Advisors

The Ada Initiative is proud to have a diverse, committed, and experienced group of advisors. We frequently ask our advisory board for input on our ideas and plans to get feedback from people with a variety of backgrounds and experiences.

Mitchell Baker
As the leader of the Mozilla Project, Mitchell Baker is responsible for organizing and motivating a massive, worldwide collective of employees and volunteers who are breathing new life into the Internet with the Firefox Web browser and other Mozilla products. Mitchell was born and raised in Berkeley, California, receiving her BA in Asian Studies from UC Berkeley and her JD from the Boalt Hall School of Law. Mitchell has been the general manager of the Mozilla project since 1999. In 2003, she became president and co-founder of the Mozilla Foundation, a non-profit organization dedicated to openness and innovation on the Internet. In 2005, she led the creation of Mozilla Corp. a wholly owned subsidiary of the Mozilla Foundation. She served as CEO of the corporation until January 2008, when Mozilla’s rapid growth encouraged her to split her responsibilities and add a CEO. Mitchell remains deeply engaged in developing product offerings that promote the mission of empowering individuals. She also guides the overall scope and direction of Mozilla’s mission. As Chairwoman of the Mozilla Foundation, Mitchell continues her commitment to an open, innovative Web and the infinite possibilities it presents. TIME Magazine profiled Baker under “Scientists and Thinkers” in its 2005 TIME 100. She has also appeared on “The Charlie Rose Show” and “CNN Global Office” to discuss open source software and the Firefox phenomenon.

Alex Bayley (Skud)
Skud is the founder of the Geek Feminism blog and wiki, and has been working in open technology and culture since the early 1990s. She is an experienced open source software developer, a prolific writer and public speaker, and has founded and run dozens of Internet-based communities and geek events. Since 2005, she has been creating fan videos (a form of remix or transformative work) and her creations, especially the feminist fanvid A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, have been shown at conventions worldwide. She co-runs an annual fanvid showcase and party at WisCon, a feminist science fiction convention.

Donna Benjamin
Donna Benjamin is a community facilitator, often found submitting patches to the social fabric of Free and Open Source Software groups by organising events and get-togethers. She runs Creative Contingencies, a micro business focused on delivering customised Drupal web application services and hosting, organising events and undertaking research and facilitation for a diverse range of clients in the education and small business sectors in Australia. You can find her on Twitter at @kattekrab.

Lukas Blakk
Lukas Blakk is a Release Engineer at Mozilla. Lukas is one of the founders of PyStar programming workshops for women and organizes PyStar workshops for the Bay Area. Lukas has been working to help increase the participation of women in Open Source through WoMoz, Mozilla Reps, and sitting on the advisory and planning committee for the Dare 2B Digital conference. Lukas brings a strong background in feminist and social justice activism from her years of involvement in artist and queer politic communities. You can find her on Twitter at @lsblakk.

Alice Boxhall
Alice Boxhall is a software engineer at Google, and happened to be in the correct place and time to be the first woman to be hired in that role in Google’s Sydney office in 2006. She is also the vice president of the Linux Australia council. She has been active in the women in technology sphere in Australia for the last four years, and helped Mary Gardiner organise a LinuxChix micro-conference in 2008. You can find her on Twitter at @sundress.

Kellie Brownell
As Donor Relations Coordinator, Kellie strives to keep donors engaged in the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF)’s effort to enhance the rights and freedoms of technology users. Before defending digital rights, she studied public versus private funding of the performing arts at Stanford University’s Center for Philanthropy and Civil Society. She has worked as a fundraiser for orchestras, operas, and theaters in the US, Canada, and Germany. She believes strongly in the open source and nonprofit ethos: if something fails to meet your expectations, be it a software feature or social problem, take responsibility for improving it. You can find her on Twitter at @fundfreetech.

Rachel Chalmers
Rachel Chalmers is the research director of infrastructure with The 451 Group, an industry analyst firm. She speaks internationally about virtualization, big data and cloud computing. She has been writing about technology and culture since the early 1990s, and has been published in or quoted by Salon, New Scientist, the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, the Boston Globe and the Sydney Morning Herald. You can find her on twitter at @rachelchalmers.

Francesca Coppa
Francesca Coppa is one of the founders of the Organization For Transformative Works (OTW), a nonprofit organization dedicated to supporting and preserving fan works and culture. As part of that mission, the OTW is designing and building the Archive of Our Own, the largest female-led and female-dominated Open Source project on the web. The OTW is also involved in legal advocacy work to create a more open cultural environment for fan works and other remix arts, and Coppa was part of the team of advocates who recently won a DMCA exemption for noncommercial remixers. Her own scholarly work has recently been focused on fan vidding both as a fair use practice and as feminist art. You can find her on twitter at @fcoppa.

Selena Deckelmann
Selena Deckelmann is a consultant and database analyst for Emma. She’s a major contributor to PostgreSQL. She speaks internationally about free software, developer communities and trolling. She founded and co-chaired Open Source Bridge, a developer conference for open source citizens. She founded the PostgreSQL Conference, a successful series of east coast/west coast conferences in the US for PostgreSQL. She’s helped run other conferences like WhereCampPDX, BarCampPDX and PG Days. She founded pdx11.org, which is putting a spotlight on the City of Portland’s efforts to transform the Portland tech industry. You can find her on twitter at @selenamarie.

John Ferlito
John Ferlito is a serial entrepreneur as well as an expert in highly available and scalable infrastructure. John is CTO of Vquence, Director of Robot Parade, and President of Linux Australia. He co-founded Bulletproof Networks and was responsible for building out their infrastructure as well as developing and deploying a VMware-based dedicated hosting platform, the first in Australia. John founded Inodes Consulting, an open source systems consulting business with an emphasis on enabling cloud computing. John is an active leader in free and open source software communities. Besides his current position as President of Linux Australia, John was a co-organiser of linux.conf.au 2007, and has worked on various open source projects including Debian, Ubuntu, Puppet and the Annodex suite. You can find him on Twitter at @johnf.

Sulamita Garcia
Sulamita Garcia is Technical Marketing Engineer for Europe at Intel AppUp Developer Program, supporting developers to create and submit applications for Intel’s applications store. She has been working at Intel since 2007, and prior this position she was Open Source Community & Strategy Manager for Latin America and later Open Source Technical Marketing Engineer. After several years leading Linuxchix Brazil, she was elected co-coordinator of Linuxchix International. She has worked for several years in Linux integration, security and development, and wrote several technical papers about high availability, load balancing and Slackware. She holds a Computer Science degree for the Federal University of Santa Catarina, and two major Linux certifications: LPI level 2 and RHCE. You can find her on Twitter at @sulagarcia.

Sue Gardner
Sue Gardner is Executive Director of the Wikimedia Foundation, the non-profit organization that operates Wikipedia. Wikipedia is the world’s largest and most popular encyclopedia: it contains more than 17 million collaboratively-created articles in 270 languages, and is read by more than 400 million people around the world. Before joining the Wikimedia Foundation in 2007, Sue ran CBC.CA, the website of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, Canada’s national public broadcaster and a much-loved Canadian cultural institution. Before that, she was a journalist for many years, working in radio, television, print and online. You can find her on twitter at @SuePGardner.

Sumana Harihareswara
Sumana Harihareswara works as the Volunteer Development Coordinator at the Wikimedia Foundation. She has worked at Collabora, GNOME, QuestionCopyright.org, Fog Creek Software, Behavior, and Salon.com, and contributed to the MediaWiki, AltLaw, Empathy, Miro, and Zeitgeist open source projects. She has been editor and release organizer for GNOME Journal and is a blogger at GeekFeminism. Sumana has presented at Open Source Bridge in 2010 and 2011 and at Foo Camp in 2010, and is the Google Summer of Code administrator for MediaWiki. She holds an MS in technology management from Columbia University and a BA in political science from the University of California at Berkeley. She is on identi.ca and Twitter as @brainwane.

Leigh Honeywell
Leigh Honeywell loves Open Stuff and geek community-building. She is a member of the board of advisors for the SECtor security conference, a former Google Summer of Code mentor, and a speaker at many conferences, including past keynotes at SCALE and Open Source Bridge. Leigh co-founded the HackLabTO hackerspace in Toronto and served as co-leader of the Ubuntu Women project. Leigh blogs irregularly at Geek Feminism and hypatia.ca, tweets at @hypatiadotca, and speaks at lots of conferences. She works as a Security Program Manager at Microsoft.

Danielle Madeley
Danielle Madeley is a professional software engineer working for Collabora Ltd. She is a contributor to the Telepathy communications framework and the GNOME Desktop and is involved in the GNOME Outreach Programme for Women, which mentors women to become free software developers within the GNOME project.

Deb Nicholson
Deb Nicholson works at the intersection of technology and social justice. She has been a free speech advocate, economic justice organizer and civil liberties defender. After working in Massachusetts politics for fifteen years, she became involved in the free software movement at the Free Software Foundation. She is currently the Community Outreach Director at the Open Invention Network and the Community Manager at Media Goblin, a GNU project dedicated to building decentralized media hosting. She also serves on the board at Open Hatch, a non-profit dedicated to providing tools and education for potential new free software contributors. You can find her on identi.ca at @eximious or on freenode as freedeb.

Denise Paolucci
Denise Paolucci is the co-owner of Dreamwidth Studios, an open-source blogging/journaling platform that is one of only two large open source projects where women are the majority. She lives in Baltimore, Maryland, with her long-suffering wife, who fortunately enjoys the frequent “C’mere, look, isn’t this cool?” invocations, and two cats, who don’t care about the Internet as long as they get fed on time.

Nóirín Plunkett
Nóirín Plunkett is a geek <-> English translator, community facilitator, and professional communicatrix. Executive Vice President at the Apache Software Foundation and board member of the Open Cloud Initiative, Nóirín embodies the saying “if you want something done, ask a busy person”. By day, she’s a technical writer in Google’s Zurich office, but speaking engagements and general mischief often bring her further afield. You can find her on Twitter at @noirinp

Karen Sandler
Karen M. Sandler is the Executive Director of the GNOME Foundation. She is known for her advocacy for free culture and free software, particularly for software transparency on medical devices. Prior to joining GNOME, she was General Counsel of the Software Freedom Law Center. Karen continues to do pro bono legal work with SFLC and serves as an officer of both the Software Freedom Conservancy and SFLC. She is also pro bono General Counsel of QuestionCopyright.org. Before joining SFLC, Karen worked as an associate in the corporate departments of Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher LLP in New York and Clifford Chance in New York and London. Karen received her law degree from Columbia Law School in 2000, where she was a James Kent Scholar and co-founder of the Columbia Science and Technology Law Review. Karen received her bachelor’s degree in engineering from The Cooper Union. You can find Karen on Identi.ca as @kaz.

Caroline Simard
Caroline Simard is passionate about building better workplaces for women and underrepresented minority talent in science and technology fields through evidence-based solutions. She is currently Associate Director of Diversity and Leadership at the Stanford School of Medicine and Research Advisor at the Anita Borg Institute for Women and Technology. Prior to joining Stanford, Caroline was Vice President of Research and Executive Programs at the Anita Borg Institute, where she led the creation and dissemination of solutions to further diversity in scientific and technical careers in industry and academia, working with executives and faculty of leading technology companies and academic institutions. Prior to ABI, Simard was a Researcher at the Center for Social Innovation of the Stanford Graduate School of Business. Caroline holds a PhD from Stanford University. Her publications have focused on technical human and social capital, solutions to recruit, retain, and advance technical women, underrepresented minorities in STEM, the diffusion of best practices, open innovation, regional clusters of innovation, and social networks. You can find her on twitter at @csimard.

Sarah Stierch
Sarah Stierch is a Washington, D.C. based consultant for cultural and historical organizations, and a master’s student at George Washington University in Museum Studies. A Wikipedian since 2004, Stierch is leading the fight in closing the gender gap within Wikipedia and related websites by assisting others in “minding the (gender) gap” in Wikipedia and developing programming for the Wikimedia Foundation. Stierch’s museum work collides with Wikipedia: in 2010 she served as the first Wikipedian in Residence at the Smithsonian Institution and continues to serve as an ambassador for GLAM (Galleries, Libraries, Archives, and Museums) outreach between Wikimedia and cultural organizations. You can find her on Twitter at @sarah_stierch.

Ellie Young
Ellie Young has overseen the operational and administrative functions of several San Francisco Bay Area not-for-profit organizations. For the past 22 years, Ellie was the Executive Director of the USENIX Association, which puts on conferences that are essential to the community of computing engineers, sysadmins, academics, and researchers. Prior to that, Ellie worked at the University of California Press and at the Boalt Hall School of Law at UC Berkeley. She has been active in many efforts and committees to encourage women to participate in computer science and computer engineering research and education at all levels.

Matt Zimmerman
Matt Zimmerman has contributed to free and open source software as a professional and a volunteer for over 15 years. A member of the founding team behind Ubuntu, he served as its Chief Technology Officer for seven years, and continues to chair its community Technical Board. As an individual developer, Matt has participated in a range of other free software projects including Debian, MythTV, and the Linux Terminal Server Project. He is currently employed as Vice President of Engineering at Singly, a San Francisco based startup working with personal data. You can find him on Twitter at @mdzimm.