2014 Invited Speakers Nominations

Nominations for invited speakers/keynotes for Code4Lib 2014. Please include a description and any relevant links and try to keep the list in alphabetical order. Suggestions will close on August 30, 2013 at midnight (EDT), which will be followed by a community vote. We will contact nominees before the vote to confirm their interest.

"Sarah Allen is a serial innovator with a history of developing leading-edge products, such as After Effects, Shockwave, Flash video, and OpenLaszlo. She has a habit of recognizing great and timely ideas, finding talented teams, and creating compelling software. She has led small and large teams and confidently turns vision into reality.

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Sarah leads an innovative product strategy, design & development company, Blazing Cloud, and in her spare time works to diversify the Ruby on Rails with RailsBridge, which she co-founded in 2009. In keeping with her belief that programming is a life skill, she also regularly volunteers teaching programming to kids. Sarah believes that open source software provides solid technical foundations and compelling business models. She is an expert with Ruby and Rails and was a member of the OpenLaszlo core team, where she coded in asynchronous Javascript before it was cool."

http://www.ultrasaurus.com/about/

John Allspaw (https://twitter.com/allspaw) is the Senior Vice President for Technical Operations at Etsy (http://etsy.com). Prior to that he built infrastructure for Salon, InfoWorld, Flickr, and others. His publications include "Web Operations" and "The Art of Capacity Planning". You can find his blog at http://www.kitchensoap.com/.

As library development teams grow from single programmers writing "glue" scripts to small teams working together on mid size web apps and further to large development shops producing complex and large scale systems, they find themselves struggling with issues of scale. These issues of scale are not just with the systems being built, but with the operations of the team itself. Operations can often be overlooked during the daily routine of project meetings, writing code, fixing bugs, etc. John's insights on operations and capacity planning would be useful to the library development community, particularly for those in departments that are maturing from one or two programmers to mid-size or larger development teams.

BoingBoing.com, craphound.com. Author of sci-fi, copyright activist, etc. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cory_Doctorow

Jerrielsworth.com, Jeri Ellsworth is an American entrepreneur and self-taught computer chip designer. She is best known for creating a Commodore 64 emulator within a joystick, in 2004, called C64 Direct-to-TV http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeri_Ellsworth

Founder of PandoDaily, tech journalist and author. I (Roy) saw her speak and she was awesome. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarah_Lacy

She is a co-founder of http://www.RunMyCode.org, an open platform for disseminating the code and data associated with published results, and enabling independent and public cloud-based verification of methods and findings, and an assistant professor of Statistics at Columbia University, and affiliated with the Columbia University Institute for Data Sciences and Engineering. She just recently gave a great keynote at Open Repositories. http://www.stanford.edu/~vcs/Bio.html

Formerly a developer with Unglue.it, she recently left full-time work there to work to help people learn to code. I (Roy) would love to hear her talk about how to help people break into coding. http://andromedayelton.com/about/

David Silver is an associate professor of media studies and environmental studies at the University of San Francisco where he teaches classes on media history, digital media production, and green media. David co-directs USF's Garden Project, a freshmen-to-senior living learning community built around an organic garden on campus. He blogs at http://silverinsf.blogspot.com/. He was the keynote at the TRLN Annual Meeting and talked about the importance of the Library as a keystone to his teaching of media studies, the Library as a keystone of collective curiosity and community action, and why we should enable students to contribute back to the Library. Some quotes I tweeted from his talk:

• "Too often library instruction starts at library databases. Librarians, this has to stop."
• "I want my seniors to contribute to the library, to give something back."
• "Whenever there is community curiosity and collective action, that's where the library should be."

I believe his keynote would be motivational in reflecting how what we do in Code4Lib is critical to Libraries support his mission as a professor and researcher, his students, and the community at large. Expect humor, humility, and creativity from David Silver.

Submitted by Tim McGeary, UNC

Daniel Reetz is the mastermind behind http://www.diybookscanner.org/ . It is an incredible community building open source software and hardware for book scanning using affordable consumer equipment. The project has evolved incredibly over the last few years and now include beautifully hackerspace-made scanner kits. He seems like a great speaker and I believe his perspective would be different from the traditional academic/research library focus.

Kathy Sierra has been interested in the brain and artificial intelligence since her days as a game developer (Virgin, Amblin', MGM). She is the co-creator of the bestselling Head First series (finalist for a Jolt Software Development award in 2003, and named to the Amazon Top Ten Editors Choice Computer Books for 2003 and 2004). She is also the founder of one of the largest community web sites in the world, javaranch.com. Kathy's passions are skiing, running, her Icelandic horse, gravity, and her latest favorite thing--Dance Dance Revolution.

http://headrush.typepad.com/about.html

Jukka Pennanen & Mace Ojala are the primary organizers of the Cycling For Libraries Unconference ( http://www.cyclingforlibraries.org/ )

"Founded in 2011, the Cycling for libraries is an international cycling conference for librarians and library lovers. It aims to advocate libraries and increase awareness of the valuable services and resources that libraries offer to the community."

I was lucky enough to participate in this event last summer and I think it was an incredible experience. I think Jukka and Mace have a great perspective in how to organize a wide encompassing international library community.