The Code4Lib 2014 Keynote Speakers Committee is excited to announce the selection by open vote of this year’s keynote speakers: Valerie Aurora and Sumana Harihareswara.

Valerie Aurora is the founder of the Ada Initiative, a non-profit organization that seeks to increase women’s participation in the free culture movement, open source technology, and open source culture. Aurora is also known within the Linux community for advocating new developments in filesystems in Linux, including ChunkFS and the Union file system. In 2012, Aurora, and Ada Initiative co-founder Mary Gardiner, were named two of the most influential people in computer security by SC Magazine. In 2013, she won the O’Reilly Open Source Award. At Valerie’s request, her keynote will be in the form of an interview, which Roy Tennant has volunteered to conduct. Questions from the Code4Lib community will be solicited, so please be thinking about what you would like to ask her.

Sumana Harihareswara works as the Engineering Community Manager 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 Geek Feminism. Sumana has keynoted Open Source Bridge in 2012 in addition to presentations 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 also a regular in #libtechwomen IRC channel.

This year’s speakers bring incredible expertise in topics that are highly relevant to our community. We had an incredible slate of nominees, many of whom will surely be nominated again.

Thanks for voting! The Code4Lib 2014 Keynote Speakers Committee