I am a researcher and educator focused on open source software, digital infrastructure, and critical approaches to new technologies. I received my PhD in English from The CUNY Graduate Center and believe the arts and humanities are critical to shaping our digital future.
Currently, I work as a product manager at Chainguard, a software supply chain security start up. Previously, I led the Developer Education team at DigitalOcean, where I helped create and maintain free educational materials on open source software development for millions of visitors a month.
Before joining industry, I served as the Digital Scholarship Librarian at UC San Diego, where I founded and directed KNIT, a non-commercial digital commons (with 2,400+ users) for UC San Diego, the San Diego Community College District, and San Diego State University. While at UC San Diego, I also co-organized the Cultured Data Symposium with Robert Twomey, co-organized and taught at the bi-annual Association of Research Libraries Digital Scholarship Institute, and served as the digital pedagogy consultant on two multimillion-dollar Mellon grant projects serving community college transfer students.
You can read about my keynote on Education and the Future of Software Freedom at LibrePlanet 2023 and find a link to the recording here.
My keynote on edtech and agency — “def tech_liberation(): teaching agency in a programmed world!” — at !!ConWest 2020 is available to watch here.
My dissertation Software of the Oppressed: Reprogramming the Invisible Discipline examines the potential role of higher education for fostering a more ethical approach towards digital technology and practice.
I explain how students and higher education can help save the web in this Design@Large talk at UC San Diego. In a similar spirit, I co-founded Ethical EdTech, a wiki and online learning community devoted to ethical and open approaches to academic technology with Nathan Schneider.
Social forms of knowledge making and education have long been critical to my work. As a graduate student, I envisioned and co-developed Social Paper, a platform for networking student writing and feedback, with The Commons In A Box team and support from the National Endowment for the Humanities. I received the 2018 Emerging Open Scholarship Award for #SocialDiss, a project in which I socialized dissertation drafts across multiple writing platforms for public review. I served as the 2019-2020 Wikipedian in Residence at the University of Victoria and gave two talks: “Open Access in the Age of Surveillance Technology” and “Who’s Afraid of Social Scholarship,” which I hope to post soon.
This site is dreadfully outdated, but you can find more information in my talks, publications, and projects pages.
Say hi at erin.glass@gmail.com.