2016 Invited Speakers Nominations

Nominations for invited speakers/keynotes for Code4Lib 2016 in Philadelphia. 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]]

Mike Bostock

Interactive Graphic Design for The New York Times and the author of D3.js, a popular open-source library for visualizing data using web standards.

Prior to The New York Times, Mike was a visualization scientist for Square and a computer science PhD student at Stanford University. Mike received the BSE degree in computer science in 2000 from Princeton University. ere's his Twitter; and his site

danah boyd

dana boyd is a Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research and the founder of Data & Society Research Institute. She's also a Visiting Professor at New York University's Interactive Telecommunications Program and a faculty affiliate at Harvard's Berkman Center. For over a decade, her research focused on how young people use social media, which resulted in two books: Hanging Out, Messing Around, and Geeking Out (2009) and It's Complicated (2014). More recently, she has focused on the social and cultural dimensions of big data, especially privacy and publicity, data(mis)interpretation, and the civil rights implications of data analytics. She often works closely with librarians, and was the keynote speaker at the Reference and User Services Association President’s Program at ALA Annual in San Francisco in 2015.

blog Twitter Essays

Mandy Brown

Mandy Brown builds systems to help writers and editors to work together. She co-founded and served as CEO of Editorially, a platform for collaborative writing and editing; Editorially was acquired by Vox Media where she is now director of platform. She is also co-founder and was editor-in-chief of A Book Apart, was a contributing editor for A List Apart, and edited many books, including The Shape of Design, by Frank Chimero. She previously served as communications director and product lead at Typekit and as creative director at W. W. Norton & Company. She blogs at A Working Library and has spoken at dConstruct, Build, Confab, TYPO SF, and Beyond Tellerrand . Additionally, she mentors and advises people from underrepresented groups in the tech industry. She lives in Philadelphia.

Kimberly Bryant

Kimberly Bryant is a Biotechnology/Engineering professional who founded BlackGirlsCode in 2011, to meet the needs of young women of color who are underrepresented in the currently exploding field of technology. Bryant received her first taste of computer programming when Fortran and Pascal were still the popular languages in the computing world and the 'Apple Macintosh' was the new kid on the block. Much has changed since those days and the mission of BlackGirlsCode is to introduce programming and technology to a new generation of coders (girls aged 7 - 17) who will become the leaders and creators of tomorrow.

Maciej Cegłowski

Maciej Cegłowski, is a programmer, painter, essayist, travel writer, and speaker. He has been running Pinboard, a bookmarking site, since 2009. He has worked at Yahoo!, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and the National Institute for Technology and Liberal Education, and has done contract work for Twitter and SixApart. He's funny on Twitter, whether he's representing himself or his company, Pinboard.

Brigitte Daniel

Brigitte Daniel is a digital access advocate with experience in telecommunications and social entrepreneurship.

In May 2006, she became the executive vice president of Wilco Electronic Systems, a small telecommunications firm founded in 1977 by her father that has primarily done installations for the Philadelphia Housing Authority.

In that role, she became a frequent speaker on digital divide and web literacy issues, particularly in the Philadelphia technology community. She was part of the 2011 class of Eisenhower Fellows.

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Catherine Farman

Philadelphian Catherine Farman is a developer, a Technology & Innovation Fellow Consumer Finance Protection Bureau, and a self-described "responsive design fanatic, feminist, Chicana, Texpat, cat lady, and teacher at Girls Develop It's Philadelphia Chapter"; she recently left HappyCog (the prestigious studio founded by A List Apart's Jeffrey Zeldman). More information on Catherine Farman is available at her website, cfarman.com, and on Twitter, and several of her recent speeches are listed on Lanyrd, though absent from that list is her 2014 presentation at OSCON, "Lessons from Girl Develop It: Getting More Women Involved in Open Source" (link goes to a video of the talk, which she co-presented with Corinne Warnshuis, Girls Develop It's excutive director).

Paul Ford

Paul Ford is a Brooklyn-based writer and web technologist. He often writes about the web, archives programming, the nature of information, and living in the information age. Past projects include tilde.club and the semantic web-ified harpers.org (back in 2003). His ~30,00-word article What Is Code? was the entire June 11, 2015 issue of Bloomberg BusinessWeek.

Website Twitter His talk at XOXO 2014 An interview, along with Gina Trapani, at In the Library with the Lead Pipe

Sorelle Friedler

"Algorithms are already being used to make decisions that affect people's lives and livelihoods, and this trend is only increasing," says Sorrelle Friedler. "Often, one of the selling points of using an algorithm is that it will be less biased than the current human process. While it is possible to create algorithms that reduce bias, the use of an algorithm does not on its own guarantee that. It's important that computer scientists, as well as policymakers, understand the limitations and work to make algorithmic decisions fair."

Sorelle Friedler has been an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Haverford College since 2014 and was visiting at Haverford starting in 2012 (Haverford is just a few miles from Philadelphia). Her research interests include the design and analysis of algorithms, computational geometry, data mining and machine learning, and the application of such algorithms to interdisciplinary data. She is a 2015-2016 Fellow at the Data & Society Research Institute for her work on preventing discrimination in machine learning. Learn more about her work on her Haverford Computer Science page.

Amelia Greenhall

Amelia Greenhall is the Chief Creative Officer of Magic Vibes Corporation. Previously, she cofounded and served as Executive Director and board chair of Double Union, a non-profit feminist hacker/maker space in San Francisco with the mission of being a safe and comfortable space for women to work on their projects. She also cofounded the publication Model View Culture, and designed things for companies including FutureAdvisor and Habit Labs. She is the publisher of the Open Review Quarterly literary journal, and the entries at her personal blog are usually made available as episodes of Amelia Explains It All, a "podcast for men in tech."

Andrew Hoppin

Andrew Hoppin is the co-founder and president of NuCivic, a technology innovator, and open source advocate. An Ex-NASA scientist who brings his theories of collaboration, open-source technologies to create open civic platforms. As president of NuCivic, his mission is to improve the efficacy of civic organizations and governments, by making innovative knowledge management solutions accessible. Namely Nucivic's DKAN open data platform DKAN provides an open source solution for government organizations, libraries and civic organizations for data cataloging, publishing and visualizing. Andrew was awarded the 2010 New York State Public Sector CIO of the Year by GovTech Magazine, and was named one of the top 50 government CIOs in the United States by Information Week magazine, for his successful effort to deploy the first major New York State government website, NYSenate.gov, which won “Best of New York” awards for Project Excellence.

Helen Horstmann-Allen

Pobox.com promised its customers a lifetime email address, and found a loyal following immediately. In addition to email addresses and accounts, their customers requested reliable email-based discussion forums, mailing lits, and newsletters, so they created Listbox.com. Philadelphian Helen Horstmann-Allen has been president of IC Group, the home of Pobox.com and Listbox.com, since 2000; prior to that, she was its director of operations, and she's been in charge of Pobox.com since 1997. She's in love with Philadelphia and food -- thus Philly Foodie -- and can be found on Twitter, too.

Jess Klein

Open Web Designer at Bocoup

If you ask about her passions, Jess will draw you a venn diagram with the words community, freedom, and learning, and point to the sweet spot where all three overlap. She is dedicated to connecting people and ideas through new technologies and interactive experiences. Before Bocoup, Jess worked at the Mozilla Foundation, where she served as Creative Lead for such projects as the X-Ray Goggles, Hackasaurus (which became part of the larger Webmaker platform), Thimble and the Hive. She also served as the Creative Director for Mozilla Open Badges, where she helped develop an ecosystem of tools for learners to earn, assess, issue and display digital micro-credentials. A Rockaway Beach native, Jess co-founded Rockaway Help in the wake of Hurricane Sandy to empower the community to find solutions for emergency response, preparedness and rebuilding through hyperlocal open news and the development of innovative community-designed technologies. She was named a White House Champion of Change for her civic hacktivism. Here is her website.

Alison Macrina

Alison Macrina is the founder and director of the Library Freedom Project (LFP), an initiative that helps libraries fulfill the the promise of intellectual freedom by teaching librarians and their local communities about surveillance threats, privacy rights and law, and privacy-protecting technology tools that help safeguard digital freedoms. She is passionate about connecting surveillance issues to larger global struggles for justice, demystifying privacy and security technologies for ordinary users, and resisting an internet controlled by a handful of intelligence agencies and multinational corporations. She cowrote the Radical Reference Collective’s zine, "We Are All Suspects," which gives advice and tools for preventing surveillance, and has written or co-written articles for Boing Boing and Slate. LFP has been featured in numerous prominent publications, including The Nation magazine and NPR's On the Media, and LFP's partners include the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the American Civil Liberties Union, the Freedom of the Press Foundation, and the Tor Project.

In February 2015, LFP won a ~$250,000 two-year grant through the Knight Foundation’s News Challenge, which enabled her to work on LFP full-time. Prior to that, she was the technology librarian/IT manager at the Watertown (Massachusetts) Free Public Library.

Katrina Owen

Katrina Owen is the creator of exercism, a FLOSS project that supports students who are learning to code by giving them practice problems and real world feedback. Exercises are currently available in Clojure, CoffeeScript, C++, C#, Emacs Lisp, Elixir, Erlang, F#, Go, Haskell, Java, JavaScript, Lisp Flavoured Erlang (LFE), Common Lisp, Lua, Objective-C, OCaml, Perl 5, PHP, PL/SQL, Python, Ruby, Rust, Scala, Scheme, and Swift, and exercism developers are in the process of adding ECMAScript, Groovy, Nimrod, Perl 6, Pony, Racket, Standard ML, and VB.NET. Katrina Owen is herself a polyglot developer and Ruby Hero award winner who has spoken at numerous conferences; example talks include: Hacking Passion; Overkill; Here Be Dragons; and Therapeutic Refactoring. She accidentally became a developer while pursuing a degree in molecular biology, and began nitpicking code in 2006 while volunteering at JavaRanch. When programming, her focus is on automation, workflow optimization, and refactoring. She is passionate about open source and contributes to several projects outside of exercism. Learn more on GitHub and Twitter.

Lauren Pressley

Lauren Pressley became the University of Washington Tacoma Library Director and Associate Dean of University Libraries on September 15, 2015. Her professional interests include formal and informal learning, design in library services, the evolving information environment, organizational change, and the future of libraries. She is the author of So You Want to Be a Librarian and Wikis for Libraries, a co-chair of Library Pipeline, and holds an elected position on the American Library Association Council. She has also served on the Library Information Technology Association board of directors and the Horizon Project advisory board.

Prior to joining UW, she was the Director of Learning Environments and Associate Professor at Virginia Tech University Libraries, where she led a team of thirty people who were responsible for enhancing situated learning by connecting services and spaces, including Reference, Circulation, Roving Services, Learning Spaces, Online Learning, academic programming, and community engagement. Several dozen of her presentations are posted online.

Aliyah Rahman

Tech and social justice activist. Engineer.

]http://www.techrepublic.com/article/aliya-rahman-former-code-for-progress-director-tech-and-social-justice-activist-martial-artist/]

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Jenica Rogers

Jenica Rogers is Director of Libraries at the State University of New York at Potsdam. Her current professional interests include interrogating the ways our information economy is breaking down and reforming now that the internet changed everything, figuring out what the role of a library is in a reality in which warehousing books is sort of passé, and informing, mentoring, and supporting new library professionals as they hit the real world face first and at full speed. She has written at length about library issues on her blog, Attempting Elegance, represented SUNY Potsdam as the subject of an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education about journal prices, and has given numerous invited keynote speeches at library conferences around the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. In 2014, she was chosen to receive the American Library Association’s ALCTS HARRASSOWITZ Award for Leadership in Library Acquisitions.

To get a sense of her presentation style, watch her deliver the plenary speech at the 2013 Charleston Conference (in which she discusses her refusal to pay the extortionate fees being charged by a professional association for its journals) as well as the Vision speech at NASIG's 2014 Annual Conference.

Jenn Schiffer

Jenn Schiffer (Twitter), aka jennmoneydollars, is an open web engineer at Bocoup and lives in New Jersey (a relatively easy commute from Philadelphia). She's good at making art with code and great at telling jokes. She was previously a senior front-end developer for the National Basketball Association and, before that, taught and evaluated computer science education at Montclair State University, her alma mater (BS and MS in Computer Science). She also organizes JerseyScript, a developer meetup based in New Jersey, which is just one of several ways she's working to attract and retain more people in the web development community. She's made a lot of recent podcast appearances and presentations at conferences.

Audrey Watters

Audrey Watters is an education writer with a focus on ed-tech. She is the author of The Monsters of Education Technology, a collection of her lectures and she is currently working on two more books, Teaching Machines and [Claim Your Domain http://reclaim.hackeducation.com/], both due out in 2015. According to her upcoming talks page she could be available to share her insights with code4lib.

Gabriel Weinberg

Gabriel Weinberg is the CEO and Founder of DuckDuckGo, "the search engine that doesn't track you," and the co-author of Traction, "the book that helps startups get customers." He is also an active angel investor, and he lives and works in the Philadelphia suburbs. Learn more on Twitter and Medium, read an interview with at In the Library with the Lead Pipe, or watch his speech at Gel 2013 or his appearance on Conversations with Great Minds.

David Weinberger

David Weinberger, PhD, is one of the world's most respected thought leaders at the intersection of technology, business, and society. He is the author of Everything Is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder, which charts how as business, politics, science, and media move online, the rules of the physical world—in which everything has a place—are upended, and the critically acclaimed book Small Pieces Loosely Joined, a highly original and accessible reflection on the impact of the Internet on human behavior. He holds a PhD in philosophy from the University of Toronto and taught philosophy for five years at New Jersey's Stockton State College. Since 2004, he has been a fellow at Harvard University's prestigious Berkman Center, gag writer for Woody Allen, NPR commentator for "All Things Considered" and "Here and Now," technology columnist for KMWorld and Darwin Magazine, blogging pioneer, and dot-com entrepreneur.

Brock Whitten

Making front-end development easier by the second. Co-creator of Surge, Harp, and Cordova/PhoneGap. Mozilla-WebFWD Alumni and advocate of a free and open web. A friend of the community. Read about Surge here and here. Here is Brock's website

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 gave a great talk at 2014 ALA & I'll bet would have some great tech & social insights for Code4Lib. Kam Woods this seems to be how to book him; here's his Twitter; and his blog

Jeffrey Zeldman

HappyCog/A List Apart (Philly/NYC-based)

Dubbed “King of Web Standards” by Business Week, Jeffrey Zeldman founded and is chairman of Happy Cog™ and has published A List Apart Magazine “for people who make websites” since 1998. He has written two books, notably the foundational text, Designing With Web Standards,currently in a 3rd Edition coauthored with Ethan Marcotte. It has been translated into 15 languages and is credited with converting the web design industry from tag soup and Flash to semantics and accessibility. Zeldman's page on HappyCog.com.