Upstream speaker spotlight: Julia Ferraioli, co-founder of Open Source Voices

Upstream is a week away—June 7!—and wow, our schedule is shaping up brilliantly. Over the next week we’ll share more details about the amazing speaker lineup. RSVP now!

This is the second year in a row that Julia Ferraioli is speaking at Upstream, and we are so happy that she agreed to join us again.

A little about Julia: she is an open source engineer, scientist, and analyst with over a decade of experience in launching, managing, and optimizing open source projects at scale at companies such as Google, Twitter, and Cisco.

Most recently, she is the co-founder of Open Source Stories, contributor to LeadDev, and sought-after conference speaker. Her background includes research in machine learning, robotics, HCI, and accessibility. Julia finds energy in developing creative demos, creating beautiful documents, and rainbow sprinkles. She’s also a fierce supporter of LaTeX, the Oxford comma, and small pull requests. (We love the Oxford comma over here on the Tidelift events team, too.)

Julia will be the closing keynote speaker at Upstream this year; her talk, titled How we treat others is a supply chain issue, fits in beautifully with the theme of this year’s event: The accidental supply chain. She will discuss how the sustainability and supply chain conversations often leave out a critical factor in the equation: the people and social systems without which there would be no open source.

Julia has written about the people and social systems of open source in the past, specifically in this blog post: Open source and social systems; and spoke about this last year at Upstream in her talk: A social model of open source: all the dynamics that are fit to print. We are excited to hear her more directly relate this topic to the open source supply chain, because sometimes people forget about the actual, real people who are creating and maintaining the code.

We can’t think of a better person to help close a day full of the discussion on the accidental supply chain at Upstream on June 7, 2023. RSVP so you don’t miss it!