Meet Your Instructors
Kate Krontiris, Co-Founder
Kate’s work as a facilitator, researcher, and organizational strategist has addressed a variety of public challenges, often with an intersection of technology. As an organizational development strategist, Kate has over 20 years of facilitation, mediation, and conflict resolution experience. She specializes in qualitative methodologies, including ethnography, user research, and design research. Applications have included organizational strategy, product design, policy recommendation, and programmatic design.
Kate has served as a consultant to Google, Facebook, the Trusted Elections Fund, Luminate, Mobius Executive Leadership, and the Make the Breast Pump Not Suck Project, among others. Kate also served as a consulting user researcher for the U.S. Digital Service within the Executive Office of President Barack Obama.
An American singer-songwriter living in Sierra Leone, Kate is a co-founder of Telem Uncommon Sounds, an initiative designed to support and showcase unique and innovative musicians in Freetown. Her music can be found on Spotify, iTunes, YouTube, and Instagram, among other platforms. Most recently, she was selected as one of 70 participants from 23 countries around the world for the 2023 and 2024 Global Musicians Workshop, an initiative founded by Yo-Yo Ma to bring about greater cross-cultural understanding through music. She also participated in the Berklee at the Gnaoua and World Music Festival in June 2024.
Kate is a graduate of Columbia University, where she received a Bachelor of Arts in Sociology. She holds a Masters in Public Policy from Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government and an MBA from MIT’s Sloan School of Management.
She is a proud alumna of the AmeriCorps National Service Program.
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Charley Johnson, Co-Founder
Charley founded Untangled, a newsletter and podcast about our sociotechnical world, and how to change it. He coaches and advises mission-driven CEOs, Executive Directors, and senior leaders to live more impactful and freer lives. Charley leads the Public Technology Leadership Collaborative at Data & Society, a peer-learning collective of scholars, researchers, and government leaders working to ensure data and technology serve the public interest. And he's a Non-Resident Fellow with the Atlantic Council's Digital Forensic Research Lab.
Before all that, Charley led the Disinformation Action Lab at Data & Society, which won the University of Washington’s Center for an Informed Public inaugural Award for Excellence for its multi-stakeholder work on the 2020 Census. Once upon a time, Charley co-founded and ultimately led the Center for Digital Development at the U.S. Agency for International Development. I helped grow the team from 2 to 55, developed our strategy, and designed multi-stakeholder alliances like the Digital Impact Alliance.
He's a graduate of the University of Washington (Go Huskies!) and the Harvard Kennedy School, and sometimes teaches at George Washington University. He's a Seattleite by disposition living in Los Angeles, a new pug dad, and an obnoxiously proud uncle.