Pause for Democracy: Leaving Open Source Storage to Help Americans Vote in 2020

In 2020 I took a leave of absence to work on democracy and voting related efforts with VoteAmerica, a national get-out-the-vote organization with a focus on voter registration, voter turnout, and voter protection. This was a huge departure from my usual role at Red Hat leading Ceph, an open source distributed storage project, both in terms of the technical work and the underlying motivation and purpose. This talk will cover a mix of both what I did and why, as well as how the journey has changed the way I view my work and career goals going forward. I will talk about what drove me to take what seemed at the time like a drastic move, how I (eventually) found a place where I felt I could be effective, who I worked with and what we accomplished, and how that has changed my perspective now that I have returned to my “real” job.

When 2:00 pm to 3:00 pm on Thursday, April 29, 2021
Location Zoom Webinar.
Contact Name Gina Mantica
Phone 617-353-7942
Contact Email gmantica@bu.edu
Contact Organization Hariri Institute for Computing
Fees Free
Speakers Sage Weil, Ceph Project Lead; Sr Distinguished Engineer, Red Hat