Whitney Hess
Founder & Executive Coach at Vicarious Partners Inc.
Whitney Hess is a coach, writer, and designer on a mission to put humanity back into business. She believes empathy builds empires.
Whitney helps creative leaders design their careers and accelerate their missions. Her techniques help people gain self-awareness, identify blind spots, navigate obstacles, and bring their whole selves to their work.
For more than a decade, Whitney was a user experience consultant making technology easier and more pleasurable to use. She has been recognized for her work with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, the Martin Luther King Jr. Center for Nonviolent Social Change, Drupal Association, Foundation Center, Seamless, Boxee, and WNYC. She is named as a co-inventor on a U.S. patent with American Express.
Whitney is a two-time graduate of Carnegie Mellon University, with a Master’s in Human-Computer Interaction and a Bachelor’s in Professional Writing and HCI. She is a Certified Integral Coach through New Ventures West and a Professional Certified Coach (PCC) with the International Coaching Federation. She writes on her blog Pleasure & Pain, co-hosts the podcast Designing Yourself, and speaks at conferences and corporations worldwide.
A native New Yorker, Whitney currently lives in Maine with her partner Fredrick Selby. They are in the early stages of planning their circumnavigation.
Keynote: The Inner Work of Being a Public Good
In 2023, Drupal was formally designated as a Digital Public Good—a high-quality, open-source digital solution recognized for having a high potential to address the critical development needs and urgent global challenges named in the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). In 2015, all members of the UN agreed on 17 SDGs to build a world of peace, dignity, and prosperity for a healthy planet. The target for reaching these goals is 2030, but our progress has been far too slow. It’s not a matter of not having the technology to do it—it’s a people problem.
In this year’s NEDCamp keynote, Whitney Hess will share an emerging framework called the Inner Development Goals (IDGs)—an open-source project backed by a nonprofit organization (sound familiar?) with the purpose of identifying the individual and collective skills necessary for business leaders like us to develop within ourselves in order to drive systemic, sustainable change.
We will explore the five dimensions and 23 skills being developed by a global collective of researchers and practitioners. We will look at the free, open-source, co-created library of tools and resources to help practice inner development. We will learn simple yet powerful exercises each of us can integrate into our daily lives, and discuss how to effectively bring these practices into our organizations and our technologies.
Drupal is poised to accelerate our progress toward a sustainable future. It’s up to each of us to do the work from within.