Sean Yo

I am active in the local tech community. I am a long time member of the Kitchener-Waterloo Design Meetup, I regularly attend DemoCampGuelph and lend a hand with it when I can. I have participated in several local tweetups and I have recently started volunteering at the campus radios station CFRU 93.3 FM. I have been involved with the United Way Campaign at the U of G every year; I have sat on the Steering Committee, been a Departmental Coordinator, a canvasser and I have worked on several versions of their website.

This will be the second year I am running an A11yCamp, at the Accessibility Conference, an unconference focused on web and software accessibility. This past year I started the Guelph Web Makers Meetup, a meetup for anyone who helps make websites in the Guelph Area. I also helped relaunch a local community coding event, now called hackGuelph.

I attend several tech conferences, such as OUCC, CANHEIT, FSOSS, The Accessibility Conference, and DrupalCon. I have been on the conference committee of OUCC, CANHEIT and The Accessibility Conference. I also frequently present at conferences and meetups, typically speaking 5-10 times per year. Here is a short list of selected presentations I have given:

• Wiki Do: The Way of the Wiki – Canadian Higher-Education IT Conference 2006
• Web 2.0 Experiential Learning – Teaching And Learning Innovations Conference 2009
• Community Is The Platform – U of G Spring IT Conference Keynote 2010
• Building A Better Web. Together: The U of G Campus Web Community – Ontario University Computing Conference 2010
• Web Accessibility: Principles, Strategies and Tactics – Ontario University Computing Conference 2010
• Drupal vs. Wordpress Smackdown – Kitchener-Waterloo Web Design Meetup 2010
• A Delicious Tale: What the story of Del.icio.us can teach us about Cloud Applications – Guelph Web Makers Meetup 2011

In 2007 I was part of the inaugural team of volunteers at the University of Guelph to participate in Leave For Change. I went on a three week short-term volunteer placement in Kathmandu, Nepal where I worked with the Fair Trade Group Nepal. I focused on building organizational capacity by training their staff and their member organizations on HTML development and delivered a strategic web plan for their organization. I was honoured to be invited to speak at the Women in Information and Communication Technology Group while I was in Kathmandu.

In 2009 I traveled with my father to Indonesia, where he was born. As part of this trip, I was able to volunteer with the Agape Social Foundation, a non-profit group which provides funding for children to attend school and runs a learning centre and children's library. The foundation is run by my family; I was able to once again focus on increasing their capacity by delivering IT and Web Development training to the teaching staff of the Agape Social Foundation. I was once again honoured to be invited to speak, this time at the Universitas Muhamadiyah Malang. I presented to their IT Staff, at their request reviewed their new campus website and had a meeting with the University President.

These opportunities have profoundly affected my values and vision. The opportunity of the Internet and the Web has tremendous promise. Closing the Digital Divide and enabling everyone who wishes it to connect through the Web is a project that could take a lifetime to achieve. And that sounds like a pretty great life to me.