Our Board Members and Committee Members
(In alphabetical order.)
* Chair, Committee
** Chair, Board of Directors
Ed Chen
director*
Ed Chen is currently the Director of Technology for The Nueva School, a PK-12 independent school focused on supporting high-ability learners and gifted students. He has supported the tremendous growth of the school as it tripled its student and faculty counts, while adding new buildings and a new site. He has also worked closely in partnership with Common Sense, advising on the creation of their citizenship curriculum and developing guidance for schools planning to launch their own 1:1 device program. He has written articles for Common Sense, Edutopia.org and Independent School Magazine. He was also the founding Director of Technology for The Bay School, growing their technology program to include a robotics team and a formalized design engineering program. Prior to entering the education sector, Ed worked with non-profits as the Technology Director for KQED, Channel 9 / 88.5 FM, advising the broadcaster on building state-of-the-art digital broadcast and digital production facilities, and as an active board member for what is now the Children’s Creativity Museum (formerly Zeum).
Laura Eise
director
Laura Eise builds and manages cyber security programs for Fortune 500 companies and has worked with technology, manufacturing, financial, and commerce companies, as well as with the US Federal Government and international partners. In her current role, she leads business enablement for the development platform and enterprise security strategy for a large consumer and business travel company. Laura also researches and studies human behavior in security, as well as how children use technology.
Lee Felsenstein
director
Lee Felsenstein has for over 50 years been an explorer in applying technology for social benefit. As an engineering student at Berkeley in 1964 he participated in the Free Speech Movement and saw how an open, equitable information structure could work wonders in allowing a campus of strangers become a community. From then on he has pursued the necessary technologies to make that process commonplace. By 1970 he realized that a network of computers would be the effective technology, and within one year was working with a group that had secured a mainframe timesharing computer for counterculture support. By 1973 the group had created Community Memory – the first public-access bulletin board system with a terminal in Berkeley and one in San Francisco. In that project, he says, “We opened the door to cyberspace and found that it was hospitable territory”. Lee has worked in Silicon Valley since 1968 performing hardware design and helping in the development of the early personal computer industry. He was able to apply lessons learned from Community Memory to the structure and function of the meetings of the legendary Homebrew Computer Club, whose meetings spawned 23 identifiable businesses, including Apple.
Allison Miller
director*
Allison Miller is the CISO (Chief Information Security Officer) and VP of Trust at Reddit, where she leads teams tasked with protecting Reddit’s customers and systems. Miller is an industry expert and innovator, having spent the past 20 years scaling teams and technology that protect people and platforms, and pioneering the development of real-time risk prevention and detection systems running at internet-scale. She has also led major initiatives to engineer the defenses for core payment and e-commerce systems and technologies that protect consumers from online threats, having held technical and leadership roles at Bank of America, Google, Electronic Arts, Tagged/MeetMe, PayPal/eBay, and Visa International. Miller speaks internationally on security, fraud and risk and has held board roles with the Center for Cyber Safety and Education, ISC2, SIRA, and Keypoint Credit Union. In addition, she holds degrees from the University of Pennsylvania and University of California, Berkeley.
Bill Pollock
chair**
Bill Pollock founded The No Starch Press Foundation in 2017 as a public non profit US 501(c )(3). Pollock saw a need, globally, to provide grants to support the ambition and talent development of the world’s most talented engineers, admirably known as a “hacker,” wherever they are globally, and wherever they are in their growth cycle — whether in kindergarten or in the workplace. Pollock has nearly 35 years in technical book publishing. In 1994 he founded No Starch Press, leader among the world’s top technical book publishers, with a track record rivaling most publishers. No Starch Press titles have been included in the prestigious Communication Arts Design Annual and STEP inside 100 Competition. The company No Starch Press has also won the prestigious Independent Publisher Book Award, the “IPPYs” from the Independent Publisher Magazine. Pollock seeded The No Starch Press Foundation with personal funds of USD$1,200,000.
