Who we are

Board & staff

We're a member-governed organization, organized in circles. Our initial board is watching over our setup and launch. Our staff are running our ongoing projects from our previous incarnation as the AT Protocol Community Fund and getting our new ones off the ground.

Board

Dawn Walker

board member

Dawn Walker is a researcher and designer interested in how computing intersects with just transitions. She is a former President and current member of CoSocial Community Cooperative, a non-profit cooperative providing open social media for Canada. She has started a tech worker co-op, participated in community-led archiving of environmental and climate data, and completed a PhD at University of Toronto (2022) on values and design in the decentralized web.

More about Dawn

Since 2017, Dawn has co-organized Our Networks, a conference about the past, present, and future of building our own network infrastructures hosted in Toronto and Vancouver.

Dawn likes lentils.

Bryan Newbold

board member

Bryan Newbold is a protocol engineer at Bluesky Social PBC, contributor to the atproto working group at the IETF, and board member of the PLC Organization. Before joining Bluesky, he w at the Internet Archive, where he collected scientific research datasets and publications and created scholar.archive.org.

More about Bryan

In past lives Bryan designed Open Hardware scientific instrumentation, operated underwater robots in Antarctica, and attended the Recurse Center. He rides bikes and climbs volcanoes around Seattle, WA.

Fig

board member

Fig operates Microcosm, a set of community-funded open-source data services in wide use across the Atmosphere. They are a DASL spec editor (for STAR) and IETF atproto working group contributor, and previously worked for a data privacy company on internet freedom and censorship circumvention, maintaining infrastructure across 50 countries.

More about Fig

Fig also founded Ones and Zeros, a series of artist-run introductory electronics and creative computing workshops in Toronto, and attended the School for Poetic Computation in New York City.

They are an avid balcony gardener and enjoy creating tiny electronic sculptures.

Staff

Boris Mann

General Manager

Boris Mann builds community locally and globally, and has grown ecosystems to tens of thousands of contributors, as well as numerous event series and conferences. His career spans web1 to web3, including experience as a founder, investor, and advisor.

More about Boris

Boris founded the AT Community Fund to support the AT Protocol community, organized the first two conferences in Seattle and Vancouver, and has helped setup the co-operative.

Boris is based in Vancouver, BC, Canada, and likes to cook & eat when he's not roaming the Atmosphere.

Chad wearing a blue checked shirt and dark rimmed glasses looking out the window of the Shinkansen with a slight smile

Chad Kohalyk

Operations Manager

Chad is a servant leader and product-minded people person who has spent over 20 years in technology, from early standards work in CSS and accessibility to leading product teams and growing startups. He has consulted as a fractional COO for startups and civic tech organizations finding their footing.

More about Chad

His standards experience spans the edtech space, the Internet Governance Forum, and the Internet Engineering Task Force. His project Protocols for Publishers ✨ advocates for the adoption of open protocols for a sustainable agentic web. He holds a master's degree in International Relations, where he studied modular organizational design and social network analysis.

He lives in Surrey, BC 🇨🇦 from where he posts books and nature photos.

Ms Boba

Resident Code Fujoshi

Ms. Boba is a software engineer, educator, and community builder empowering people who spend (a lot of) time on the internet through a mix of technical education, infectious unhingedness passion, and charming websites. She learned to code to build things for fandom, did a stint in Big Tech land, and is back serving the communities she loves.

More about Ms

She believes that building a better, kinder web means inviting all netizens to become active participants in its creation—which means having fun, making websites, and having fun making websites. She's been The™ web wrangler for every Atmosphere Confs that needed one.

Ms. Boba thanks her 2006 doujinshi scanlations website and her 11th grade math teacher for the opportunity to be here.

Erin Kissane

Governance Research Lead

Erin Kissane is a writer and researcher focused on the way the social internet shapes what we know and how we live. She publishes and works at wreckage/salvage and co-runs Unbreaking.org, a networked volunteer collective making sense of the hollowing-out of the US government.

More about Erin

Previously, Erin researched Fediverse governance with the support of the Digital Infrastructure Insights Fund, co-founded networked volunteer org the Covid Tracking Project, and was a founder at OpenNews, an organization incubated at the Mozilla Foundation. She’s a member of the board of A New Social, makers of Bridgy Fed and other network cross-connectors.

She lives on the Oregon Coast and is a fan of seaweed.

Circles

Circles are the working structure of the co-op. Circles can run indefinitely or spin up a project, then wind down when its work is complete. Our first three are the Governance Research Circle, the Community Infrastructure Circle, and the AtmosphereConf 2027 Organizing Circle.

Our working groups. Some are here for good, some spin up for one project, then wind down.

  • Active

    Governance Research

    Designs the co-op's governance: membership, decision-making, accountability, and the rules that make power shareable.

  • Active

    Community Infrastructure

    Coordinates the shared infrastructure the community depends on: domains, hosting, email, tooling, and operations.

  • Forming

    AtmosphereConf 2027 Organizing

    Stewards the co-op's role in AtmosphereConf 2027 in Europe, working with partners, local organizers, and the conference team.