GWOB Advisory Board

A. Riley Eller is an accomplished technologist with deep experience imagining, planning, developing, testing, shipping, and evolving software solutions to fit emerging technology markets. Mr. Eller specializes in distributed algorithms, reverse engineering, applied cryptography, code review, and training. He has extensive experience working with Internet embedded devices and protocol security. He pioneered defenses against distributed attack networks, automatic vulnerability analysis (“fuzzing”), and ASCII-armored stack overflow exploits. As a professional software developer, he began his career in embedded operating system development, took a spin at security consulting and security software development, and is currently focused on peer to peer routing for offline IP networks.

Beth Kolko tends to wear several hats simultaneously. She’s been an academic for close to two decades, and is currently a Professor in the Department of Human Centered Design & Engineering at the University of Washington. In recent years she’s gotten very interested in innovation and unofficial expertise, and runs a project called Hackademia. She’s also a writer, a tinkerer, a builder of giant giraffes, and now, an entrepreneur.

Christy Wilson is an operations geek and technology leader with a‪ penchant for instigating fun and a passion for data democratization. Christy is currently VP of Product Operations and Engineering Cross Functions at Splunk, a big data company headquartered in San Francisco‪. Christy also founded and leads Splunk4Good, Splunk’s Corporate Social Responsibility program. Christy has ‪over 15 years of experience and prior to joining Splunk in 2007, Christy served at both early-stage ventures and large companies, including Offermatica, Thomson Reuters and Commcerceflow.

Eleanor Saitta is a hacker, designer, artist, and writer.  She makes a living and a vocation of understanding how complex systems operate and redesigning them to work, or at least fail, better.  Her work is transdisciplinary, using everything from electronics, software, and paint to social rules and words as media with which to explore and shape our interactions with the world.  Her focuses include the seamless integration of technology into the lived experience, the humanity of objects and the built environment, and systemic resilience and conviviality.

Eleanor is a co-founder of the Trike project, the Seattle Public N3rd Area space, and the Constitutional Analysis Support Team (CAST).  Trike is an open source threat modeling methodology and tool which partially automates the art of security analysis.  CAST works with national constitutional assemblies to improve the quality of the documents they create and ensure they correctly represent the stated intention.

James Carlson is founder and director of the School Factory, Inc. a 501(c)3 non-profit that helps create and sustain open, transparent, and inclusive value-generating communities that bridge the gap between education, community, and workplaces. In 2002, he started Bucketworks, the world’s first health club for the brain and one of the longest-operating and oldest hacker/makerspaces in the US. He is also CEO and co-founder of the Bucket Brigade, a team of business leaders, facilitators, designers, and technical experts who transform workplace culture from command-and-control to collaboration from the inside out. James applies his skills as expert facilitator and visual thinker to the vision of building an open, sustainable, and inclusive model of public learning that prepares humanity for its longest-term future. James helped in the strategy and operations of GWOB from 2010-early 2012, and collaborated with Willow Brugh, Diggz and others on the development and modeling of the accelerator concept.

Johnny “Diggz” Higgins is an entrepreneur, musician, filmmaker and founder of Geeks Without Bounds. In 1995 Diggz co-founded IRDG (Intergalactic Research and Development Group) which built the world’s first Internet-based unified messaging platform, iPost.  In 1999 Diggz co-founded Voxeo Corporation and serves as Chief Evangelist for Voxeo Labs’ flagship cloud communications platform, Tropo and its community of over 250,000 developers. He produced the indie feature film, The Karaoke King, a musical comedy that premiered in 2007 at the Cinema City International Film Festival. Diggz is also a professional dueling piano player and will perform at the slightest arm-twist. On Twitter: @johnnydiggz

Joshua R. Furman is an attorney in private practice in Southern California.  After a youth spent as a web developer and drummer in the halcyon days (for both music and technology) of 1990′s Seattle, Joshua attended law school at Seattle University where he was editor in chief of the law review, a Presidential Law Scholar, and law clerk for the Center for Democracy and Technology in Washington DC, as well as externing for software companies in the Seattle area.  Joshua’s current practice includes advising small and mid-size companies on intellectual property and general business matters and civil litigation.  He believes the law can facilitate, not obfuscate, and will never vacillilate when given the opportunity to explicate regarding whatever you want to innovate.

Nicholas Skytland is an engineer, designer, entrepreneur, and advocate for Open Government. As Program Manager of NASA’s Open Government Initiative, he is responsible for directing the agency’s Open Government Plan, with aggressive goals towards releasing more high value data sets online, pushing forward the use of open source software, developing technologies that advance human civilization, and creating participatory opportunities to engage citizens in NASA’s mission. Skytland has experience planning galactic-sized hackathons, envisioning future space exploration missions, designing next generation space suits, training space-bound astronauts, developing open-source software and encouraging new partnerships between government and industry, academia and organizations.  Combining elements of space exploration, science, technology, visual art and storytelling, Skytland is well known for many of his presentations promoting the human space program, participatory exploration, millennials, social media, and open government. Skytland holds a bachelor’s degree from Valparaiso University in mechanical engineering, a master’s degree from the International Space University in Space Studies and a MBA from the University of Texas McCombs School of Business.

Pascal Schuback is currently an Emergency Management Program Manager at King County Office of Emergency Management. His work focuses on the technical side of the house developing and implementing collaborative methods using cloud computing, social media, existing and future technologies in emergency management. He continues to participate with several regional organizations dedicated to building resilient emergency management and public/private programs throughout the Northwest and world. Participating with CrisisCommons, CrisisCamper, CrisisCamps, Random Hacks of Kindness (RHoK) and Geeks without Borders to help build technological tools in response to crisis around the world, developing social media tools and collaborative software systems to increase the mechanisms of communications include proof-of-concept testing on public/private governance and technology initiatives. Pascal is a member of the International Association of Emergency Managers’ Emerging Technology Committee. Board member of the EMforum and serves on the Department of Homeland Securities Science and Technology’s Virtual Social Media Working Group.

Sara-Jayne Farmer has spent over 20 years as a lead engineer, innovations strategist and manager, developing new technologies and business cultures, and turning theory into reliable practice. Her recent work includes working as Chief Architect at UN Global Pulse, on accessing and using big data sources and streams to improve detection and monitoring of development crises; as a lead in Standby Task Force and Crisis Camp London, receiving and collating information about natural crises and conflicts like Libya and Somalia and working on developing crisismapping as a discipline; and with Random Hacks of Kindness and Geeks Without Bounds as a systems designer working on new ways to develop crisis data technologies. Her other recent work includes unmanned vehicles, intelligent transport systems, innovations management, information fusion and autonomy (how humans and automated reasoning algorithms work together) theory.

Mentors

A. Riley Eller, adviser.

Aaron Huslage is co-founder of Tethr which makes it easy for people and organizations to be reconnected with one another during crisis situations.  He is also a founding partner of Carbon Imagineering, a UK-based technology think tank incubating a number of technology startups. In 2011 he was a co-founder of Safecast which provides crowdsourced radiation monitoring data to Japan.

Previously, Aaron was a System Administrator and System Architect for major corporations such as Microsoft and Major League Baseball. He has also contributed his expertise to various media properties like GigaOm and O’Reilly Media. Aaron was formerly on the organizing committee for O’Reilly Media’s ETel conference. In 2011, he helped shape Contact, a conference that seeks to explore the greater promise of social media.

Eva Galperin is the International Freedom of Expression Coordinator for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, where she does education, mobilization, and outreach on all things related to free speech with a particular focus on security, safety, and censorship circumvention for Internet users in authoritarian regimes. Prior to EFF, Eva worked at the US-China Policy Institute, where she helped to organize conferences and research Chinese energy policy. She has Bachelor’s degrees from SFSU in International Relations and Political Science, which she is continuously astonished to find useful on a daily basis.

Evert Bopp is the founder of Haiti Connect & Disaster Tech Lab. After a 15 years of building networks for money he decided to do something more useful and went to Haiti to build wifi networks to improve communications and internet access for NGO’s, aid organisations and local orgs. Since then he started Disaster Tech Lab to develop and promote the use of technology in disaster & crisis situations. He’s based in ireland and also dabbles as a tech start-up mentor through The Greenhouse accelerator which he founded in 2009.

James Carlson, adviser.

James Vasile is the Director of the Open Internet Tools Project, which supports development of anti-censorship and anti-surveillance tools. He is a partner at Open Tech Strategies, which advises organizations and businesses as they navigate the open-source world. He is also a Senior Fellow at the Software Freedom Law Center, where he acts as a strategic advisor on a range of free software projects.

James helped found a number of free software organizations, including the FreedomBox Foundation, Open Source Matters, and the Software Freedom Conservancy. His FreedomBox work has been recognized by an Innovation Award at Contact Summit 2011, as well as an Ashoka ChangeMaker’s award for Citizen’s Media.

You can learn more about James at http://jamesvasile.com.

Johnny “Diggz” Higgins, adviser.

Kate Chapman is the Acting Executive Director at the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team (HOT). Her most recent work has been in Indonesia working on a pilot program analyzing the feasibility utilizing OpenStreetMap for collection of exposure data. This project has hosted a OpenStreetMap mapping competition, a month long event to map critical infrastructure in Jakarta and assisting community facilitators in moving from hand-drawn maps to digital maps. Previous to working at HOT Kate was involved in development of multiple web-GIS applications including GeoCommons and iMapData.

Kav Latiolais is a software architect and educator. He works as a partner at LIFFFT, bringing the speed and innovation of the startup world to major brands through product development and workshops on Lean Metrics, Agile Methodologies, and Design Thinking. Before starting LIFFFT Kav served as CTO of Giant Thinkwell designing and building highly scalable, massively multi-user, social video applications. Prior to Giant Thinkwell Kav worked on Microsoft’s Visual Studio Platform designing world class developer tools and platform technologies.

 

Mark Iliffe is currently a lead on the Taarifa project; an open source platform for the improvement of public service delivery, transparency and government processes. In his ‘spare’ time he is also a PhD candidate at the Nottingham Geospatial Institute, University of Nottingham and a Geospatial Consultant for the Global ICT group of the World Bank.

Sara Farmer, adviser.

Christy Wilson.

Schuyler Erle has been a Free Software developer and evangelist for over fifteen years. He was a co-author of ‘’Mapping Hacks’’ and ‘’Google Maps Hacks’’. Schuyler was also a co-founder of the OpenLayers and TileCache projects, and is a charter member of the OSGeo Foundation. More recently, he helped found the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team, and serves on its Board of Directors. Schuyler lives in San Francisco.

Employees

Willow Brugh is the director of Geeks Without Bounds, an accelerator for humanitarian projects. Previous endeavors including being cofounder of Seattle makerspace Jigsaw Renaissance, of the hackerspace collaboration initiative Space Federation, and of the response-development competition GameSave. Most recent efforts also include a research affiliate position at the Center for Civic Media at MIT’s Media Lab.

Years of participation in the hacker and makerspace community have created purpose towards distributed systems, engaged citizens, and mutual aid. With heavy involvement in Maker Faire, Random Hacks of Kindness, and the SpaceApps Challenge, Willow’s main skill is “getting out of the way.” Location is at this point post-geographic, though favorite places are Seattle, San Francisco, Berlin, Chicago, and New York.

Find this robot on the internets just about anywhere as willowbl00.

Lindsay Oliver is the Content Creator for Geeks Without Bounds. A writer with a background in marketing, fashion, education, and technology, she wields her red pen with impunity for the purposes of making the highly technical more legible, the conceptual more grounded, and communication more clear.

Highly involved in the hacker/maker community, Lindsay cares deeply about DIY and self-reliance, social engineering for good, and open communication as the founding principles to further these causes. She is located in Seattle and can be found dithering on about fashion and projects on her style blog, Rosalind Of Arden.

 

Lisha Sterling is a hacker of code, words, and education. She has been developing software, managing IT teams and advising technology start-ups for 20 years. She works with Geeks Without Bounds wherever she’s needed, from hunting down waffle irons to make breakfast at a hackathon to writing content for the Geeks Without Bounds website.

When she’s not helping with hackathons and other GWOB projects, Lisha teaches classes in hackerspaces, schools, and community centers and writes open source STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Art and Math) curricula. She has a passion for open software, open hardware, open data, and open learning.

You can read what she’s thinking about right now at http://alwayssababa.com or listen to the BrainMeats! Podcast which she co-hosts with Willow Brugh.