Valerie Aurora

Valerie Anita Aurora a non-profit organization that sought to increase women's participation in the free-culture movement, open-source technology, and open source culture. Aurora is also known within the Linux community for advocating new developments in filesystems in Linux, including ChunkFS and the Union file system. and relative atime. Along with Arjan van de Ven, she came up with the idea for ChunkFS, which simplifies file system checks by dividing the file system into independent pieces. She also co-organized the first Linux File Systems Workshop in order to figure out how to spread awareness of and raise funding for file system development. As of 2009, she worked for Red Hat as a file systems developer as well as a part-time science writer and Linux consultant. The Ada Initiative was shut down in October 2015.

Writing

Maintaining a blog since 2007, Aurora has written extensively about coding and the experiences of women in open source. This has included descriptions of DEF CON and the harassment that took place there. In 2013, Aurora provided a comment to The Verge about the Electronic Frontier Foundation's involvement in the legal defense of Andrew Auernheimer, who was in prison for hacking and had previously harassed Kathy Sierra. Aurora said "This is another case where they're saying, 'The cases we care about are the ones white men are interested in. We’re less interested in protecting women on the web.'" This comment was received negatively by the EFF's Director of International Freedom of Expression, Jillian York.

Another 2013 controversy that received commentary from Aurora was Donglegate in which a female attendee at a nearly all-male PyCon attendee faced backlash for reporting a conversation overheard between two men sitting near her. Aurora condemned the threats sent to the woman and stated that Anonymous, by using large numbers of computers, was "distorting social pressure". When asked if firing one of the males was an appropriate response, she said "I don't have enough information to know that." Two years later, Aurora praised the gender ratio at PyCon and called Guido van Rossum and the Python community "the biggest success story for women in open source." In the same interview, she approved of the culture of the website Tumblr and stated that Linus Torvalds' daughter Patricia was a positive role-model.