Thank you for the invitation to become part of the JoPP board -- it's a great honour to be involved with such a great community of makers and thinkers. I've been a big fan of the work of JoPP for a while now as an open tech practitioner, and I often credit the Shared Machine Shops Issue #5 for helping inspire me to go back into academia and conduct my own research!

As for what I'm up to, I'm currently doing doctoral fieldwork aimed at understanding user experiences of access, ownership and power at spaces for digital making emerging within cultural institutions in London like the Tate's Digital Studio. This work is made possible thanks to a scholarship from the University of Sussex Digital Humanities Lab: http://sussex.ac.uk/shl 

I'm also a critical design practitioner via http://codekat.net and have collaborated with (and learned from!) many of you here while working for various open tech orgs from Mozilla to the Open Knowledge Foundation for the past 10 years, building creative F/LOSS tools, curricula and workshops for underserved communities ala <http://mozfestartoftheweb.tumblr.com>. 

As far as my participation with JoPP, I'm happy to say Adrian Smith and I will be co-editing Special Issue #12, which builds on the shared machine shop insights of Issue #5 by looking at a new wave of institutionalization, practices and spaces amongst shared machine shops. This issue was proposed in collaboration with participants of a track entitled "Whose industrial revolution?" from this year's 4S/EASST Barcelona: <http://bit.ly/1SzPmvI>. I'm also happy to help with the JoPP website if needed.

I look forward to learning (and continuing to be inspired) by you all!

٩(●ᴗ●)۶ // Kat