Karen Sandler

Karen M. Sandler is the executive director of the Software Freedom Conservancy, which is the nonprofit home of many projects, including Git, Samba, QEMU, Selenium and Inkscape (to name a few). 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. Prior to joining Conservancy, she was the executive director of the GNOME Foundation. Before that, she was the general counsel of the Software Freedom Law Center. Karen co-organizes Outreachy, the award-winning outreach program with the goal of improving diversity to address under-representation, systemic bias, or discrimination in tech . Karen is an adjunct Lecturer-In-Law at Columbia Law School. She is the recipient of the Free Software Foundation's 2017 Award for the Advancement of Free Software as well as an O'Reilly Open Source Award.

Accepted Talks:

Introducing the Principles of Digital Autonomy

We have rights with respect to our technology. These rights are imperative to ensuring our digital autonomy: our right to be in control of our own destinies. As the border between the physical and the digital breaks down, it is increasingly becoming necessary to re-examine what we consider to be the rights that protect our digital autonomy, and the way those abstract ideas apply to existing (and theoretical) technology.

We will first discuss the principles of digital autonomy, clarifying what your rights are and the principles that define them. They will then analyze popular technologies, namely Debian!