Mon 14 December 2015 by Laura Gaetano
Introducing the Community Commander
We proudly present our third team member, Laura. Laura is originally from Rome, in Italy; after growing up in the Silicon Valley of Southern France, she moved to Vienna in her teens with her family, where she finished high school and stayed for her art studies. Passionate about learning, she enjoys NASA trivia, playing around with Ruby and practicing Taekwondo.
From art to music to tech
“I touched a lot of different disciplines during my studies, from traditional sculpture and ceramics to performance and installation art, photography, typeface design, print and bookbinding”, she says about her studies of Transmedia Art. From the art scene, she moved onto the music business, where she tried out pretty much everything she could for a few years. She did band and concert photography, wrote album press releases for indie labels, wrote about albums and musicians for her music blog and other online publications, and even tried her hand at managing a musician, for whom she took care of everything, including design for a lyrics booklet and vinyl-only release. After that, she transitioned to the tech industry: ”In many ways, the music industry is very similar to the tech industry — at the local level, it's a small circle where everyone knows everyone, people are incredibly enthusiastic and willing to put in long hours, and last but not least: women are definitely underrepresented in the industry. So from the music industry I landed into tech, where I worked as a full-stack web developer for almost 3 years.”
Management and organisation
A ”people person” with knowledge of the tech industry, Laura takes care of marketing-related tasks and of the community, making sure that people who have questions about CloudFleet are taken care of and that the team reaches out to projects who have similar interests at heart. She coordinates the content of the blog and social media channels — while also finishing her Master's degree and dedicating the rest of her time to her many side projects. She is passionate about organising events and the Open Source community, even more so when she can combine both: ”this year I co-organised ROSSConf in Vienna and Berlin. I also run the monthly Ruby meetup in Vienna and am on the core team of the Rails Girls Summer of Code, an initiative that supports women interested in contributing to Open Source Software.”
Privacy should be for everyone
“Women are more likely than men to be singled out online for stalking, harassment, invasions of privacy, and threats of physical violence” (from “Smart Girl's Guide to Privacy”). Primarily for this reason, Laura believes more and more that privacy should be a right and not a commodity. In her opinion, Cloudfleet first and foremost allows for this discussion to take place: Why are we trading our private information for free services? What are the problems of such a system? How can we change our attitude towards it? ”I think Cloudfleet will make people realise that there are alternatives to ’selling‘ our private data, and that you don't need to be tech-savvy to have access to those alternatives.”
Interested in more? Follow her on twitter.