Feral Librarian.

Chris Bourg

danah boyd

danah boyd is a Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research, a Research Assistant Professor in Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University, and a Fellow at Harvard's Berkman Center. She has done groundbreaking work on youth culture, particularly as impacted by social media and the internet in general. She has been addressing gender issues and technology since her work as an undergraduate at Brown.

danah boyd

Deborah Bryant

Deborah Bryant lives in Portland and is Red Hat's Senior Director of Open Source and Standards. She has worked extensively as an open source consultant for governments, and has earned an international reputation for expertise in the adoption and use of open source software and open development models in the public sector. In her previous role as Public Sector Communities Manager at Oregon State University’s Open Source Lab : she founded and produced the annual Government Open Source Conference (GOSCON) from 2005 to 2011. Also in that role she consulted with U.S. local, state and federal agencies as well as international governments to assist them in their understanding of open source, community, and its implications for policy and planning, public procurement and sourcing, economic development and work force training strategies. In 2010 Deborah received an O’Reilly Open Source Convention Open Source Award in recognition of her contribution to open source communities and advocating its use in government.

Deb Bryant

Kimberly Bryant

Biomedical/Engineering professional and founder of Black Girls Code, an organization dedicated to bringing more WOC to technology and computer science. She gave a keynote at LibTechConf in 2012, if you want to see what type of work she has been doing with BGC. They are also working on launching a companion group, Black Boys Code.

Kimberly Bryant


Amber Case

Amber Case is the Director of Esri's R&D Center, Portland, where she works on next generation location-based technology. Previously, she co-founded Geoloqi. In 2012, she was named one of National Geographic's Emerging Explorers and made Inc Magazine's 30 under 30 with Geoloqi co-founder Aaron Parecki. Case has spoken at TED on technology and humans and regularly speaks around the world. Case is a proponent of data ownership, and uses her domain as her own personal data store and identity provider. Case founded IndieWebCamp with Tantek Çelik and Aaron Parecki in 2010. Case is interested in furthering the ideas of Calm Technology, wearable computing, and the future of the interface. You can follow her on Twitter @caseorganic.

Amber Case

Trevor A. Dawes

Associate University Librarian, Washington University Libraries

(Taken from his WUSTL web page) Trevor A. Dawes is an Associate University Librarian at Washington University in St. Louis, where he’s responsible for research services (librarians with subject liaison responsibilities, the departmental libraries/librarians, and library outreach), as well as scholarly communications, collections and acquisitions, and preservation. He was previously the Circulation Services Director at the Princeton University Library, and prior to that held several positions at the Columbia University Libraries in NYC. He has worked with staff in developing and providing training for various public service operations; has authored, co-authored, or edited several books and articles on a variety of topics; and has either planned or presented at various local, national and international conferences. His new co-edited volume on the role of access services in the success of an academic library will be published by ACRL in the summer 2013. Since 2006, Dawes has been an instructor in the MSLIS program at the iSchool at Drexel University. Dawes earned his MLS from Rutgers University, and has two additional Master's Degrees from Teachers College, Columbia University. He is an active member of the American Library Association and is the 2013-2014 President of the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL).

Trevor A. Dawes

Selena Deckelmann

Selena Deckelmann is a major contributor to PostgreSQL and a data architect at Mozilla. She’s been involved with free and open source software since 1995 and began running conferences for PostgreSQL in 2007. In 2012, she founded PyLadiesPDX, a portland chapter of PyLadies. She founded Open Source Bridge, Postgres Open and speaks internationally about open source, databases and community. You can find her on twitter (@selenamarie) and on her blog. She also keeps chickens and gives a lot of technical talks.

She was an advisor for two years to the Ada Initiative, an organization dedicated to increasing the participation of women in open source and technology communities. She's a very experienced speaker, you can view an example of a recent talk here: Ignite Portland talk on election rigging in Nigeria.

Selena Deckelmann

Sally Deffor

Sally Deffor works part-time as the Project Coordinator for the Open Data & Privacy project. She is a former Google Policy Fellow who supported the development of some initiatives on Creative Commons, Open Access and OSS at the Kofi Annan ICT Centre. She has also worked as a communications specialist with the Tax Justice Network (Africa) and the USAID/ICFG (Ghana). She currently lives in Preston (UK) where she is finishing a PhD at UCLan, looking at the digital practices of online news-making. She also spends some time volunteering in her local community. You can find her on Twitter at @SDeffor.

Sally Deffor

Cory Doctorow

Cory is a blogger and co-editor of Boing Boing. He writes often and eloquently on intellectual property, privacy, and digital rights management, among other things. He has really smart things to say about general purpose computing (or lack thereof). He's also a speculative fiction writer.

Cory Doctorow

Limor Fried

Open source hardware hacker. Founded Adafruit Industries. Adafruit designs and sells open source electronic kits as well as provides a space online to learn about making, wearables, and microcomputers. Fried was awarded the Pioneer Award by the Electronic Frontier Foundation in 2009, the Most Influential Women in Technology award by Fast Company in 2011, and was named "Entrepreneur of the Year" in 2012 by Entrepreneur magazine. You can read more about her on her Wikipedia article. Limor Fried

Rebecca Garcia

Rebecca is the Co-founder of CoderDojo NYC, a non-profit teaching youth to code. In 2013 she was awarded as a U.S. White House ‘Champion of Change’ for Tech Inclusion for her work to bring STEM education to underrepresented groups, especially youth and women.

Previously she was a Developer at Do Something, the largest non-profit for youth and social change, and CTO of Greatist, a health, fitness and wellness media startup. Currently she is a Developer Evangelist at Squarespace, empowering people to build their ideas on the web.

Rebecca Garcia

Sarah Jeong

(from here:) Freshly-minted Harvard Law J.D. and writer. Co-author of Five Useful Articles (ed: a weekly newsletter about intellectual property). I care about justice, the free flow of information, and using the free flow of information to enact justice. Other people would summarize this as “interested in feminism, antiracism, and also technology, copyright, and privacy for some reason.”

Sarah Jeong

Charles D. Knutson

Dr. Charles D. Knutson is an Associate Professor in the Computer Science Department of Brigham Young University and Director of the BYU SEQuOIA Lab where he conducts empirical research in software engineering, focusing on the dynamics of open source software construction. He is the Founder and Chairman of Kinpoint, Inc. a genealogy software company, Founder and Chairman of the non-profit Internet Safety Project, and host of the Internet Safety Podcast. He is the author of 130 publications and has delivered nearly 120 presentations around the world on topics including data communications, software engineering, Internet safety, and family history. Dr. Knutson holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Oregon State University and B.S. and M.S. degrees in Computer Science from Brigham Young University. He was the recipient of the 2013 BYU Technology Transfer Award. Dr. Knutson is the Founder and Managing Partner of Ironwood Experts, where he has served as an expert witness in patent litigation cases for clients including Apple, Amazon, Comcast, Expedia, Novell, Microsoft, and Vizio.

Charles D. Knutson

Christie Koehler

Portland-based experienced open culture advocate, community organizer, computer programmer, writer and speaker. Co-chair of the annual Open Source Bridge conference, a co-founder and President of the Stumptown Syndicate, a technology education non-profit, and runs both Code N Splode and Women Who Hack, user groups for women in technology. In 2012, she was recognized with an O’Reilly Open Source Award.

Last keynoted at the Wikiconference USA and wrote a book on Community Event planning.

from here: Christie's website

Mark Matienzo

(contributed by kayiwa:) Mark is the director of Technology at DPLA. He is however much more than that. He has worked tirelessly as an archivist and technologist solving many problems in the library domain. While his leadership style shows up through service, it is time to actually listen to him for more than his oft moving 5 minute Lightning Talks.

(My stock bio:) "Mx (Mark) A. Matienzo is the Director of Technology for the Digital Public Library of America. Prior to joining DPLA, Matienzo worked as an archivist and technologist specializing in born-digital materials and metadata management, at institutions including the Yale University Library, The New York Public Library, and the American Institute of Physics, and on award-winning projects such as the ArchivesSpace open source archival management system and AIMS - Born Digital Collections: An Inter-Institutional Model for Stewardship. Matienzo received a MSI from the University of Michigan School of Information and a BA in Philosophy from the College of Wooster, and was the first awardee (2012) of the Emerging Leader Award of the Society of American Archivists."

Mark Matienzo

Bethany Nowviskie

From her web site: "Nowviskie is Director of Digital Research & Scholarship (including the Scholars' Lab) at the University of Virginia Library, Special Advisor to UVa's Provost, a CLIR Distinguished Presidential Fellow, and immediate Past President of the ACH. Her muse, according to Willard McCarty, "is one angry B."...Last year's major events included: chairing the Digital Humanities conference, a keynote on the Scholars' Lab in Tokyo, an invited talk on digital materiality at the MLA Convention's Presidential Forum; various Neatline workshops, and a stint as a Lansdowne Visiting Scholar at UVic in Canada. I continue to teach at UVa's Rare Book School, and will give a only small number of talks this academic year, on a "New Deal" for the humanities and the imperatives of DH in the Anthropocene." Bethany Nowviskie

Jennifer O'Neal

Jennifer R. O'Neal is the Corrigan Solari University Historian and Archivist at the University of Oregon Special Collections and Archives, where she manages the University Archives collections, oversees the department’s instruction program, and serves as an advisor on tribal community projects. From 2008 to 2012, she served as the Head Archivist for the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of the American Indian Archive Center, and has held prior positions at the U.S. Department of State, Princeton University, University of Arizona, and Utah State University. She serves on various groups in the Society of American Archivists, including the Native American Archives Roundtable and the Cultural Heritage Working Group. In 2006 she participated in drafting the best practices for the respectful care and use of Native American archival materials, which produced the Protocols for Native American Archival Materials. She currently serves on the Advisory Board for the Association of Tribal Archives, Libraries, and Museums. Most recently, she served as an instructor for the Oregon Tribal Archives Institute at Oregon State University. Her research interests include international indigenous activism, cultural heritage, traditional knowledge, intellectual property rights, digital humanities, and indigenous use of new media and technology. She is also a member of the The Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde in Oregon.

Jennifer O'Neal

Bess Sadler

Bess Sadler is the manager of a software engineering team at Stanford University Library. She writes open source software and spends a lot of time on Free and Open Source Software projects like Project Blacklight and Project Hydra, both of which she cofounded. Bess Sadler was a 2010 Library Journal Mover and Shaker. She also served as the co-chair of Electronic Information for Libraries—Free and Open Source Software in 2008-2009. You can read a few Ada Lovelace Day posts about Bess Sadler here and here. She maintains a blog and is @eosadler on Twitter.

Bess Sadler

Dorothea Salo

Academic librarian and library-school instructor whose interests include metadata and linked data, scholarly communication, research-data management, and digital preservation. Recent talks include Don't Make Me Think at Digital Frontiers 2014 and The Purple Squirrel (and other damaging technology myths) at the Conference on Law School Computing.

Dorothea Salo

Rob Sanderson

Rob Sanderson is the Technical Collaboration Facilitator at Stanford, and has played a leadership role in the development and publication of the IIIF Image and Presentation APIs, W3C Open Annotation, and Shared Canvas specs. This standards-based work is a critical prerequisite to developing next generation open source, cross-institutional tools for interacting with linked data and digitized content. Rob can convey (in a cool British [sic, edit: kiwi] accent) how to get better results when it comes to technical collaboration in libraries. Rob Sanderson

Jer Thorp

(from here:) Jer Thorp is a data artist whose work focuses on adding narrative meaning to huge amounts of data. In other words, he makes data more human. Through cutting edge data visualization techniques, Thorp helps people and corporations take control of the information that surrounds them, using technology and data as a new way to tell stories. Originally from Vancouver, Jer lives in New York City, where he teaches in NYU’s ITP program. To investigate the results of Big Data, Thorp helped launch [The Office for Creative Research http://o-c-r.org/abstract/] with his peers. From 2010-2012, he was the Data Artist in Residence at The New York Times. Thorp's software-based art has been featured all over the world. His art brings big data sets to life, combining state-of-the-art science with a natural interest in the human condition. His “Cascade” project at The New York Times visualizes the sharing of content through social media, offering tremendous insight into the way we use digital networks to share, influence, and connect with others. He was also a major contributor to the 9/11 memorial project in New York City, where he wrote a program that organized the names of victims not by alphabetical order, but by relationships—putting coworkers next to coworkers, and brothers next to brothers. Thorp’s award-winning software-based work has been exhibited in Europe, Asia, North America, South America, including in the Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan.

Jer Thorp

Zeynep Tufekci

Zeynep Tufekci writes insightful and critical observations about the interactions between technology and society, media, Internet, social issues, big data, statistical and predictive analytics, and participatory politics at Medium, The Atlantic, Digital Media and Learning Central, and Technosociology. Twitter at @zeynep.

She is Assistant Professor at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill at at the School of Information and Library Science (SILS) with an affiliate appointment in the Department of Sociology. Previously, she was assistant professor of sociology at UMBC, a fellow at the Center for Information Technology Policy at Princeton University, and a fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University. Currently a faculty associate at the Berkman Center. Technosociology


Kim Christen Withey

From her website: "I am an Associate Professor and Associate Director of the Digital Technology and Culture program in the Department of English and Director of Digital Projects at the Plateau Center, Native American Programs at Washington State University. My work explores the intersections of cultural heritage, traditional knowledge, intellectual property rights, the ethics of openness, and the use of digital technologies in and by indigenous communities globally. I have worked in Tennant Creek, Northern Territory, Australia over the last decade with Warumungu community members on a range of projects including a book, an interactive website, and a community archive. My collaborations with the Warumungu focused on alliance-making in cross-cultural projects. I am currently working on several digital humanities projects that explore ethical issues of openness and access in relation to indigenous cultural protocols and digital archives. I am the Director of both the Plateau Peoples' Web Portal, a collaboratively curated site of Plateau cultural materials and Mukurtu CMS: a free and open source content management system and digital archive built around the particular needs of indigenous peoples globally."

Kim Christen Withey

Kam Woods

Research Associate & Adjunct Faculty at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Kam is currently developing modified open source digital forensics tools for digital archivists. He works with archivists, librarians, forensics researchers, and other development groups to identify core needs in analyzing and preparing digital content for preservation -- specifically needs that can be addressed using existing high-performance forensic technologies (with a little tweaking). He is also interested in developing datasets and teaching technologies to support education and professional training in digital archiving. He can give a great talk (I know from 2014 ALA) & I'll bet would have some great tech & social insides for Code4Lib. Kam Woods

Andromeda Yelton

Andromeda was last year's runner up in the keynote speaker voting. Formerly a developer with Unglue.it, she recently left full-time work there to help librarians learn to code. As such, she's helped run a preconference at ALA Annual teaching Python and taught a jQuery workshop at a Code4Lib DC event. She gave a great keynote at Online Northwest 2014 entitled "Five Conversations about Code". Andromed is a member of the LITA Board of Directors and advisor for Ada Initiative.

Andromeda Yelton

Kortney Ziegler

Dr. Kortney Ryan Ziegler is an Oakland based award winning artist, director, writer, and the first person to hold the Ph.D. of African American Studies from Northwestern University. Dr. Ziegler is also the founder of Trans*H4CK--the only tech event of its kind that spotlights trans* created tech and trans* led startups, directed the feature-length documentary STILL BLACK: A Portrait of Black Transmen, runs the GLAAD Media Award nominated blog, blac (k) ademic, and was recently named one of the Top 40 Under 40 LGBT activists by The Advocate Magazine and #29 of the most influential African Americans of 2013 by TheRoot100.

Kortney Ziegler

Shauna Gordon-McKeon

Shauna Gordon-McKeon is a writer, speaker, teacher, and programmer who works actively in the free and open source software (FOSS), open science and medicine, and open government/civic tech communities. She works on the Open Science Collaboration, OpenHatch.org, and is an active member of Ada Community. Click for more info about Shauna, a link to her blog, and her portfolio.


Shauna Gordon-McKeon