Sara Kate Fishback

The keynote address, “The Tightrope Walk between Fail and Magic: Lessons from a Luddite Technophile,” is available on iTunes U and on Duke on Demand.

Sarah Kate Fishback, director of operations at the Institute for Sustainable Development, delivered the TechExpo 2011 keynote address. Read more about Sarah Kate Fishback.

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If you see something on the schedule that interests you, please feel free to participate, but understand that we will not be able to arrange for your lunch at this late date. (You can get something to eat at one of the restaurants on the property or, if you bring your own, you’ll be able to attend the keynote address and eat with colleagues.) Please check in at the registration table when you arrive, so that we have a record of your attendance, and so we can send you a link to the program evaluation.

The Institute for Sustainable Development is a nonprofit formed by Duke University, UNC and local chambers of commerce to help small and medium-sized employers build sustainable practices into their operations. At the institute, Fishback works to develop and administer programs that leverage web-based technologies and local assets to encourage sustainability in the local business community.

Fishback joined the institute in 2009 after graduating from the Fuqua School of Business, where she concentrated in social entrepreneurship. While at Fuqua, Fishback was a founding team member of PlotWatt, a high-tech residential home energy efficiency startup presently in beta testing.

Previously, Fishback served as online operations strategist at Google, working on the AdWords, Google Video, and YouTube teams. In that role, Fishback gathered user feedback, built customer service systems, provided technical support and collaborated with engineers with the objective of creating a seamless, magical user experience.

Fishback remains actively involved in entrepreneurship through the women’s entrepreneurship initiative at Duke, and she also serves on the advisory board of If Not You, Who?, a web-based early childhood education startup. She holds a bachelor’s degree in government from Dartmouth College.

So, if what we do is akin to magic, and if TechExpo is about sharing and learning, it seems appropriate to adopt the theme of “Breaking the Magician’s Code: IT Secrets Revealed” for our fourth annual conference.

TechExpo 2011 will bring Duke’s IT professionals together to learn about the technologies we are using today, and the ones we hope to use tomorrow, to perform our magic—connecting people in new ways, helping them to collaborate and giving them easy access to vast stores of information. We’re building the program now, so think about the magic you do every day and how it would benefit your IT colleagues across Duke, and Duke as a whole, if your secrets were revealed.