Jennifer Argüello is currently the Senior Technical Development Manager at GitHub. She is passionate about making the world a better place through innovations in education and technology. 15+ years of professional experience in a variety of technical roles for small and large high-tech companies. 20+ years of involvement in national organizations aimed at the advancement of underrepresented people of color and women in technology fields. Jennifer serves on the advisory boards of Globaloria and Silicon Valley Latino.
Areas of Focus
Chris Aniszczyk (@cra) is an engineer by trade with a passion for open source and building developer communities. He currently serves as interim Executive Director of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation. At Twitter, he created their open source program (@TwitterOSS) and leads their open source efforts. For many years he served on the Eclipse Foundation’s Board of Directors representing the committer community and the Java Community Process Executive Committee. He’s also served as a mentor for many years at Google Summer’s of Code (GSOC) and helped Twitter participate in the Outreach program. In a previous life, he bootstrapped an open source consulting company, made many mistakes, lead and hacked on many eclipse.org and Linux related projects.
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Amanda Cooper (@MandaCoop) is a seasoned strategic communicator and campaigner providing consulting, training and coaching for social justice movement leaders and organizations. She is proud to have worked with clients like the Ms. Foundation for Women, Forward Together, Welcoming America, Demos, Transgender Law Center, and the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights.
She has also served as a communications director and press secretary for labor unions, providing critical strategic and tactical support to dozens of successful organizing, corporate and political campaigns. Before joining the labor movement, Amanda was the media relations manager for the Brennan Center for Justice, and her early career included roles in public relations and development for the Children’s Village in Dobbs Ferry, NY and for the Los Angeles Regional Foodbank. She currently a partner at LightBox Collaborative.
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Lisa Gelobter works for the White House, in the United States Digital Service. She is currently serving as the Chief Digital Service Officer with the US Department of Education.
Lisa has been working in digital technology for more than 20 years, with a focus on strategy, operations, and product development. She has been integrally involved with the advent of several pioneering internet technologies, including Shockwave, the genesis of animation on the web, and the emergence of online video by way of Brightcove, Joost, and The FeedRoom. Previously, Lisa was the Interim Head of Digital for BET Networks and ran Technology, Product and Business Operations. She was also a member of the senior management team for the launch of Hulu. Through the convergence of media and technology, Lisa has been fortunate enough to have had an impact on how, where, and when media is consumed and she is now bringing that consumer focus and transformative practice to bear in government.
Lisa is proud to be a Black Woman with a degree in Computer Science. Go STEM!
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Sef Kloninger (@sefk) has been a professional software engineer and engineering manager for over twenty years. His expertise is building and scaling Internet infrastructure and applications at Akamai, VMware, Ning, Google, and several startups. He has worked in big enterprise software engineering organizations as well as small fast-moving teams. He currently manages the engineering team at YouTube that builds the data warehouse for over a billion active users.
In 2012 Sef built and delivered an open-source online learning platform for Stanford University during the MOOC heyday. He merged his project with edX in exchange for getting them to open-source their stack. He has real-world experience in higher-ed online education and running successful open-source projects.
Sef serves on the Board of Directors and Executive Committee of Peninsula School, a progressive K-8 school in Menlo Park, California. He occasionally blogs here.
Areas of Focus
Vidya builds high-growth, high-impact startups that scale. Currently, she is a founder of Popily - automated data analytics-as-a-service for software teams. Vidya also co-founded DMV.org and helped turn it into a multi-million dollar business, making the Inc. 5000 list, reporting 391% growth in three years. For the last 15 years, Vidya has been advising startups on strategic growth, working with accelerators, incubators, and investor networks. She served as president on the board of directors of CodeScouts, a non-profit dedicated to the mission of supporting and encouraging minority and underrepresented communities to learn to code. More recently Vidya worked with the White House as a Presidential Innovation Fellow, helping the Office of Science and Technology Policy with the mandate to leverage open data and partnerships to promote economic growth in the world’s poorest countries. Vidya has been a mentor and advisor at various early-stage venture firms and startup accelerators such as TechStars, KickLabs and Astia. She is also a co-host of Partially Derivative, the popular data science podcast.
Today, Vidya is founder of Popily.com a data exploration startup and holds several tech/innovation boardseats. For more information on Vidya’s work, please visit: vidyaspandana.com
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