Mary Gardiner, Co-founder & Director of Operations and Research at the Ada Initiative, to keynote Wikimania 2012

WASHINGTON, D.C., March 23, 2011:  Wikimedia, District of Columbia (Wikimedia DC) is pleased to announce Mary Gardiner as the keynote speaker for Wikimania 2012, the international Wikimedia conference. Mary will be speaking at the opening session of the conference on Thursday, July 12, 2012.

“We’re very excited to have Mary Gardiner open the conference this year,” says James Hare, coordinator of Wikimania 2012. “Mary has been a strong advocate for open source and has worked extensively to elevate the role of women and increase their participation in open source and open culture. Her work fits perfectly within our vision of empowering individuals around the world through free and open access to the sum of human knowledge. We look forward to welcoming her to Washington, DC.”

MARY GARDINER is co-founder and Director of Operations and Research at the Ada Initiative and founder of the first and largest women in open source organization in Australia, AussieChix, which she subsequently expanded into Oceania as Oceania Women of Open Technology. Mary has served as a council member for Linux Australia, the largest non-profit funder of open source projects in Australia and as program chair for linux.conf.au, the largest Linux conference in the southern hemisphere.

THE ADA INITIATIVE is a non-profit organization dedicated to increasing participation of women in open technology and culture, which includes open source software, Wikipedia and other open data, and open social media. Co-founders Mary Gardiner and Valerie Aurora each have ten years of experience in open source software, open culture communities, and women in computing activism. The Ada Initiative is named for Countess Ada Lovelace, widely acknowledged as the world’s first computer programmer. She is also the world’s first open source programmer. For more information, visit adainitiative.org

WIKIMANIA has been, since 2005, the premier annual international gathering of experts, academics, and enthusiasts whose vision is to empower people around the world through free access to global knowledge. It has been previously held in Frankfurt, Germany; Boston, Mass.; Taipei, Taiwan; Alexandria, Egypt; Buenos Aires, Argentina; Gdańsk, Poland; and Haifa, Israel. Additional information on the conference can be found at www.wikimania2012.org

WIKIMEDIA DC is the official regional chapter of the Wikimedia Foundation in the District, Maryland, Virginia, West Virginia, and Delaware. A non-profit educational organization, Wikimedia DC is dedicated to the advancement of general knowledge and the collection, development, and dissemination of educational content under a free license or in the public domain.

Contact: Nicholas Michael Bashour, Vice-President

Phone: (313) 377-4589, E-Mail: Press@wikidc.org

Contact for Ada Initiative: press@adainitiative.org