Jackie Danicki

When I signed up to the Ada Lovelace Day pledge, there was only one woman in tech I wanted to blog about: Adriana Lukas. She is a visionary who - most importantly - makes things happen.

Adriana is leading what I strongly believe to be the most important movement in technology right now: the drive to turn individual human beings into platforms. That means enabling people to take charge of their data (content, relationships, transactions, knowledge); arrange (analyze, manipulate, manage) it according to their needs and preferences; share it on their own terms, and do all this while connected and networked on the web. Adriana often describes this as giving individual users their own unique APIs. I’ll quote from a recent email she wrote:

What drives me is the frustration with the current state of the (social) web, where I am not an autonomous node but a profile page in someone’s silo. This is not where I imagined to be when I was bitten by the internet/web bug all those years back. At the same time, there is a plethora of amazing technologies that could be better used to deal with the (un)holy trinity of the web - data, privacy and identity.

The open source Mine! project is Adriana’s prototype app - being built with the help of superb, like-minded geeks - for this movement. She still needs more of those developers, especially on the UI front, so please do spread the word.

To read more on how Adriana came to spearhead this drive, check out this excellent piece she wrote on the social web, privacy, data, and VRM.

Full disclosure: Adriana is one of my most treasured friends in the world, someone I can count on in the worst of times and celebrate with in the best of times. There was a time when we worked and lived together, spending literally every hour in the same space, and any friendship that can survive that is something special. (Just ask the men who were in our midst at the time if you want any of the gory details of some of our lively “debates”.)

Filed under: Life