Effie Kapsalis, chief of content and communications strategy, Smithsonian Institution Archives, develops programs to enable participatory cultural heritage and inclusive storytelling in order to make history more accessible to the world. She led the earliest crowdsourcing initiatives at the Smithsonian, opening the doors to their collections and resources, and helped to create the institutional policy to enable wider public participation across the Smithsonian’s 19 museums, 9 research centers, libraries, archives, and zoo. While participating in the Smithsonian’s Emerging Leaders Development Program, she conducted critical research demonstrating the benefits of open cultural heritage, which was released at SXSW 2016. She has developed games to spark interest in American history and is working on working on a project to integrate the Smithsonian’s collections metadata into the Semantic Web and Wikipedia. She has a decade experience in the private tech sector in educational and training software development, and received her Master of Industrial Design where she developed a life-long love for human-centered design.