2019 Keynote Speakers Nominations

Nominations are now closed for the Code4Lib 2019 Keynote speakers.

Please include a description and any relevant links and try to keep the list in alphabetical order.

The criteria for nominating a candidate to act as keynote are below:

  • Speaker’s name (First Name, Last Name)
  • Brief description of individual (250-word max)
  • Pertinent links (Maximum of 3)
  • Contact information of candidate (email address)

We strongly encourage you to nominate speakers who are local to the San José area. If you would prefer to submit a nomination anonymously, please send your nominee(s) to Clara Turp at: clara.turp@mcgill.ca.


Please follow the formatting guidelines:


== Nominee's Name ==

Description of no more than 250 words.

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


Jane Doe (example)

Jane works at ________, doing _______.

Some pertinent history/biography/hyperlinks that elucidates why Jane would be a good keynote speaker.

Leo Lo

Leo Lo is the Associate University Librarian for learning and undergraduate services at Penn State University Libraries. Leo is a talented presenter, creative thinker and offers very interesting ideas relating to organizational research and development, appreciative inquiry, fostering collaborative works and communications including one's strengths and gifts to the organization. He would make an excellent speaker for Code4Lib when connecting to bigger frameworks within our communities/workflows.

More on Penn State News, Linked In, ODU digital commons

Tara Robertson

Tara works at Mozilla as the Diversity & Inclusion Strategic Partner. She is tasked with ensuring one of the darlings of the technology industry to be more inclusive, diverse and open. Tara has been championing open communities, open source, open access, and open education prior to her affiliation with Mozilla for over a decade. As the Code4lib community continues to wrestle with these very issues, it is a timely opportunity to invite her to speak to us since we are on the left coast this year.

More on Tara.

Not all information wants to be free, LITA Closing Keynote, 2016.

Mark Matienzo

Mark works at Stanford as the Collaboration & Interoperability Architect for Digital Library Systems and Services.

Mark has worked at the intersection of technology, libraries, and systems for over a decade, serving as a technologist, advocate, and facilitator for cross-institutional projects. Prior to joining Stanford, Mark worked as an archivist, technologist, and strategist specializing in born-digital materials and metadata management, at institutions including the Digital Public Library of America, Yale University Library, The New York Public Library, and the American Institute of Physics. Mark would be an excellent keynote speaker because their long track record of involvement in cross-disciplinary and intra-institutional initiatives has given them a unique exposure to projects that touch on all aspects of library systems and tools. In addition, they are an outspoken advocate on a wide range of issues including labor, the environment, and leadership in libraries.

More on Mark.

Raj Jayadev

Raj Jayadev is the cofounder of Silicon Valley De-Bug, a community organizing, advocacy, and multimedia storytelling organization based in San José, California. Since its inception in 2001, Silicon Valley De-Bug has been a platform for Silicon Valley's diverse communities to impact the political, cultural, and social landscape of the region, while also becoming a nationally recognized model for community-based justice work. For nearly fifteen years, the organization has been a platform for the least heard of Silicon Valley — youth, immigrants, low-income workers, the incarcerated — to impact the the political, cultural, and social landscape of the region. Through De-Bug, Jayadev and is colleagues also started a family organizing model called the Albert Cobarrubias Justice Project – a methodology for families and communities to impact the outcome of cases of their loved ones and change the landscape of power in the courts. They call the approach "participatory defense" and are now implementing the model nationally. Jayadev is a 2018 MacArthur Foundation Fellow and has been an Ashoka Fellow and a Rosenberg Foundation Leading Edge Fellow. All three recognitions are to support De-Bug’s innovative social justice work both locally and nationally. His writing and work has appeared and been profiled in media outlets such as the New York Times, Time.com, and National Public Radio.

More about Raj (contact info).

Karla Monterroso

Karla Monterroso is the CEO of Code2040, a community of Black and Latinx technologists and their allies who are diversifying tech to create a more equitable, inclusive, and prosperous economy. Through high-impact direct service programs, robust in-person and online community engagement, and dynamic storytelling and knowledge sharing, Code2040 empowers and mobilizes diversity champions across the industry. She believes Code2040 sits in the perfect intersection of a skills- and network-building opportunity for Black and Latinx tech talent and a systems-change opportunity for a critical segment of the country's economy. Karla has focused much of her career growing the people and program functions of rapidly scaling social enterprises driving youth advocacy and leadership. Since joining Code2040 in 2014, she has grown the number of students served from 25 to 4,000, ushered in several new successful programs, and stewarded critical organizational development practices and policies around values and racial equity. Her success and insights on racial justice and equity have landed her in publications such as Fast Company, NPR, Bloomberg, and more.

More about Karla.

Rick Prelinger

Rick Prelinger is an archivist, writer, filmmaker, and librarian. He is currently Professor of Film & Digital Media at University of California, Santa Cruz. His archival work currently focuses on collecting, recontextualizing, and exhibiting home movies and amateur films, and is a renowned speaker on preservation, archives, and material culture in the anthropocene. In 1982, he founded Prelinger Archives, a collection of industrial, advertising, educational and amateur films that was acquired by the Library of Congress in 2002. With Megan Prelinger, he is the co-founder of Prelinger Library, an appropriation-friendly private research library open to the public in downtown San Francisco. Prelinger has also partnered with the Internet Archive (of which he is a board member) to make 2,100 films available online for free viewing, downloading and reuse. His archival feature Panorama Ephemera (2004) played in venues around the world. Prelinger has recently made several film programs that he categorizes as “historical interventions,” called Lost Landscapes of San Francisco (7 annual parts) and Lost Landscapes of Detroit (3 annual parts).

More about Rick.

Safiya U. Noble

From her website: "Dr. Safiya Umoja Noble is an Assistant Professor at the University of Southern California (USC) Annenberg School of Communication, and is the author of a best-selling book on racist and sexist algorithmic bias in commercial search engines, entitled Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism. [...] Previously, she was an assistant professor in the Department of Information Studies in the Graduate School of Education and Information Studies at UCLA where she held appointments in the Departments of African American Studies, Gender Studies, and Education."

More about Safiya.

Sarah Mei

Sarah Mei is a Ruby and JavaScript developer and the Chief Consultant at DevMynd Software. With Sarah Allen, she founded RailsBridge, a community that provides free two-day workshops for members of under-represented groups in tech who want to learn Ruby on Rails. She also founded BridgeFoundry to expand the RailsBridge model to other communities. Sarah is a renowned speaker and author on topics such as technical collaboration and pair programming, fostering inclusive communities, and Ruby development.

More about Sarah.

October Montoya

October Montoya is a PhD student in the Communications and Science Studies Departments at UC San Diego. They hold a BA in Ethnic Studies, and a BA in Feminist Studies from University of California at Santa Cruz where their thesis, "Digital Activism in the Land of Abundant Failure: Silicon Valley and the Radical Re-Making of the Borders between Place and Space" explored the relationship between geography, technology, displacement, and change-making in their hometown of San Jose, California. Prior to attending graduate school, October engaged in various grassroots and coalitional forms of community organizing in the Bay Area, and this continues to influence their research interests, projects, and goals. They are also a contributing editor of San Jose-based literary journal Cheers from the Wasteland.

More about October: Cheersfromthewasteland communication.ucsd.edu.

Isaac Schlueter

Creator of npm, the JavaScript package manager, and CEO of npm, Inc. Isaac has been working in open source technology for decades and was instrumental in Node's early development, taking over from Node's creator Ryan Dahl and leading the project for a few years. While his contributions to open source software are notable, Isaac also leads by example with regards to diversity in the tech industry and creating a positive company atmosphere at npm. The company has a code conduct and emphasizes a healthy work/life balance. "We believe that the best way to iterate towards success is by taking care of ourselves, our families, our users, and one another." Isaac is local to Oakland, California.

More about Isaac: izs.me @izs

Mimi Fox Melton

Director, Community Mobilization for Code2040. As a first generation Haitian-American, Mimi’s passion lives at the intersection of Black and Brown liberation and empowerment. In her role at CODE2040, she designs experiences to build and strengthen community while resourcing and connecting agents of equity and inclusion within the Black and Latinx tech community. Before CODE2040, Mimi co-founded and ran Code for Progress, a non-profit coding bootcamp that pays adults of color as they learn to code and start careers in social justice tech.

Form for requesting her (or another Code2040 staffer) to speak

Becky Yoose

Becky Yoose is the Library Applications and Systems Manager for the Seattle Public Library, perennial Code4Lib MC and presenter, and wearer of many hats, both physical and metaphorical. She has wrangled both library people and data for over a decade, working at academic and public libraries of different shapes and sizes, from libraries built exclusively on proprietary systems to Open Source library technology shops. Becky's data work includes cataloging and metadata work to administrating library systems, data warehouses and patron data privacy. Her library community work includes extensive involvement in code4lib, LibTechWomen, Mashcat, and Troublesome Catalogers and Magical Metadata Fairies, as well as bridging the library world to other communities like Write The Docs. Becky's work and interests fall into the many intersections of technology, culture, privacy, community, and libraries.

At past Code4Lib conferences, Becky has spoken thoughtfully and passionately about key issues in our community, including sustainability and burnout, compassionate project development, and the ethics of data analytics. She works for tea and chocolate, and prefers to use lard for her pie crust, though she will make vegan butter pie crust on request.

More about Becky: yobj.net

Previous C4L talks:

Kate Deibel

Kate Deibel is the Inclusion & Accessibility Librarian at Syracuse University. An ardent advocate for usable and accessible technologies, her work focuses on disciplinarity, technology adoption, comics, and disability. Kate earned her PhD in computer science and engineering at the University of Washington in 2011 with a multidisciplinary study of the social and technological factors that hinder adoption of reading technologies among adults with dyslexia, and while working as a web applications specialist at the University of Washington Libraries she focused on ensuring that technologies are effective tools for both library patrons and staff. Kate brings to library work strong communication skills to encourage different disciplinary and departmental perspectives to come together. By challenging the assumptions that we make about accessibility and our patrons' experiences with library technology, Kate's work pushes us to be more empathetic, realistic, and creative when we design library systems.

https://twitter.com/metageeky

Margaret Heller

Margaret Heller is the Digital Services Librarian at Loyola University Chicago. Involved in Code4Lib since 2010, she also sits on the LITA Board of Directors, and actively participates in community projects including the Read/Write Library Chicago and LibTechWomen. Her passion for building strong communities has led to writing a forthcoming book on best practices for library technology communities of all kinds. Heller has spoken several times at Code4Lib about community building, and is an advocate for being inclusive and sensitive to the needs of people and institutions across library types and funding or staffing levels. She will speak to how trends in technology and politics require communities to engage their members and improve their structures in order to ensure a future for community technology.

Freada Kapor Klein (unavailable)

Freada Kapor Klein, PhD is an entrepreneur, social policy researcher, and diversity activist. She is a founding partner at Kapor Capital and the Kapor Center for Social Impact, as well as part of the founding team at Project Include. Dr. Klein is involved in endeavors that aim to bring diversity to the tech space and empower social entrepreneurs.