We would like to acknowledge the tremendous contributions of time, technology, and code that have been made to our open source project. Beginning in the fall of 2018, we began participating in hackathons in Seattle and at the University of Washington. In summer, 2019, we partnered with Microsoft through their amazing hackathon community. In 2020, Orcasound became a host organization for Google Summer of Code (GSoC).
In combination with our Github repositories, these events have brought many talented programmers, designers, engineers, researchers, and “geeks for good” to the project. They have made it possible to rapidly develop and refine the Orcasound app — a new way to listen for whales — based on a cutting-edge suite of inexpensive and open source hardware and software for live streaming audio data.
Orcasound at a democracy lab hackathon in Seattle (photo by Mark Frischmuth).So, let’s have a virtual round of applause for the following stand-out members of the Orcasound open source community. If you’re inspired by their contributions to our Github repositories or Democracy Lab hackathons, don’t hesitate to support the Founders and Influencers directly! Sing their praises on social media and networks; join them in hacking for orca conservation; reinforce their volunteerism financially.
Founders
(Long-Term Contributors)
Like Orcasound organizational members (who have their own amazing volunteers!), founders can raise funds under the auspices of Orcasound to support their own Orcasound efforts or the project in general. The also have shown leadership in the community and often have administrative access to key parts of the Orcasound infrastructure.
Founders can raise funds under the auspices of Orcasound to support their own Orcasound efforts or the project in general.Paul Cretu
Orcasound site & player (2017+)
GSoC mentor (2021)
Orcasound site (2017-2020, 2023-2025)
Admin UI (2019)
Steve Hicks
Orcanode repository (2018+)
GSoC mentor (2020+)
Brendan Thatcher
User research & UX team lead (2020+)
GSoC mentor (2021)
Node engineering and machine learning (2017+)
GSoC mentor (2020+)
Scott Veirs
Project management (2017+)
GSoC mentor (2020+)
Mike Castor
UI v2 implementation (2019-2020)
2017 Kickstarter Campaign creation.
2017+ Product Manager and UX Designer.
2021 Google Summer of Code mentor.
Orcamap 2018+
Valentina Staneva
Microsoft AI4Earth Innovation Grant lead (2019)
GSoC mentor and administrative lead (2020+)
UW MS Data Science mentor (2022-23)
Prakruti Gogia
OrcaHello project manager
Pod.Cast creator (Microsoft hackathons, 2019-2021)
OrcaHello, Founding project lead (2019-2023)
Pod.Cast creator
Praful Mathur
Experiment.com funding (2021)
GSoC mentor (2022)
Michelle Yang
Microsoft hackathon project manager (2020+)
Jesse Lopez
GSoC mentor (2020-2021)
Graphic design (2017+)
Project lead and GitHub maintainer (2024+).
Influencers
(Major Contributors)
Founders can raise funds under the auspices of Orcasound to support their own Orcasound efforts or the project in general.
Google Summer of Code (GSoc) Participants
(India)
GSoC contributor (2020)
GSoC mentor (2021)
Diego Roderiguez
(Mexico)
GSoC contributor (2020)
(Ecuador)
GSoC contributor (2021)
(Russia)
GSoC contributor (2021)
(India)
GSoC contributor (2021)
Jose Giraldo
(Colombia, Spain)
GSoC contributor (2021)
(Italy, UK, Germany)
GSoC contributor (2022)
Devdoot Chatterjee
(India)
GSoC contributor (2022)
(Singapore, USA)
GSoC contributor (2022)
(India)
GSoC contributor (2022)
Paul Nguyen Hong Duc
(France, Canada)
GSoC mentor (2022)
Live Listening App UI & Development Team
UX Project Team Lead (2021+)
Elena Bukhonok
UX/UI/design project manager (2020-21)
Sam St Michael
Design, branding, social media (2020+)
James Pedersen
Full stack developer (2020)
Wei Li
Catherine Zeng
UX Designer
Arcatia.io Data Cooperative
Maria Palamar
Facilitation & user research (2020+)
Graise Lee Jenni
Facilitation & user research (2020+)
Tech Lead for Acartia
Development (2020-22)
Design & Project Management (2020-21)
Data Exchange + Mobile App Customization (2019+)
Data Exchange + Mobile App Customization (2019+)
Acartia project lead organizer (2023).
Acartia stand-up roster member through 2023.
Project Management Team
Project Manager, Fundraising (2022-23)
Heather Gordon
Project Manager (2021-2)
Sanjari Jain
Project Manager (2021)
Development Project Manager (2021)
PodCast
(ML-Assisted Annotation Tool)
OrcaHello
(Real-Time Inference System Leads)
Prakruti Gogia
Overall Lead
Mike Cowan
Moderation system, Front End
Moderation system, Design
Akash Mahajan
Annotation System
Aayush Agrawal
Machine Learning Development
Chris Hanke
Public Relations
Notification System
Michelle Yang
Azure Administration+
Individual Contributors
Erin Pierce-Magdalik
User-centered design of 2019 UI v2 (2019)
Implementation of 2019 UI v2 (2019)
Samantha Berk
Administrative back end (2018-19)
Graphic design (2017-2020)
Erika Pelaez
Machine learning (2018)
Machine learning & spectrograms from FLAC files (2018+)
Ivan Storck
Orcamap code clean-up & contribution standards (2020-21)
Joyce Liao
Orcanode repo & Raspberry Pi testing (2020+)
Adrian MacDonald
Content strategy, analytics, conservation impact (2021+)
Maria Palamar
Conservation impact (2020+)
Glenn Block
UX Designer & Researcher (2023+)
Product Manager (2023+)
UX Designer (2023+)
Rick Hines
UX Project Team Lead (Shipnoise)
UX Designer (2021+)
Eric McRae
Maintainer for the Port Townsend Hydrophone Node
Full stack development on Orcamap React build.
UI Designer on the Notifications team and contributor to Orcasite.
Jointly led original Shipnoise UX research with Rick Hines in early 2021.
Benji Friedman
Full Stack Developer on Orcahome with significant institutional knowledge.
Ambient sound analysis pipeline development and CI workflow contributor.
UX designer on the Learning Interface (Orcahome predecessor) and call catalog redesign.
UX Designer and Researcher on the Shipnoise prelaunch team.
Shipnoise development contributor.
SalishSea.io developer.
Lead UX Designer on Shipnoise from late 2025 through launch.
Multi-source whale-sighting dataset compiler and AIS data engineer.
Open source mapping architecture advisor (2021).
UUX Researcher on competitive audit and user testing for Orcasite Listening App.
Juliet Stevenson
UX Researcher who led usability testing for the V3 Listening App Mobile iterations (2021 to 2022).
Supporters (key one-time contributions)
Front End Developer who landed Next.js v15 upgrade.
UX contributor at Orcasite Listening App kickoff and heuristic evaluation.
Anurag Peshne
Microsoft hackathon participant (2019 to 2021+).
UW MSDS 2024 capstone member.
Shipnoise team member from June 2025 through end of year.
UX contributor on heuristic evaluation for Orcasite.
Front End Developer who took on the Hacker Hall of Fame page rebuild.
UX team member on the Orcahome kickoff (2025).
Erika facilitating an early discussion of machine learning and the Orcadata repository.
Val working on the Orcanode software and hardware.