my name is mwd: photos

Today is International Women’s Day. I’m fortunate that I know a lot talented and inspirational women, but I don’t take many pictures of people, so here I shall share about the one person who’s picture I do take.

The woman in this picture is Laura, who has been a constant inspiration to me: she earned her degree and doctorate from the University of Cambridge in Engineering; she then immediately went on to be the lead engineer in an IoT startup before anyone had heard of the term IoT; later she was Head of Knowledge at the knowledge company Amazon bought to help build Alexa; she’s was the CEO at the Open Knowledge Foundation, an international effort to standardise the opening of data; and now she spends her life in the intersection of tech and civic interest (and I missed out a lot of other cool stuff she’s worked on - you can read about her recent thoughts here). She is an amazingly talented individual that works hard to bring others along on that journey too.

I’m also hugely fortunate that she’s been my partner for many years and we get to go on adventures together, such as the time pictured here where we went to Colorado and visited the Great Sand Dunes National Park.

As I opened with, I don’t tend to take many people photos, so I feel I’m cheating a bit on my IWD celebration post by posting closer to home, but Laura really is an inspiration, and I’ll just need to find another medium to try and recognise all the others and/or work on my people photography for future years.