Karen Sandler
Karen is the executive director of the Software Freedom Conservancy, which is the nonprofit home of over 40 projects, including e.g. Git, Samba, QEMU, Selenium, and Inkscape.
She is known as a cyborg lawyer for her advocacy for free software as a life-or-death issue, particularly in relation to the software on medical devices.
Karen co-organizes Outreachy, the award-winning outreach program for women and for people of color who are underrepresented in tech. She is a pro bono counsel to the FSF and GNOME.
Accepted Talks:
That's a free software issue!
With the saturation of technology in our lives, free software has become more important than ever. You can find computers in the walls of your home and woven through the walls of your heart. With the advent of electronic voting, and the possibility of an all-online census, questions of software safety and user freedom are now touching parts of our lives we may not have thought about before. If you’ve ever wondered to yourself whether something is a free software issue, the answer is probably yes.
Join cyborg lawyer and Software Freedom Conservancy executive director Karen Sandler and free software activist and Free Software Foundation campaigns manager, Molly de Blanc to discuss the wide range of what is a free software issue and why it’s important to view our technology issues through that lens. Together, we’ll discuss how to talk about free software from different perspectives, drawing the connection between issues of software and user freedom to issues ranging from institutional racism to avocado toast. Bring your questions and the topics you want to connect to free software.