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]]

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

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. Read more at her blog, on Twitter, or read her Essays.

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 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, 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.

Aaron Straup Cope is a software developer who believes that "promise of the Internet is to be a bridge for cross-pollinating peoples, ideas and communities"[1] and his work shows it. Currently at Mapzen he is building a Who's On First, a gazetteer of places "each with a stable identifier and some number of descriptive properties about that location." Previously he designed and developed the much lauded collections website for the Cooper-Hewitt Museum. His work consistently focuses on publishing data to the web with stable identifiers, while eschewing much of the formality and overhead of "Linked Data", a point he made quite clearly in his talk "OMGWTFTGN" at Museums and the Web 2015, where he asked if releasing a 17GB RDF dataset is really the best way to get data used by... anyone. Read Aaron Straup Cope's resume for more information.

Brigitte Daniel is a digital access advocate with experience in telecommunications and social entrepreneurship, she is a vocal advocate for gender and cultural diversity in the tech industry.

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. Wilco is one of the last remaining African-American owned cable operators in the Nation and specialized in providing technology access to under-served communities.

In that role, she became a frequent speaker on digital divide and web literacy issues, particularly in the Philadelphia technology community. She graduated Magna Cum Laude from Spelman College in1999 with degrees in History, Women's Studies, and Business Management and received her Juris Doctorate from Georgetown University Law School in 2002 and was admitted to the Bar of Pennsylvania in 2004.

She currently serves as the Co-Founder and Co-Chair of the Philadelphia Theatre Company's new Young Friends Executive Committee and also serves as a Board Director of the Greater Philadelphia Urban Affairs Coalition (GPUAC) and is on the Board of Directors of the Philadelphia People's Emergency Center (PEC).She was part of the 2011 class of Eisenhower Fellows. Read more from her on Twitter.

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 has worked at HappyCog, the studio founded by A List Apart's Jeffrey Zeldman. More information is available at her website, cfarman.com, and on Twitter. Several of her recent speeches are listed on Lanyrd. Also available is a video of 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 executive director).

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). Ford's 30,000-word article What Is Code? was the entire June 11, 2015 issue of Bloomberg BusinessWeek. Learn more at his website, on Twitter, or on Medium, or watch his talk at XOXO 2014 or his interview on Charlie Rose. Paul was also interviewed at at In the Library with the Lead Pipe, along with Gina Trapani.

Sorelle Friedler is Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Haverford College. 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.

"I’ve been doing research in Johannesburg, South Africa, to understand what the city needs to do to better support technology entrepreneurs," says Rutgers Business School professor Brett Gilbert. "The city is actively in the process of trying to see a tech cluster emerge, so my research is intended to help them understand what needs to happen in order to see a tech community thrive in Johannesburg. It's research I’m doing concurrently in Newark, New Jersey, because the city would like to see a technology community emerge here. The research is really comparing the process these two cities are going through. Most research on clusters focuses on clusters that already exist and on regions that are somewhat well established so you don’t see a lot that helps people understand what a city or region would need to do if they want to see one of these technology clusters emerge."

Dr. Gilbert's dissertation, "The Implications of Geographic Cluster Locations for New Venture Performance" was awarded a Kauffman Dissertation Fellowship in 2004, and selected as a finalist for the Entrepreneurship Division's 2005 Heizer Award for outstanding dissertations in entrepreneurship. In addition to examining emerging technology communities in developing market contexts, she is also focusing on understanding emerging "clean energy" technologies. She has taught a variety of entrepreneurship courses on creativity and innovation, and the startup and management of new ventures. At RBS, Dr. Gilbert teaches the Technology Ventures course for undergraduates and graduates, and the Ph.D. seminar in entrepreneurship. Learn more on Twitter and on her page at the Rutgers Business School website.

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."

Kate Heddleston is a software engineer who works primarily on Python projects. She has been a mentor for Hackbright Academy and PyLadies. She blogs and gives talks about how engineering environments are killing diversity (see her talk and her blog series), on technical onboarding, training, and mentoring, and on the ethics of being a programmer, among other topics.

Andrew Hoppin is the co-founder and president of NuCivic. He is a former NASA scientist who utilizes his theories of collaboration, open-source technologies in the creation of open civic platforms. As president of NuCivic, his mission is to improve the efficacy of civic organizations and governments, by providing accessible innovative knowledge management solutions. NuCivic's open data platform DKAN provides a platform for government organizations, libraries and civic organizations to implement data cataloging, publishing and visualizing. Andrew was awarded the 2010 New York State Public Sector CIO of the Year by GovTech Magazine. He 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 a “Best of New York” award for Project Excellence.

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.

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. Previous to her position at 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. More information is available at her website.

Kate Krauss is the Director of Communications and Public Policy for the Tor Project, a nonprofit organization that builds free, online privacy tools that allow users to defy shoe companies and intelligence agencies alike while they stay free and anonymous on the internet. As a human rights advocate, Kate lead several successful campaigns to free public health experts and human rights activists who were imprisoned in China. She became interested in internet freedom when she sought help from San Francisco hackers to aid a well-known Chinese health advocate whose huge, popular web site for people with hepatitis had been taken down by the Chinese government.

Prior to her work in online privacy, she served as Executive Director of the AIDS Policy Project, where she lead a successful effort to move $35 million into cure research at the US National Institutes of Health and wrote groundbreaking reports that showed for the first time how little the world was investing in the search for a cure for AIDS. Kate has been chosen twice as one of the Poz 100, one of the top 100 people working in AIDS in the world. She was a very early member of the renowned AIDS activist group ACT UP. She has also spoken at several hacker conferences, including Chaos Communications Congress, where she delivered a talk on mass surveillance in China and how it was converted into political repression.

(However--she *has* a sense of humor!)

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.

He is the CTO and founding partner of Zepheira, and has been a leader in the implementation of the LibHub Initiative. From his website: "Uche is a leading expert in data design and distributed systems. He has worked with XML, RDF and Web Services since the inception of those technologies. He has been technical lead on many open specifications and open source projects as well as on Zepheira's platform for library data transforms." He was also recently named poet laureate of Balisage: The Markup Conference! More information is available at his website.

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 became the University of Washington Tacoma Library Director and Associate Dean of University Libraries in September of 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.

Tech and social justice activist. Engineer. Read more at Tech Republic and on Twitter. From her Code for Progress bio:

As Program Director, Aliya Rahman leads the recruitment, in-residence training, and job placement of Code for Progress fellows into full-time developer positions. Her work is informed by a background in legislative, electoral, and community organizing for racial and economic justice campaigns, and by a former life in public higher education conducting curriculum research and teaching computer programming and educational foundations/policy.

Aliya is the former Field Director of Equality Ohio, where she built a statewide field program focused on bridging gaps between racial justice organizers, LGBT rights groups, and labor. Prior to that, she worked for the Center for Community Change, first as their Ohio organizer in the passage of employment legislation supporting formerly incarcerated people, and later as a national circuit rider working with immigrant rights groups on voter engagement.

Aliya has developed Django applications, conducted tech trainings, or performed data analysis and targeting for every campaign, nonprofit, and university she has ever worked for - despite none of those tasks explicitly appearing on her job descriptions. Now based in Washington, DC, she is thoroughly enjoying life as a non-accidental techie, and is grateful to be part of an active ecosystem of women and people of color who believe tech has a pivotal role to play in creating social change.

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 (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.

Polymath extraordinaire; doing digital humanities before it was cool; 20 years of experience in information architecture design and programming for the World Wide Web; Director of Digital Scholarship at the University Library, University of California, Davis; Technical Lead for the English Short Title Catalogue; Associate Director of the English Broadside Ballad Archive. Currently helping to lead the IMLS-funded BIBFLOW project at UC Davis. Read more on his website or Twitter.

Cecily Walker is the Assistant Manager for Community Digital Initiatives & eLearning at Vancouver Public Library. In addition to her work on user experience and open data, she is an experienced speaker (keynoting DLF Forum this year) and has hosted a Twitter chat for first-generation library professionals (#L1S). Learn more at her website, and on Twitter, GitHub, and In the Library with the Lead Pipe (she is a member of the editorial board).

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, both due out in 2015. She created Hack Education in June 2010 shortly after she became a technology journalist because she was frustrated by the lack of coverage of education technology. Hack Education was always intended to be the sort of publication that she would want to read: smart and snarky, free of advertising and investor influence, and focused on tracking new technologies but not just because of some hyperbolic "revolution." Read more on her website, on Twitter, and on GitHub.

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 him (and Endeca co-founder Pete Bell) 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, Ph.D., is one of the world's most respected thought leaders at the intersection of technology, business, and society. His latest book, Too Big to Know: Rethinking Knowledge Now That the Facts Aren't the Facts, Experts Are Everywhere, and the Smartest Person in the Room Is the Room, is a roadmap on taking advantage of networked knowledge now that it has replaced books and experts of old. He also 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, as well as the critically acclaimed book Small Pieces Loosely Joined, a highly original and accessible reflection on the impact of the Internet on human behavior. He earned his doctorate 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. This site has information on how to book him, and you can read more on Twitter or on his blog.

Making front-end development easier by the second, Brock Whitten is the co-creator of Surge (Read about it on Medium), Harp, and Cordova/PhoneGap, as well as a Mozilla-WebFWD Alumnus and an advocate of a free and open web. He's also a friend of the community who has spoken at several conferences, including GOTO Chicago, Copenhagen, and Aarhus; RubyConf Argentina; CascadiaJS Seattle; NodeBrigade; VanJS; JSConf Washinton D.C.; Erlang Meetup Vancouver; OSCON San Jose; Future Ruby Toronto; and MerbCamp San Diego. Read more at his website.

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 well-received talk at 2014 ALA, and could offer interesting tech and social insights at Code4Lib. Read more at Kam Woods's website.

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.

The founder of Trans*H4CK--the only tech event of its kind that brings visibility to trans* tech innovators and entrepreneurs--Kortney Ryan Ziegler is an award winning artist, writer, and blogger based in Oakland, California. Dr. Ziegler is also the first person to hold the Ph.D. of African American Studies from Northwestern University, the director of the multiple award winning documentary, STILL BLACK: a portrait of black transmen, and runs the GLAAD Media Award nominated blog, blac (k) ademic. In 2013, Dr. Ziegler was named one of the Top 40 Under 40 LGBT activists by The Advocate Magazine and one of the most influential African Americans by TheRoot100, and in 2014 he gave the closing keynote at the LITA Forum in Albuquerque, New Mexico.