Speaker - Valerie Young

Valerie Young works at Igalia, a worker-owned co-op, focusing on web standards related to accessibility. Her work there includes co-chairing the ARIA working group of the W3C and being an editor of the CORE-AAM specification. In the course of her career, she has worked up and down the web stack -- from building web apps to standards and standards testing in browsers, and more recently on the browsers themselves. From the moment she learned about the free software from fellow nerds in college, she has been an advocate for it. Outside of work, she has spent her whole adult life participating in non-hierarchical co-operative structures, from housing co-ops, to political projects, to academic conferences and community farms. Valerie is endless curious about ways to organize work that lead to empowerment, self actualization and joyful collaboration for individuals involved -- she has seen many successes and many failures and would love to hear from you about yours!