I asked a friend about local-to-PDX technology people who might be great 
speakers. He recommended two people: Selena Deckelman and Deborah 
Bryant. Both live in Portland. I'll add these to the wiki later today.

Selena Deckelmann is a major contributor to PostgreSQL and a data 
architect at Mozilla. She's one of The Ada Initiative advisors.She's a 
very experienced speaker 
(http://www.whitecells.org/daily/speaking/index/) and looks like an 
interesting speaker (Ignite Portland talk on election rigging in 
Nigeria) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cZ7qm6yglfE
It looks like she's on an email sabbatical 
(http://www.chesnok.com/daily/2014/05/26/personal-email-sabbatical-july-10-october-15-2014/) 
but it shouldn't be too hard to figure out how to get in touch with her. 
According to the internet, she also raises chickens.

Deborah Bryant's is currently Red Hat's Senior Director Open Source and 
Standards. Her experience is broad and deep: 
https://www.linkedin.com/in/opengovernment Her bio is impressive: 
http://debbryant.com Her work with open source adoption in government 
would make her qualified to give us advice on how to push things within 
the institutions that we work in.

For me, the most successful keynotes are people from outside the library 
community who are unexpected, thoughtful, inspiring and skilled 
presenters. In the past I've programmed Jer Thorpe (who at that time was 
the Data Artist in Residence at the NYT), Andrea Reimer (a local 
politician who was behind the open data push at the City of Vancouver), 
Zak Greant (open source technologist) and Marian Bantjes (designer and 
creative typographer). I've also helped organize conferences where we 
invited authors to keynote: Arundathi Roy, Ivan Coyote and John 
Valliant. While I've been resistant to book authors because I balk at 
"libraries are about books! librarians love books!" these were very 
successful because someone from the organizing team briefed each author 
that we wanted them to talk about their ideas and not to give us a "I 
remember when i was a kid and loved going to the library" feel good, 
surface deep, nostalgia-laced talk. We asked all of these people to talk 
about what they know, and to assume that we'll make the links to 
libraries or figure out what we can learn from the expertise that they 
share.

Here's two more half-baked Portland ideas:

Someone from Bitch Media who run Bitch Magazine: Feminist Response to 
Pop Culture that started in 1996. Their content has always been 
thoughtful and thought provoking. With #libs4ada raising over $16k, 
there's an obvious interest in making our community more inclusive. If 
we wanted to develop a more complex and nuanced understanding of 
feminisms, someone from Bitch Media might be a good fit: 
http://bitchmagazine.org/staff

Someone from the Rebuilding Centre, a non-profit that sells recycled 
doors, windows, and other building supplies. Their main building is 
beautiful and wacky looking: http://bit.ly/1uM4g5M If there's someone 
there who is a dynamic speaker it might be interesting to hear their 
thoughts on reuse and building new models for doing stuff.

I don't know anyone at either of these organizations--does anyone here?

Tara

On 2014-09-19, 7:51 AM, Mark A. Matienzo wrote:
> This thread motivated me to add a few folks, but of note are the following
> people from the Pacific Northwest:
>
> - Amelia Abreu, a UX practitioner based in Portland and a PhD candidate at
> the University of Washington iSchool. Amelia's writing focuses on the
> intersection of user experience, data collection, and gender.
> - Jennifer O'Neal, Corrigan Solari University Historian and Archivist at
> the University of Oregon Special Collections and Archives, who has research
> interests in international indigenous activism, cultural heritage,
> traditional knowledge, intellectual property rights, digital humanities,
> and indigenous use of new media and technology.
> - Kim Christen Withey, Associate Professor and Associate Director of the
> Digital Technology and Culture program in the Department of English and
> Director of Digital Projects at the Plateau Center, Native American
> Programs at Washington State University in Pullman, Washington. Kim is the
> director of the Mukurtu CMS project <http://mukurtu.org/>, an open source,
> freely available, international standards-based tool driven by the specific
> concerns and content management needs of Indigenous communities.
>
> Mark
>
> On Thu, Sep 18, 2014 at 9:02 PM, Roy Tennant <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>
>> What Tara said, Certainly one of the benefits of moving this conference
>> around geographically must surely be the opportunity to pull on local
>> talent. Thanks for pointing that out!
>> Roy
>>
>> On Thu, Sep 18, 2014 at 1:48 PM, Tara Robertson <[log in to unmask]>
>> wrote:
>>
>>> Hi,
>>>
>>> The current list of proposed invited speakers has some great ideas on it:
>>> http://wiki.code4lib.org/2015_Invited_Speakers_Nominations
>>>
>>> I'm sure there's some kickass speakers in Portland who might be willing
>> to
>>> speak. After all OSCON is in Portland, Portland hosted Typecon 2013,
>> World
>>> Domination Summit (ugh), and home to so many people doing traditional
>>> things in new ways, disrupting existing business models, creative
>> thinkers
>>> and fine purveyors of bespoke just about everything. Looking for local
>>> talent means saving on travel and accommodation costs too, or means being
>>> able to pay a higher speaker fee.
>>>
>>> I wonder if there are locals who have ideas of people they think we would
>>> benefit from learning from.
>>>
>>> Cheers,
>>> Tara
>>>