Building Inclusive Tech Communities: Strategies for Success

Jas Panaich (She/Her)

Jas has led global teams for nearly a decade where she specialises in producing transformative results in efficacy, diversity and inclusion for engineering. Her responsibilities focus on delivering availability, reliability and resilience in live service platforms and products. She brings in a product and customer focused insight to overcoming technical challenges and building solutions that drive technology and culture changes.

Uniquely, Jas brings a range of experience and insights from a broad range of industries, ranging from Cloud to publishing multiple globally successful AAA Video Games. She has coordinated and led multiple cross-functional gatherings within her industries, to produce collaboration across competitors for delivering aligned results to technology solutions for common problems.

Nominated for the Trailblazer Award at the Diversity in Tech Award 2023, Jas is recognised for tirelessly investing in improving access to STEM careers for both engineers and engineering leaders.

Having conquered the challenges she faced in her career, Jas is devoted to sharing her methods, learnings and results. She has consistently found that investing in growing diverse teams are not only more successful, but also produce a higher enrichment and quality of product that is delivered. She takes a multi-target approach to guarantee positive change in her organisation, ranging from building inclusive hiring practices to retaining and growing top talent.

Karen R. Penn, JD (she/her)

Karen leads diversity, equity & inclusion and Elastic Cares, Elastic’s philanthropic goodness program.

Karen is a former civil rights attorney for the U.S. Department of Justice, who was also in-house employment counsel in the private sector before leaning into all things people and culture related. Her more than 20 years of leadership experience encompasses a cross-section of companies and industries ranging from small tech startups to global aerospace enterprises, to US federal government agencies, and outsourced strategic human resources consulting. She has either led the people function, or served as a member of senior leadership with responsibility for key functions like DEI recruiting, EEO & Affirmative Action, and ethics & compliance.

Karen served on the Board of Directors for the Girl Scout Council of the Nation’s Capital for more than 10 years, co-chaired the Women’s Advisory Board and currently sits on the Nominating Committee.

She is co-administrator and Team Lead for Arlington Neighbors Welcoming Afghans, the volunteer grassroots community effort launched in 2021 to aid resettlement efforts of Afghan refugees in the Washington, DC metro area.

She also serves as the volunteer driver coordinator for the Arlington (Va) chapter of Food For Neighbors, a non-profit organization that sources and delivers more than 2000 pounds (907 kg) of individual meals and snack items 5 times per school year to local middle and high school food pantries to distribute during times when students might otherwise go hungry.

Karen holds a Bachelor of Arts in government from the University of Virginia and a Juris Doctor from The George Washington University Law School.

Courtney (CJ) Wilburn (she/her)

Courtney has been in the industry for over 15 years, having worked in tech via media, academia, and medicine before arriving at Elastic in 2020. Courtney's journey began in her hometown of Memphis, Tennessee, by hardware hacking on personal computers and lurking on Prince message boards. She loves finding unusual and elegant ways to solve problems (both human and technical alike), building tools, developing workflows, and building infrastructure almost as much as she enjoys finding ways to keep activists safe organizing online. When she’s away from her desk, she can be found running, hiking, or biking around Philadelphia, cooking, lifting weights, gardening, knitting, building keyboards, or singing karaoke duets with her wife.