Core Team
Director of Marketing
@xolotl
Nate is an evangelist who connects people, ideas, and technologies to make things better. He has worked across a wide variety of public and private institutions, focusing on community development, digital communications, meaningful education, open technologies, and sustainable growth. Nate studied, taught, and researched topics in film, television, and digital media at Brown University, and the history and literature of Latin America at Columbia University. Learn more about Nate on his LinkedIn profile, blog, or Twitter stream.
Customer Success Specialist
Eryn has worked in education since 2001, as a teacher, administrator and university lecturer. She transitioned to the world of education technology and brings experience in consulting, sales, support, and professional development at a variety of ed tech startups to her role as Customer Success Specialist. Eryn’s persistent focus on student engagement and academic progress has led her in her roles as a Colorado Educator Voice Fellow and a parent advocate on the State Accountability Committee for Parent Involvement. She has trained instructors and administrators around the country on best practices for technology implementation and its role in student achievement. She is working towards an Ed.D. in Instructional Leadership. You can find her on LinkedIn or Instagram.
Senior Developer
Jon was given an ORIC-1 home computer when he was seven and started writing loud and annoying programs on it. Later he studied maths and artificial intelligence before it was cool. After 15 years working as a bartender, support engineer, developer, playcare worker, scrum master, software architect and budding data scientist, he's back where he started: wondering "what else can this strange contraption do?"
Senior Site Reliability Engineer
Ian is a highly experienced software engineer with more than 2 decades of experience building open source environments designed to be used at scale. Specializing in the provision and automation of cloud environments, a genuine safe pair of hands when it comes to application delivery. An advocate of all things open source with a passion for Linux, cyber security and distributed computing.
Partnerships Lead, Education
@Ryan__Comeaux
Ryan is passionate about carefully leveraging technology to help people. He has worked in education over the last 8 years, both as a professor and in edtech. He holds his bachelor's and master's in philosophy where he specialized in mathematical logic and metaphysics. When not in the office you can usually find him mountain biking, backcountry skiing, or walking his tiny dog.
VP, Education
@dr_jdean
Jeremy was previously the Director of Education at Genius where he facilitated educational applications of their interactive archive of literary and historical texts. Jeremy is a scholar-educator with fifteen years of experience teaching at both the college and high school levels. He received a Ph.D. in English from the University of Texas at Austin where he worked as a Project Leader in the Digital Writing and Research Lab for four years developing units and lesson plans around a variety of digital tools. He also worked as a Program Coordinator at the University of Texas Humanities Institute, overseeing their education initiatives.
jeremydean@hypothes.is
Customer Support Engineer
Starting in the dusty, basement Athena clusters at MIT Libraries in the mid 1990s, Matt has spent over 20 years supporting, administrating, and integrating technology in higher education. He is an advocate for accessibility, open standards, cephalopods, and rogue taxidermy.
Director, Business Operations
@pfowler
Peg is an operations manager and business advisor to entrepreneurial technology companies. Peg’s operations experience in the software industry spans over three decades, and includes work in broadband, telecommunications, financial services, transportation, and healthcare industry verticals. Peg has been responsible for driving strategic and operational planning, corporate finance, marketing, facilities management, and corporate development. Prior to joining hypothes.is, Peg lead Operations and Project Management for Applied Broadband, Inc., the software and services firm that developed and marketed Pipeline™, cutting edge IPDR data collection and analytics software to the Tier-1 Broadband industry.
Digital Marketing Specialist
Before joining Hypothesis, Franny worked in marketing, web content, UX, project management, fundraising, and education. She earned her MA from Portland State University, where she taught expository writing. She has also taught at Friendly House, Bishop Morris Place, and the Attic Institute. Outside of work, her interests run far and wide and do not always match up with her skill set — but she loves a good challenge and possesses a lot of nerve. She enjoys traveling to out-of-the-way places in the Pacific Northwest, loves finish carpentry, tries to like gardening, and is a first-rate parallel parker.
Senior Frontend Developer
Eduardo is a frontend developer with an unusual background. It was during his PhD studying the structure of viruses when he started to code and fell immediately in love with it. For the past 9 years he has worked as a fullstack, and later as a frontend developer in a scientific institute. His ultimate passion is the web platform, which he considers the most accessible and ubiquitous platform ever created.
Lead Developer and Technical Project Lead
@lyzadanger
Lyza likes figuring out how to do things. In turn, she likes to teach others how to do new things, too. Writer for O’Reilly, A List Apart, Smashing Magazine, NET Magazine and co-founder of Cloud Four, Lyza advocates for elegant standards, education and compassion in pursuit of the best possible future Web. Building on over 20 years of web experience, Lyza’s current focuses include JavaScript-powered IoT, platform standards stewardship, Web APIs and progressive web applications. Lyza’s most recent book is JavaScript on Things: A Web Developer’s Introduction to Electronics (Manning). Learn more about Lyza on her website.
Customer Success Specialist
Becky has worked in education since 2006 with a focus on science education and social-emotional learning and development. After working nearly a decade in classrooms in both the United States and abroad, she made the transition to the edtech space. With a passion for helping others and promoting lifelong learning, she is excited to continue to impact education at Hypothesis. When not working, you can find her working out, baking paleo sweet treats, exploring a new locale, or in the outdoors — hiking or camping.
Lead Developer
@snhmnd
Sean is a future Portuguese Water Dog owner and a developer at Hypothesis. He tries to work on open source projects that have a positive impact on the world. He has previously worked as a web developer at Open Knowledge, iOS developer at Click-East, and Java lecturer at The University of Edinburgh. For his PhD he developed a desktop app to help children create stories.
Scholar in Residence
@remikalir
Remi Kalir is an Assistant Professor of Learning Design and Technology at the University of Colorado Denver School of Education and Human Development. He researches how social annotation facilitates collaborative, open, and equitable learning. During the 2020-21 academic year, Kalir is serving as Hypothesis' inaugural Scholar in Residence and is helping to lead a new research initiative related to social annotation and student learning. Kalir is lead author of the forthcoming Annotation, a volume in The MIT Press Essential Knowledge Series. He is also co-founder and facilitator of the Marginal Syllabus, a research-practice partnership that sparks and sustains conversation about educational equity through social annotation. Kalir earned his PhD in Curriculum and Instruction from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Senior Front End Developer
Kyle initially entered into the programing field from his passion for modding video games. He eventually transitioned into the dynamic landscape of front-end UI where he professionally worked at Riverbed, then moved into the biotech space of Novartis and then Genetech. When not developing, Kyle enjoys designing loudspeakers and gaming. He also maintains one of the most extensive subwoofer measurement databases at data-bass.com.
Lead Developer
@robknight_
Rob is a front-end developer at Hypothesis. He was previously part of the team that grew Mendeley from early betas to a service used by millions of researchers worldwide. In the process he developed an interest in efforts to make better tools for discussing and sharing science.
Product Manager
@lemayke
Katelyn works in a dual role of Customer Success Engineer and Product Manager at Hypothesis. She previously worked as an educational technologist at NYU, where she partnered with faculty on instructional design for courses in the humanities and foreign languages. She is also a web designer and developer with experience in technical writing. Katelyn is a board game enthusiast who co-hosts a monthly game night in NYC, and she would like to meet your dog. Learn more about Katelyn on her website.
Director, Integrations
@judell
Jon Udell is an author, information architect, software developer, and new media innovator. His 1999 book, Practical Internet Groupware, helped lay the foundation for what we now call social software. Udell was formerly a software developer at Lotus, BYTE Magazine's executive editor and Web maven, and an independent consultant. A hands-on thinker, Udell's analysis of industry trends has always been informed by his own ongoing experiments with software, information architecture, and new media. From 2002 to 2006 he was InfoWorld's lead analyst, author of the weekly Strategic Developer column, and blogger-in-chief. During his InfoWorld tenure he also pioneered the medium now known as screencasting and produced an audio show, Interviews with Innovators. From 2007 to 2014 Udell worked for Microsoft as a writer, interviewer, speaker, and experimental software developer. He created the Elm City calendar network, a service based on open standards that runs in the Windows Azure cloud, and worked on Thali, a P2P technology that enables people to control their online identities and share their data securely. In 2015 he joined Hypothesis to help build an open annotation layer for the web.
Director of Engineering
@ajpeddakotla
Arti Walker-Peddakotla is a former product manager, scientist, and US Army veteran, and currently serves as a part-time local elected official. After serving in the US Army, and getting her M.S. in Microbiology, Arti leveraged her experience solving complex scientific problems to pursue a career in technology, where she has worked as a product manager in both VC backed and privately held startups, working to guide product strategy and development.
Founder/CEO
@dwhly
Dan is a coder and entrepreneur that created the first online travel reservation company on the web (ITN/GetThere) in 1995. He wrote much of the software, launched the business and guided the long term technical and product vision. GetThere went public in 1999 and was sold to Sabre in 2000 with nearly 600 employees while processing approximately 50% of travel transacted online. Dan currently serves as a director of Sauce Labs, the leading open source functional testing company and Getaround, a peer-to-peer car sharing company. He is a Shuttleworth Fellow.
Interested in joining our team? Check out our open positions.
Advisors and Collaborators
Stackexchange
@codinghorror
Jeff co-founded Stackexchange, a question-and-answer network that is collaboratively built and maintained by users, and is one of the most well-known and highly trafficked sites on the Internet. The site utilizes an earnable privileges reputation system, with the ultimate goal of the site being to cull good answers “to every imaginable programming question.†Jeff began his professional efforts in technology as a software developer, working various implementations of Microsoft's BASIC in the 1980’s. Fascinated by the human side of software development, Jeff blogs about just that and more on his popular blog Coding Horror.
UC San Diego / PLoS
Philip is the co-founder and Editor-in-Chief of the open access journal PLoS Computational Biology. Philip has recently launched the Beyond the PDF initiative to develop a mandate, open source code and a set of deliverables to be used by scholars to accelerate data and knowledge sharing and discovery. He is a Past President of the International Society for Computational Biology, and an elected fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS).
UC Santa Barbara
Jack is one of the foremost experts on the role of stance in language, and how it flows and changes even within the same conversations. Stance is the position we take relative to external things, and particularly how we align ourselves with respect to others in doing so. Stance is central to language, and is one of the most important components of the approach we will take with Hypothes.is.
MLA / MediaCommons
Kathleen Fitzpatrick is Director of Scholarly Communication at the Modern Language Association, and is on leave from a position as Professor of Media Studies at Pomona College, in Claremont, California. She is the author of Planned Obsolescence: Publishing, Technology, and the Future of the Academy, and she is co-founder of the digital scholarly network MediaCommons, an open platform for the scholarly peer-review of books. She is one of the most outspoken and respected voices imagining the reinvention of peer-review in the modern, digital and connected age.
Sauce Labs / Bittorrent
@sahazel
Steve is a long-time contributor to and architect of leading peer-to-peer systems. He is the former Director of Engineering for Bittorrent, and a previous engineer at Audiogalaxy and a contributor to Freenet. Now at Sauce Labs, he leads their effort to bring Selenium, the dominant open-source testing framework, to the cloud.
Singularity U
@salimismail
Salim has operated seven early stage companies and is a frequent speaker on internet technologies, private equity and entrepreneurship. Salim was the founding Executive Director of Singularity Univ., which is training a new cadre of leaders to manage exponentially growing technologies. Prior to that, Salim was a Vice President at Yahoo and the Head of Brickhouse, Yahoo's internal ideas factory.
Internet Archive
Brewster studied AI at MIT with Marvin Minsky and Danny Hillis, and later joined Hillis at Thinking Machines where Brewster developed WAIS (sold to AOL). He later founded the early innovator of page rank, Alexa (sold to Amazon), and simultaneously created the Internet Archive, the non-profit archive of the version history of all web pages (and much more). More recently he founded the Open Content Alliance to begin digitizing, archiving and providing open access to the worlds texts.
Stanford
Andrea is Stanford Univ.'s Director of the Program in Writing and Rhetoric PWR. During her remarkable career, she has revolutionized the way that college students learn how to write, research, and present arguments. Andrea has served as Chair of the Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC), as Chair of the Modern Language Association Division on Writing, and as a member of the MLA Executive Council. Andrea is also the force behind the large-scale Stanford Study of Writing. The longitudinal study that investigated how todays students write by analyzing 14,672 writing samples, including everything from in-class assignments, formal essays, and journal entries to emails, blog posts, and chat sessions.
@hueypriest
Erik is the General Manager of Reddit, the self-proclaimed “front page of the Internetâ€. Erik took over the reins of Reddit in 2008 from the original founders and has been responsible for managing it through it’s extraordinary growth to one of the largest and most influential web properties in the world, with over 2 billion page views a month as of December 2011. Under Martin's lead, Reddit was instrumental in organizing opposition to proposed SOPA and PIPA antipiracy laws, even going dark in protest along with other sites on Jan. 18.
Calyx Institute
Nicholas Merrill is the founder of Calyx Internet Access and the Calyx Institute. He was the first person to file a constitutional challenge against the National Security Letters statute in the USA PATRIOT Act. After receiving a National Security Letter NSL from the FBI, he sued the FBI and Department of Justice and became the plaintiff in the historic lawsuit Doe v. Ashcroft, which persisted through four US Attorney Generals and resulted in a precedent setting victory. As a result of the original NSL, Merrill was gagged from speaking publicly for over six years.
Hackers and Founders
@hackersfounders
Jonathan is the founder of Hackers and Founders, an organization now with over 15,000 members in cities all around the world that brings together coders, entrepreneurs and innovators. Jonathan has an inspiring vision for how HF can open-source, disrupt and invert the process of forming teams, founding companies, finding capital and learning about everything from coding to business operations. Its inspiring, and it will most definitely change everything about the startup process as we know it.
Slashdot
@nateoostendorp
Nate was the technical co-founder of Slashdot, which has become a canonical example of how to do online reputation well. Nate is now the founder of Ingenuitas which intends to open-source the manufacturing process, by building open tools for collaboration around computer vision, data acquisition and robotics.
Open Knowledge Fdn.
@rufuspollock
Dr. Rufus Pollock is co-Founder and Director of the Open Knowledge Foundation, makers of the open source AnnotateIt bookmarklet. Rufus is also a Shuttleworth Foundation Fellow, and an Associate of the Centre for Intellectual Property and Information Law at the Univ. of Cambridge. He has worked extensively as a scholar and developer on the social, legal and technological issues related to the creation and sharing of knowledge.
Nonprofits 101
@dheyman
Darian is a widely respected voice in the non-profit and social enterprise world and a highly intuitive thinker around the messaging and framing of issues. He recently edited Nonprofit Management 101: A Field Guide for Social Sector Professionals, which included contributions from 37 recognized nonprofit leaders.
Pouch
@mikeal
Mikeal is a leading contributor to the open source Node.js project. He currently is involved in a stealth project called Pouch. Previously he was the first employee of CouchOne, a principal of Mitch Kapors Open Source Applications Foundation, and a developer at Mozilla.
Public Knowledge
Gigi is the co-founder and president of Public Knowledge, a non-profit dedicated to preserving the public’s access to knowledge, promoting creativity through balanced copyright, and upholding and protecting the rights of consumers to use innovative technology lawfully. As PK’s chief strategist, fundraiser and public face, she is frequently quoted in the New York Times, Washington Post and Wall Street Journal, as well as in trade and local press and has appeared on numerous television and radio programs, including the Today Show, The McNeil-Lehrer Report, C-SPAN’s Washington Journal and National Public Radio’s All Things Considered and Morning Edition. In May 2006, the Electronic Frontier Foundation gave Gigi its Internet “Pioneer†Award.
Board of Directors
Secretary, Emeritus (1947–2018)
@JPBarlow
John Perry was a retired Wyoming cattle rancher and former lyricist for the Grateful Dead. In 1990 he and Mitch Kapor founded the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), an organization that fights for the rights of citizens in the digital world. He served as its Vice Chairman. Starting in 1998, he was a fellow at Harvard Law School's Berkman Center for Internet and Society. His widely distributed manifesto, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, can be found on more than 20,000 web sites. Read more about John Perry's contributions to Hypothesis.
Treasurer
@gerrypercy
Gerry comes from a creative background, having attended UC Santa Cruz for a degree in Music, and studied improvisation at the Creative Music Studio in New York. In 1980 he co-founded the successful juice company Odwalla, which went public and was subsequently purchased by Coca Cola. Gerry has since retired from the business and returned to his creative roots. He is currently Executive Producer for a documentary feature now in development.
Chairman
@dwhly
Dan is a coder and entrepreneur that created the first online travel reservation company on the web (ITN/GetThere) in 1995. He wrote much of the software, launched the business and guided the long term technical and product vision. GetThere went public in 1999 and was sold to Sabre in 2000 with nearly 600 employees while processing approximately 50% of travel transacted online. Dan currently serves as a director of Sauce Labs, the leading open source functional testing company and Getaround, a peer-to-peer car sharing company. He is a Shuttleworth Fellow.