Hello, I'm Daina

I spent part of college volunteering at a hospice. I was a patient care aide. I washed hair and helped patients feel comfortable. We talked. Sometimes about baseball, which I don’t follow, but that didn’t really matter. Sometimes just listening was enough. People there were receiving extraordinary care, but sometimes what they needed most was someone who could help them understand what was happening. Knowledge was a comfort to them. I thought I wanted to be a doctor, but my time in the hospice made me realize that knowledge and community are a kind of medicine too. So I went to library school instead. I became a medical librarian, for a while. But I was restless. Knowledge isn’t just something people need access to, and not just in medicine. Knowledge is a story we agree on, and stories reflect the people who tell them. Who gets to shape the story? Whose stories are missing? I’ve spent my career focused on those questions. The roles have changed. The work hasn’t.

• Developers who build the tools the world runs on often feel unseen by the organizations that profit from their work. That’s the problem I work on now in developer relations at Anaconda.
• Scientists whose software and data shaped entire fields were functionally invisible in the research record. I spent years building infrastructure to change that.
• Communities that should have access to scientific knowledge often don’t. I spent years trying to fix that through open infrastructure and public library partnerships.
• AI systems being built for vulnerable populations were being evaluated on the wrong terms. I saw that firsthand doing government work, and I haven’t stopped talking about it since.
• The forgotten humans behind computing are disappearing from the story we tell about technology. I’m recovering them in a narrative podcast and a book.

Beyond the Work

I’m a hand embroidery artist with a particular love for goldwork. I also love open water swimming and being outside. I live in the Berkshires with my family, two blind cats, and some fish. Originally from the Buffalo Southtowns.

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