In this episode we are joined by Dr. Robert Friedman, the Executive Director of the Permanent Legacy Foundation. Together, we discuss what makes the Permanent Legacy Foundation a unique tech non-profit for social good and how we plan for the future, especially in such uncertain times. 

Guest Name: Dr. Robert Friedman
Email: [email protected]
Pronouns: he/him
Bio: Dr. Robert Friedman has over a decade of experience in the non-profit sector focused on developing an inclusive and ethical digital community. As the Executive Director of the Permanent Legacy Foundation, Dr. Friedman is building a nonprofit, historical trust to guarantee secure digital preservation for all people. Previously, he lead the Mozilla Foundation Internet Health agenda in Texas, working with Austin community leaders to advance digital inclusion, internet decentralization, open innovation, online privacy and security, and web literacy. As a community organizer and educator in Chicago, Dr. Friedman worked with museums, cultural institutions, community-based organizations, and schools to advance equitable access to digital learning opportunities for young people. His nonprofit career began at the Adler Planetarium, where he established a STEM program for young adults at a world renowned museum. Dr. Friedman holds a Ph.D. in Astrophysics from the University of Chicago. He was a 2019 Leadership Austin Essential alum and the previous Community Tech Network board vice chair. Together, he and his wife Zarah make their home in the Lost Pines of Central Texas with their two young children, dogs and chickens.

Join host Amanda Meeks in conversation with Rachael Woody, the founder and director of Relicura™ LLC, to learn about the importance of adding metadata to your files. Metadata provides critical context to the items in your collections, context that Rachael works to create when providing services to archives, museums, and cultural heritage organizations. With metadata, you can increase the searchability and accessibility of your archives.

Guest Name: Rachael Cristine Woody
Email: [email protected]
Pronouns: She/her
Bio: Rachael is the founder and director of Relicura™ LLC, a firm that provides services to archives, museums, and cultural heritage organizations. She specializes in collections management systems, digitization technology, and digital usership. Previously Woody was at the Smithsonian Institution and the Oregon Wine History Archive at Linfield University, where she successfully launched multiple digital collections that included advanced digitization technology, collaborative portals, and the migration of collection information into collections management systems. She received her Master of Science in Library and Information Science with a concentration in Archives Management from Simmons University, and has more than 15 years of experience in the museum and archives field.

Links:

• https://www.relicura.com/
• "Enhancing Family Photos with Metadata"
• Metadata on Permanent

In this episode we are joined by Dr. Christine Sleeter, who shares her expertise on critical family history, which is a framework she developed to help people reckon with the messier and complex parts of history, particularly within their own family lineages. October is Family History Month, which is the perfect time to explore questions you have related to your ancestors’ experiences and legacies.

Guest Name: Christine Sleeter
Email: [email protected]
Pronouns: she/her
Bio: Christine E. Sleeter, PhD. is Professor Emerita in the College of Education at California State University Monterey Bay, where she was a founding faculty member. She has served as a visiting professor at several universities, including the University of Maine, University of Colorado Boulder, Victoria University of Wellington in New Zealand, and Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia in Spain. She is past President of the National Association for Multicultural Education, and past Vice President of the American Educational Research Association. Her research focuses on anti-racist multicultural education, ethnic studies, and teacher education. She has published over 170 articles and 21 books, most recently Critical Race Theory and its Critics (with F. A. López, Teachers College Press, 2023). She has also published three novels, the most recent being Family History in Black and White. She is a Fellow of the American Educational Research Association and of the National Education Policy Center, and a member of the National Academy of Education. Awards for her work include the American Educational Research Association Social Justice in Education Award, the Chapman University Paulo Freire Education Project Social Justice Award, and the Willamette University Distinguished Alumni Citation for Professional Achievement.

Links:

• Critical Family History
• How to Use Dr. Sleeter's Blog
• Critical Family History Context Questions Framework
• Coming to the Table Organization 

Join host Amanda Meeks in conversation with Cathi Nelson, of the Photo Managers, to learn about the ABCs of photo organizing, when it’s okay to break the rules of photo organizing, and what one can do to prepare their photos for natural disasters. Don’t forget that September is Save Your Photos Month, an international effort to provide free education around photo preservation.

Guest: Cathi Nelson
Email: [email protected]
Pronouns: she/her
Bio: Cathi Nelson is a CEO, author, and speaker, but most importantly, she's passionate about helping people organize their photos, so they can share their photo legacy. In 2009 she founded The Photo Managers, the leading organization serving entrepreneurs through training, a professional certification program, best practices, and a code of ethics that sets high standards for the rapidly growing photo management industry.  She's been featured in the New York Times, The Atlantic, Real Simple Magazine, and The Wall Street Journal about organizing and preserving your family heritage's legacy through photos.

Links:
Save Your Photos Month
ABCs of Photo Organizing
The Photo Managers

In this episode we are joined by the Flickr Foundation Executive Director, George Oates, and interdisciplinary scholar and curator, Temi Odumosu, who share about their research and thinking behind the 100 year plan, an effort to design for long term sustainability. We explore this idea from the perspective of cultural heritage organizations concerned with digital collections and preservation.

Guest Name: George Oates
Email: [email protected]
Pronouns: She/her
Bio: George Oates is a designer and maker. She's also the Executive Director of the new Flickr Foundation. Our mission is to keep the billions of images on Flickr visible for 100 years.

Guest Name: Temi Odumosu
Email: [email protected]
Pronouns: She/her
Bio: Temi Odumosu is an interdisciplinary scholar and curator at the University of Washington Information School, with a teaching focus on critical and creative approaches to understanding information technology’s role within society, particularly how unfinished colonial histories and their inequalities haunt data, uses of information and technology design. Her research and curatorial work are engaged with the visual and affective politics of slavery and colonialism, racial coding in popular culture, postmemorial art and performance, image ethics and cultural heritage digitization. Overall, she is focused on the ways art can mediate social transformation and healing. Dr. Odumosu is author of the book Africans in English Caricature 1769-1819: Black Jokes White Humour (2017).

Links:
www.Flickr.org   
www.temiodumosu.com
“The Crying Child On Colonial Archives, Digitization, and Ethics of Care in the Cultural Commons”
“Thick Description: On the possibilities for vibrant anti-colonial record-keeping”

Join host Amanda Meeks and Courtney Plaster in a conversation about inheritance. Courtney shares practical tips on how to start downsizing, organizing, and preserving digital or print collections, without the overwhelm, for yourself or others. She also walks us through the more sentimental aspects of both leaving behind and inheriting special memories and heirlooms.

Guest Name: Courtney Plaster

Email: [email protected]

Pronouns: she/her

Bio: With a 20 year background in client supporting roles, Courtney Plaster brings a unique combination of academic training in art and theater production to the technology space. As a Certified Professional Photo Organizer and as an Advisory Board member for The Photo Managers, Courtney is a project manager at heart with a comprehensive approach to problem solving. Drawing from her travels abroad, vast professional network, and supplemental training, she has developed a detailed and intimate hands-on approach to each project lending a personal touch not found anywhere else in the industry. Courtney has a Bachelor of Arts in Studio Art from The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She lives in Carrboro, NC, with her son and two cats.

Links:
ABCs of Photo Organizing

Save Your Photos Month

Archival Methods

Stabilo Pencils

Backblaze Cloud Backup

Join host Amanda Meeks and Stewart Traiman as they explore what it means to dive into family history as a member of the LGBTQ community, as well as the importance of uncovering and preserving your own LGBTQ ancestors’ life stories that would otherwise be erased or forgotten.
 
Guest: Stewart Traiman
Email: [email protected]
Pronouns: He/Him
Bio: Stewart Traiman is a professional genealogist, a graduate of ProGen #49, a public speaker, and blogger. He began building his genealogy skills as a teenager by interviewing his great-grandmother, grandmother, and mother about their Nicaraguan roots. He has maintained the oral history of his family for decades. When he married, he took on the new adventure of researching his husband’s Ukrainian and Polish Jewish immigrant ancestors. He’s researched both of his children’s biological origins back to Colonial America and Western Europe. He’s also accomplished client research with Irish, Swedish, German, and other records covering the 17th to 21st centuries.

Stewart has been a volunteer with the California Genealogical Society since 2014, serving six years on the Board of Directors, with five years as recording secretary. He published the monthly CGS eNews for eight years. He continues to volunteer with CGS on the Digital Archive Committee.

For more information see SixGen.org.

Join host Amanda Meeks in conversation with Heather Shelton, the Peale’s digital curator, registrar, and communications specialist, on all things that make a “community museum” and how the Peale supports Baltimore’s storytellers.

Guest Name: Heather Shelton

Email: [email protected]

Pronouns: she/her

Bio: Heather Shelton is the Peale’s digital curator, registrar, and communications specialist, focusing on the Peale’s online presence and its growing collection of Baltimore stories. She has undergraduate degrees in Art History and English Literature from the University of Virginia and an M.A. in Art History from Virginia Commonwealth University. With more than 25 years of museum and archives experience, Heather has held positions in virtually every department–from curation and collections care to public relations and education. From 2004-2006, she worked exclusively in print, writing and editing exhibition scripts and educational materials at the Smithsonian, but in 2006, with the advent of Facebook and social media, she transitioned almost entirely to the web, becoming the leading digital voice of the Smithsonian Institution Traveling Exhibition Service. Today, Heather works with the Peale and other innovative cultural organizations, like the Smithsonian’s Museum on Main Street program, to provide structure and meaning to a sea of digital content.

Links: https://www.thepeale.org/

Join host Amanda Meeks in a conversation with Heather Meeker, founder of the Free Open Source Stories Digital Archive (FOSSDA), and learn about how and why the project was started. Plus, get a sneak peek into some of the amazing interviews Heather has conducted so far, where she captures the personal stories from the open source movement’s pioneers.

Guest name: Heather Meeker

Email: [email protected]

Pronouns: she/her

Bio: Heather Meeker is the founder of the FOSSDA project. She is a General Partner at OSS Capital, www.oss.capital, an early stage venture capital fund specializing in commercial open source development. She is also a partner at Tech Law Partners, LLP, www.techlawpartners.com, a law firm focused on technology transactions.

Meeker is an internationally-known specialist in open source software licensing.  She is the primary drafter of many widely-used licenses, including Elastic 2.0, and served on the core drafting team for Mozilla Public License 2.0 and the PolyForm licenses. Her book Open Source for Business, now in its third edition, is a definitive handbook for lawyers, engineers, and businesspersons on open source licensing in business.  In 2019, Meeker was named by Business Insider as one of the ten people transforming the way the technology industry does business, along with the CEOs of Salesforce, Stripe, and Microsoft.  She was the only lawyer on this list. Heather is a former professional musician and enjoys dancing, gaming and travel.

Links: 

• https://fossda.aviaryplatform.com/collections/1633/collection_resources/80243
  
  
• https://fossda.aviaryplatform.com/aboutus
  
  

Join host Amanda Meeks in conversation with Miriam Pytell, an interaction and communication designer, in discussing open access platforms and content creators’ digital legacies. They also get into some of the challenges of thanatosensitive design in the digital realm, working at a funeral home as a student, and advice for creatives who are just starting to think about their digital legacies.

Contact Information: [email protected]

Guest Name: Miriam Pyttel

Email: [email protected]

Pronouns: she/they

Bio: Miriam Pyttel is an interaction and communication designer from Germany currently based in Malmö, Sweden. With an interest in thanatosensitive design, Miriam has explored the topic of digital legacy in different contexts from a qualitative design perspective.
Links: https://www.miriampyttel.com/