Van Riper

Community Builder and Program Manager in Aptos, California

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Serial Community Organizer, Silicon Valley Geek, and Yoga Enthusiast. Spent 30 years as a developer in both large and small companies in Silicon Valley. Since 2003, my volunteer work as a community builder among developers has evolved into my main area of interest. Which is why I accepted my first full-time developer relations position at Google in December of 2010. As of January 2015, I applied my meta-community manager expertise towards building communities of mindful living at every Google office in the world.

As of October 2018, I returned to developer community work as a member of Google's Open Source Programs Office. Initially, I worked with the Go developer community as a member of the Open Source Strategy team. As of January 2021, I am now focused more broadly to work with all the major open source projects and foundations that Google sponsors as a member of the Open Source Outreach team.

As of March 2021 in a personal capacity, I am applying my community expertise towards building local in-person communities to foster mindful authentic human connection for the global online Wisdom 2.0 community.

Specialties: Building Communities, Workplace Mindfulness, Web Application Development, Object-Oriented Programming, Interaction Design

  • Work
    • Google Open Source
  • Education
    • MIT