Our Team

Board of Directors

Liz Henry – President

Liz Henry, as well as founding Grassroots Open Assistive Tech, is a maker and hackerspace enthusiast, technical program & release manager for Mozilla, program manager for the Disability Inclusion Fund x Tech, advisor to the San Francisco Disability Cultural Center, and member of Awesome Foundation Disability. You can find more about their writing, poetry, translation, zines, and random blogging at https://bookmaniac.org, and for microblogging, @lizzard@mastodon.social.

Karen Nakamura – Treasurer

Professor Karen Nakamura is a cultural and visual anthropologist at the University of California Berkeley. Her first book was titled Deaf in Japan: Signing and the Politics of Identity (2006). Her next project resulted in two ethnographic films and a monograph titled, A Disability of the Soul: An Ethnography of Schizophrenia and Mental Illness in Contemporary Japan (2014). She is currently working on the intersections of transsexuality and disability politics in postwar Japan as well as a project on disability, technology, and access especially in the context of Artificial Intelligence (AI/ML). 

Alex Handy

Alex Handy is the founder of the Museum of Art and Digital Entertainment. He spent 20 years as a technology journalist writing for outlets like Wired, the East Bay Express, the Atlanta Journal Constitution, and Make Magazine. He is now a serial non-profiteer, open copyright/source activist, and software historian.

Ian Smith

Ian Smith works as a software engineer in San Francisco. Their other projects include elevatoralerts.com, using public transit APIs to provide a better user experience for disabled riders. Ian studied Computer Science at MIT and Linguistics at Gallaudet University. They are Deaf and a wheelchair user.

Advisory Board

Olga Prilepova – Secretary

Olga is an engineer, a polyglot, a crafting enthusiast, avid LARPer and puzzle solver. They are working towards a Master’s in Assistive Technology Studies and Human Services from CSUN. Olga has been working in the field of Digital Accessibility since 2018 as a Technical Program Manager and later as a Software Engineer.

Veronica Sutter

Veronica adds her professional expertise in librarianship to help GOAT in developing useful metadata and cataloging our archival material — along with her deep experience as a maker and hacker.

Megan Prelinger

Megan Prelingeris a cultural historian, writer, and public speaker; as co-founder and information designer of the Prelinger Library, an independent, experimental research library that is a creative workshop as well as a research space, she is working with GOAT to house the physical archives of our DIY assistive tech design material.

Vincent Lopez

Vincent Lopez grew up in South San Francisco in a blue collar lower middle-class family. He’s a liberal person who always roots for the underdog and believes that everyone deserves a fair chance at the American Dream.

Vincent currently is a mobility device technician for an Independent Living Center in San Francisco, with over 10 years of experience in the field. He has presented at various conferences, including CSUN Assistive Technology Conference and the Abilities Expo covering disability advocacy and history, disability etiquette, and assistive technology and universal design.

Since he is hard of hearing, has a family history of hereditary hearing loss, and wanted to learn ASL as a backup when hearing aids do not work, Vincent is completing his Associates Degree in Deaf Studies/American Sign Language. He is also working on his Assistive Technology Professional Certification to assist clientele on choices of available assistive technology from low-tech to high tech. And as an advocate, he educates his clientele to navigate the insurance process and self-advocate for getting proper Durable Medical Equipment.

Staff

GOAT intern Jack Kukulski is a student at Oakland Tech. He rows with Open United Rowing Crew and his interests include writing, cooking, public policy and law. As an intern for Open Assistive Tech, he is cataloguing and scanning physical archive materials, assessing their quality and contents, checking for their availability in libraries around the world, and adding relevant metadata. 

Former GOATs