Valerie Aurora, Executive Director

Valerie Aurora (formerly Val Henson) is the Executive Director and co-founder of the Ada Initiative, a non-profit dedicated to promoting women in open tech/culture. With co-founder Mary Gardiner, she created and implemented projects like the Ada Initiative conference anti-harassment policy, now adopted by hundreds of open tech/culture events. Aurora and Gardiner were both recognized as one of Femme-o-nomics Top 50 Women to Watch in Tech in 2011 and SC Magazine’s 6 Influential Information Security Thinkers in 2012. Aurora created and teaches the Ada Initiative Allies Workshop, which teaches men simple ways to support women in open tech/culture.

Aurora, an experienced software engineer, was a leading file systems developer, researcher, and consultant for over a decade. She invented several new file systems concepts, including a widely used power-saving feature in file systems called relative atime, and co-founded the Linux Storage and Filesystems Summit. Her contributions to the field were recognized by invitations to speak at or serve on the program committees for many top file systems and open source conferences, including USENIX File Systems and Storage Technology, OSCON, and  linux.conf.au.

Aurora holds a double B.S. in computer science and mathematics and lives and works in San Francisco, California.

Mary Gardiner, Director of Operations and Research

Mary Gardiner is the Director of Operations and Research and co-founder of the Ada Initiative, a non-profit dedicated to promoting women in open tech/culture. With co-founder Valerie Aurora, she created and implemented projects like the Ada Initiative conference anti-harassment policy, now adopted by hundreds of open tech/culture events. Aurora and Gardiner were both recognized as one of Femme-o-nomics Top 50 Women to Watch in Tech in 2011 and SC Magazine’s 6 Influential Information Security Thinkers in 2012. Gardiner created and organized the world’s first conference for women in open tech/culture, AdaCamp.

Gardiner is formerly a software developer and computational linguistics research student. Gardiner was the keynote speaker at Wikimania 2012, the world-wide conference for Wikipedia, the world’s 5th most popular web site. Her work has been discussed in Slate, the Huffington Post, and the Sydney Morning Herald. She is a major contributor to the influential Geek Feminism blog and wiki. After more than 10 years of service to the open source community in Australia and worldwide, Gardiner’s contributions were recognized with the prestigious Linux Australia Rusty Wrench award in 2012.

Gardiner holds a B.S. with honours in computer science and a major in mathematics, and a B.A with majors in linguistics and philosophy. Her computer science PhD will be awarded in 2013. She is based in Sydney, Australia and you can find her on Twitter at @me_gardiner.