Team
Sandy Ordonez, Head of Team
She has over 20+ years of experience working at the intersection of technology, community engagement, and human rights. She is a graduate of American University with a double degree in International Relations and Public Relations. One of the first Latinas to occupy leadership positions in the open source community, notably having served as the first Director of Communications for the Wikimedia Foundation. As a native New Yorker and daughter of immigrants, throughout her career she has worked towards elevating the voices of marginalized communities. This experience led her to envision and create Team CommUNITY and their popular annual in-person gathering, formerly known as the Internet Freedom Festival.
Ordonez is a recipient of the prestigious Hispanic Leadership Award by Fundacion Carolina, and currently serves on the board of several digital rights organizations.
Lindsay Beck, Deputy Head of Team
She manages operations, project delivery and reporting, partnership development and fundraising, ensure effective financial operations including carrying out due diligence on new partnerships and contracts. She also works closely with the Head of Team to chart Team CommUNITY’s future growth and strategic response to a post pandemic environment.
Lindsay has over 15 years of experience working on the intersection of technology, security and human rights across a variety of non-profit organizations. She has worked extensively with US and local activism networks to implement digital security strategies into their program activities to ensure their core work remains resilient against the changing threat landscape. Lindsay received her Master’s degree, focusing on Technology in International Affairs, from the Elliott School of International Affairs at the George Washington University.
Danae Tapia, Director of Community Strategy
Danae Tapia is a writer, multimedia artist and technologist born in the Chilean working class. She founded The Digital Witchcraft Institute after her fellowship with the Mozilla Foundation, which is an arts organisation where she leads projects that fall at the intersection of technology and religious studies. She is also a lecturer of Hacking and Autonomous Practices at the Willem de Kooning Academy in Rotterdam and a resident artist at the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam.
In the past, Danae has been a project director in activist organizations dedicated to technology and human rights, such as the Riseup Collective in the US, Coding Rights in Brazil and Derechos Digitales in Chile. She has a bachelor degree in social communication from Universidad de Chile, a master of science in management from the University of Bristol and a research master in comparative literary studies from Utrecht University.
Victoria Sanchis, Program Coordinator
She has served the digital rights community since she graduated from Jaume I University with a degree in Audiovisual Communication in 2015, with a specialization in Social Equity of Consumption and Ethics and now she holds a MA on International Studies on Media, Power and Diversity, by University Pompeu Fabra of Barcelona. Her first engagement with the digital rights community was in co-organizing the Internet Freedom Festival in Valencia, Spain, where she developed her capacities in organizing events and community management.
In recent years, she perfected her abilities in organizing impactful events for young people working in technology as well as creating programs and equitable spaces for gender diversity and inclusion with global digital and human rights organizations including Open Tech Fund and Article 19. She supports the global Team CommUNITY staff to create programming that is equitable, innovative, and centered around safety and security while ensuring that community initiatives are being consistently pushed forward. Find Victoria on Twitter @VictoriaSanchis.
Mardiya Siba Yahaya, Global Community Manager
Erin McConnell, Event Lead and VPN Community Lead
She has been coordinating Team CommUNITY's 2023 Global Gathering as well as bringing individuals working across the VPN ecosystem together to discuss and collaborate around emerging issues within the space. Erin has worked at the intersection of language, human rights and technology for over a decade, focused on accessibility in technology, language access and localization of open source technology, and community building within the global digital rights space. She most recently worked as the Program Manager at Localization Lab and as a Localization Advisor with EngageMedia, and is a member of the Global Coalition for Language Rights. She is motivated to build inclusive, global communities that collectively move human and digital rights initiatives forward.
Mardiya Siba Yahaya is a feminist digital sociologist, researcher and community movement builder whose work extensively investigates the implications of technology surveillance and datafied societies on minoritized genders and communities in the global South. She has a Masters in Sociology from the University of the Witwatersrand, and was awarded the Mandela Rhodes Scholarship in 2021. Mardiya recently participated in the fall 2022 research sprint hosted by the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society on “Digital IDs in Times of Crisis”, where she and her team designed an informative interactive quiz that assesses the digital ID risks and threats against vulnerable groups to provide policy oriented recommendations.
Úrsula Schüler, Communications Lead
Úrsula Schüler was born and raised in Chile, South America. She studied journalism in her home country, and a Digital media marketing postgraduate program in Canada. She has more than seven years of experience working in newspapers and television channel websites, for whom reported two presidential and legislative elections in Chile. She has also done internal communication for universities, companies, and organizations. Spanish is her first language and years ago she was a student representative in high school and her university.