OpenJS Foundation / OpenJS World 2021 - Keynotes

As a Newbie in a Pandemic, How your Unique Story can get you Hired.

Keynote: Breaking Transmission Chains with JavaScript - Cian Ó Maidín, President and Founder, Nearform

One of the greatest responses to COVID-19 has been technological. The brightest minds in the technology industry came together to create a new system to digitally track the virus at a scale, while respecting people’s privacy.

In 2020, NearForm developed what is now the most widely adopted COVID-19 Exposure Notification app in the world. Over five months, the team deployed and scaled their digital contact tracing solution for nine governments.

In this talk, Cian will share the challenges of building an app for all, the importance of getting it right from the start, while working to tight deadlines against an ever evolving pandemic. Cian will discuss how NearForm used an open source approach to public health to help break chains of transmission and save lives using JavaScript.

Keynote: Building Great Web Experiences with AMP and TensorFlow.js - Jeffrey Jose, Product Manager, AMP, Google & Sandeep Gupta, Product Manager, TensorFlow, Google

Prioritizing user-experience isn't just for end user delight but it can also make great business sense. In this keynote, we will discuss two open source solutions from Google -- AMP and TensorFlow.js -- that helps you build great web experiences to innovate and stand out on the internet. In this talk, you will learn more about the upcoming Page experience update on Google Search, where user-experience as measured by Core Web Vitals are becoming a ranking factor. You will also learn about how machine learning and AI is transforming web experiences and how TensorFlow.js makes it easy for you to develop and use machine learning.

Keynote: Game Design Thinking + Social Justice - Ashlyn Sparrow, Assistant Director, Weston Game Lab at University of Chicago

Games are the largest cultural and entertainment forms of our time. Pre-Covid, thousands of players would gather in parks to play Pokémon Go, or in large stadiums to see international teams play a game of League of Legends. These numbers have continued to grow with games like Animal Crossing: New Horizon, selling more than 26 million copies since March 2020, and over half a billion users playing Among Us in November 2020. Games have consumed much of our time, attention, and capital. Games are so popular, that they have begun to influence our everyday lives. The practice of “gamification”, using game mechanics in traditionally nongame activities, is all around us. Fitocracy, Fitbit, and MyFitnessPal, Nike+ have gamified exercise, Khan Academy gamified education and learning, while consumer rewards programs, have even gamified loyalty. The language of competition, leaderboards, and points have taken over mundane aspects of our lives. But, can we use games and game design thinking to shift our relationship to the world and design a more just society?

In this session, Sparrow will reorienting the affordances of games and invite participants to think critically about how our society has been designed, who it’s been designed for, and who it’s been designed by.

How a drag queen deconstructs the world around them to create sickeningly entertaining and educational coding tutorials.

Keynote: How Open Governance Influences Open Source & Inner Source at GoDaddy - Charlie Robbins, Senior Director Of Engineering, UX Platform & Jonathan Keslin, Director of Engineering, GoDaddy

Keynote: Making JavaScript on WebAssembly Fast - Lin Clark, Senior Principal Software Engineer, Fastly

JavaScript in the browser runs many times faster than it did two decades ago. And that happened because the browser vendors spent that time working on intensive performance optimizations in their JavaScript engines.

Because of this optimization work, JavaScript is now running in many places besides the browser. But there are still some environments where the JS engines can’t apply those optimizations in the right way to make things fast.

We’re working to solve this, beginning a whole new wave of JavaScript optimization work. We’re improving JavaScript performance for entirely different environments, where different rules apply. And this is possible because of WebAssembly. In this talk, I'll explain how this all works and what's coming next.

Keynote: Michael Jennings, Inclusion Strategy Partner, Product at Netflix

Keynote: Open Open Source and Making Great Places for Collaboration - Joe Sepi, Open Source Engineer & Advcoate, IBM; Michael Dawson, Node.js lead for IBM and Red Hat; Beth Griggs, Senior Software Engineer, Red Hat

The Node.js project is often seen as an example for Open Source projects and we’ve learned a lot over the last 5 years about how an “Open” Open source project works. The goal is to build places where both individuals and companies can come together to make impactful technical, organizational, and community contributions. Come learn about some of the core concepts and principles behind open communities and governance and how we are applying these to help grow the OpenJS Foundation. What’s more we want your help, find out how you can get involved!

Keynote: Restoring Balance in Technology: Lessons from the Indie Rock DIY Movement - Jenny Toomey, International Program Director, Technology and Society, Ford Foundation

Indie rocker and technology policy leader Jenny Toomey was an early proponent of the punk and indie DIY scene where musicians took more control of their content. Hear how waves of technology movements over time altered the distribution of power in society, and how citizens in open source communities can be activists for change.

Ford Foundation, Public Interest Technology: https://www.fordfoundation.org/campaigns/public-interest-tech/

New America, Public Interest Technology: https://www.newamerica.org/pit/

New America, PIT-UN: https://www.newamerica.org/pit-un/

Mozilla Fellows for Tech + Society: https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/what-we-fund/fellowships/fellows-for-tech-and-society/

Mozilla Fellowships: https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/what-we-fund/fellowships/

TechCongress: https://www.techcongress.io/

Ford Foundation, Critical Digital Infrastructure Research: https://www.fordfoundation.org/campaigns/critical-digital-infrastructure-research/

US Digital Response: https://www.usdigitalresponse.org/

Code for America Brigade Network: https://brigade.codeforamerica.org/

Code for America Community Fellowships: https://www.codeforamerica.org/programs/network/community-fellowship

The United States of Technologists: https://www.usoftech.org/

The Atlantic: “The Secret Startup That Saved the Worst Website in America” https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/07/the-secret-startup-saved-healthcare-gov-the-worst-website-in-america/397784/

Welcome Keynote: the Roaring Twenties for JavaScript - Robin Bender Ginn, Executive Director, OpenJS Foundation & Todd Moore, VP of Open Technology and Developer Advocacy, IBM