Samantha Shireman is a passionate pragmatist who develops technology that helps people break through the digital walls that divide them. Within Harvard’s Applied Social Media Lab, she serves as the product manager for Frankly (frankly.org), an open-source video platform that enables people to engage in deliberation, assemblies, and other forms of discourse and collective problem-solving.
Previously, as Director of Product at AllSides.com, she helped build many products intended to help people understand diverse perspectives and enable healthy communication across ideological divides.
She earned her degree in cognitive science from UC Berkeley, where she spent a lot of time thinking about thinking. A self-admitted tech nerd, she first earned her tech chops in middle school when, out of necessity, she taught herself HTML and CSS to create web pages for her Neopets.
When not working to strengthen democracy, Samantha enjoys puzzles, good food, cocktails, and the occasional rabbit hole into psychology research. She and her husband live in El Cerrito in an apartment building they and a few friends purchased together to end-run SF bay area housing costs. They live with their cat GABA, appropriately named after a neurotransmitter.