Board of Directors
Mel Chua – Secretary
Mel Chua (she/they) is a contagiously enthusiastic hacker, scholar, and perpetual motion machine. They are an auditory low-pass filter (deaf), multimodal polyglot (ASL/English), and enthusiastic forearm crutch and manual wheelchair user and dancer. Mel has a B.S. in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Olin College and a PhD in Engineering Education from Purdue University, where they studied learning in FLOSS communities. They have worked/consulted as community architects for Red Hat, the Fedora Project, and One Laptop Per Child, among others, and served on advisory boards for the Ada Initiative and Open@RIT.
Alex Handy
Alex Handy is the founder of the Museum of Art and Digital Entertainment. He spent 20 years as a technology journalist writing for outlets like Wired, the East Bay Express, the Atlanta Journal Constitution, and Make Magazine. He is now a serial non-profiteer, open copyright/source activist, and software historian.
Liz Henry – President
Liz Henry wears a lot of hats: maker and hackerspace enthusiast, technical program manager for Mozilla, poet and literary translator, program manager for the Disability Inclusion Fund x Tech, and member of Awesome Foundation Disability. You can find more of their writing, translation, and random blogging at https://bookmaniac.org, and for microblogging, @lizzard@mastodon.social.
Karen Nakamura – Treasurer
Professor Karen Nakamura is a cultural and visual anthropologist at the University of California Berkeley. Her first book was titled Deaf in Japan: Signing and the Politics of Identity (2006). Her next project resulted in two ethnographic films and a monograph titled, A Disability of the Soul: An Ethnography of Schizophrenia and Mental Illness in Contemporary Japan (2014). She is currently working on the intersections of transsexuality and disability politics in postwar Japan as well as a project on disability, technology, and access especially in the context of Artificial Intelligence (AI/ML).
Ian Smith
Advisory Board
Ian Smith works as a software engineer in San Francisco. His other projects include elevatoralerts.com, using public transit APIs to provide a better user experience for disabled riders. He studied Computer Science at MIT and Linguistics at Gallaudet University. He is Deaf and a wheelchair user.
Staff
GOAT intern Jack Kukulski is a student at Oakland Tech. He rows with Open United Rowing Crew and his interests include writing, cooking, public policy and law. As an intern for Open Assistive Tech, he is cataloguing and scanning physical archive materials, assessing their quality and contents, checking for their availability in libraries around the world, and adding relevant metadata.