Eleanor Saitta Hacker, Designer, Artist, Writer
Eleanor Saitta is a hacker, designer, artist, writer, and barbarian. She makes a living and a vocation of understanding how complex systems operate and redesigning them to work, or at least fail, better. Her work is transdisciplinary, using everything from electronics, software, and paint to social rules and words as media with which to explore and shape our interactions with the world. Her focuses include the seamless integration of technology into the lived experience, the humanity of objects and the built environment, and systemic resilience and conviviality.
Eleanor is Technical Director at the International Modern Media Institute (IMMI), a member of the advisory boards at the Freedom of the Press Foundation, Geeks Without Bounds (GWoB), the IFTF Governance Futures Lab, and the Calyx Institute, is part of the Trike and Briar/Bramble software projects, and works occasionally as a freelance security architecture and strategy consultant to news organizations, NGOs, and software teams like Mailpile and Commotion.
Prior to this, she was Principal Security Engineer at the Open Internet Tools Project (OpenITP), directing the OpenITP Peer Review Board for open source software and working on adversary modeling, and also had a long career in the commercial security consulting space. She also previously co-founded the Constitutional Analysis Support Team (CAST) and the Seattle-based Public N3rd Area hacker space.