Valerie Aurora is the Executive Director and co-founder of the Ada Initiative, a non-profit dedicated to promoting women in open tech/culture. In addition to leading the development and adoption of conference anti-harassment policies, Aurora created and teaches the Ada Initiative Ally Skills Workshop, which teaches men simple ways to support women in open tech/culture. Aurora, an experienced software engineer, was a leading file systems developer, researcher, and consultant for over a decade. Her contributions to open source software were recognized with the O’Reilly Open Source Award in 2013.