Speaking
I’ve been talking about distributed manufacturing resilience and open hardware infrastructure since 2016 - before most people knew they needed to care about it. COVID-19 made the problem visible. The talks got easier after that.
More recently my speaking has expanded into AI systems design, security in agentic systems, and privacy-preserving architectures for sensitive data.
Upcoming
Open Hardware Summit 2026
Berlin, Germany · May 2026
Supply Chain Mesh Networks: Open Infrastructure for Manufacturing Resilience
When centralized supply chains collapse, distributed manufacturing capacity exists but lacks coordination infrastructure. During COVID-19, 1,800+ maker organizations produced 48 million medical supply units - but 70% of volunteer effort went to manual coordination rather than production. This talk presents working open-source tools that solve that coordination problem, and outlines concrete pathways for technical and policy participation.
Previous Talks
Global Innovation Gathering
2018 / 2019
Open Hardware Infrastructure: A Vision for Distributed Manufacturing
Presented an early vision of what would become the Open Hardware Manager to an international audience of makers, technologists, and humanitarian practitioners. This talk laid out the coordination problem in distributed manufacturing and proposed open data standards as a foundation for solving it.
First Humanitarian Maker Faire
Kathmandu, Nepal · 2016
Making for Resilience: Open Hardware in Crisis Response
Spoke at what was billed as the first humanitarian Maker Faire, held in Kathmandu not long after the 2015 earthquake that devastated Nepal. The audience included organizers of the Global Innovation Gathering and the director of Engineers Without Borders - a conversation that directly led to the open hardware data standards work that underpins the Open Hardware Manager today.
This experience shaped my understanding of what distributed manufacturing infrastructure could mean for communities facing crisis, and why the coordination layer matters as much as the physical capacity.
Read my article about this experience in Make Magazine →
Topics I Speak On
Distributed Manufacturing & Supply Chain Resilience The coordination problem in distributed manufacturing, open hardware data standards (OpenKnowHow, OpenKnowWhere), supply chain mesh networks as resilient alternatives to centralized systems, and lessons from COVID-19 for future crisis response. I have been developing and refining this material since 2016 and have multiple slide decks available.
AI Systems Design & Agentic Architecture Building production-ready agentic systems, evaluation frameworks, and the practical gap between AI demos and AI systems that work under real conditions. Based on 12+ production deployments across healthcare, SaaS, and financial services.
Security & Privacy in AI Systems Threat modeling for LLM applications, prompt injection defense, and privacy-preserving architectures for sensitive data. Includes a novel approach to giving AI agents analytical capability over sensitive datasets without exposing raw data to cloud infrastructure - with direct applications for journalism, healthcare, and legal contexts.
From the Field to the Cloud: Non-Traditional Paths in Tech How operational experience in high-stakes physical environments (emergency medicine, large-scale event production, industrial work) transfers to cloud architecture and systems design. For audiences interested in career transitions, diverse hiring, or the value of non-traditional backgrounds in technical roles.
Workshops
I have taught internal workshops at DoIT International on a range of AI topics including:
- AI security and threat modeling
- Prompt injection: attack and defense
- Agentic system design principles
- Building production RAG systems
- Evaluating LLM outputs in production
Workshop materials are available on request for organizations interested in team training.
Speaking Inquiry
I’m selectively open to speaking engagements where there’s genuine alignment between the topic and the audience. I’m particularly interested in:
- Open source and open hardware communities
- Humanitarian technology and crisis response contexts
- Security and privacy focused events
- AI engineering and systems design conferences
If you’re organizing an event and think there’s a fit, get in touch.