About

Hi! This is me:

(photo by the super-awesome Molly Tomlinson)

I’ve been a math major and a middle school Latin teacher. Now I’m a librarian and technologist, winding my way through library and library-adjacent organizations. Specifically:

• I’m a software engineer, building things that empower people through code. Today I work at theBerkman Klein Center, primarily on Lumen, which maintains records of content takedown requests to support lawyers, journalists, and other scholars and activists of the open internet. I’ve done past work for the MIT Libraries, the Wikimedia Foundation, Unglue.it (open access ebooks), Measure the Future (privacy-sensitive library space usage analytics), and CustomFit (made-to-measure knitting patterns).
• I’m a nonprofit governance nerd. This includes six years on the board of the Library & Information Technology Association, including a term as President. I was also on the advisory board of the Ada Initiative.
• I’m a teacher and public speaker. My wheelhouse these days is introductory programming, ethical implications of code, and library technology; I’ve been an invited speaker in four countries. I’ve also spoken and written on gender, conference codes of conduct, copyright, and more. You can see details, often including slides or video, on my resume. Want me to speak at your event or write for your publication? Contact me.
• Sometimes I do projects with code. Yes, I have a GitHub.

I’m interested in people, technology, information, and how they intersect in strange new alchemies.

About the blog

My blog title, Across Divided Networks, is from Peter Morville’s Ambient Findability:

Narrowly circumscribed groups develop coded languages that optimize communication between insiders at the expense of transparency for outsiders. And when these groups interact, they often talk past one another without doing the hard work necessary to translate, understand, and cooperate. This insularity can be disheartening, and yet it presents a great opportunity for boundary spanners who are willing to serve as a bridge by linking ideas and people across divided networks.(link).

I aim to be a boundary spanner.