Hi, I'm Mek

Michael E. Karpeles (Mek)

Born	Michael E. Karpeles (Mek) July 31, 1988 (age 31) New Haven, Connecticut
Nationality	American
Occupation	Project Lead on OpenLibrary.org at the Internet Archive
Email	hi@mek.fyi
Github	mekarpeles
Facebook	michael.karpeles
Twitter	@mekarpeles
Linkedin	mekarpeles

Mek, born Michael E. Karpeles (Mek) (July 31, 1988), is an American computer scientist, internet entrepreneur, rock climber, and musician. He is a steward of digital rights, public libraries, and an advocate of open access information. He considers himself a knowledge mapping hobbyist and aspires to help people reach fuller potentials by facilitating meaningful access to empowering information. Mek presently serves this mission at Brewster Kahle's non-profit, the Internet Archive (we're hiring!), where Mek directs OpenLibrary.org in memory of his personal hero, Aaron Swartz.

Mek is noteable for wearing a purple shirt branded with his name, a concept inspired by Sai. In 2015, Mek started tracking various aspects of his life in a public spreadsheet. He self-identifies as a functional minimalist and has few (but not too few) belongings.

Mek lives in Mission District, San Francisco at Serapeum, an epicurean community house named after the Serapeum Temple of Alexandria, considered to be the daughter and backup to the great Library of Alexandria). Mek lives with his three housemates Ariel Liu, Mishal Afzal, and Bobi Rakova. His former roomates include Drew Winget, Sahar Massachi, and Jessy Diamond Exum.

Early Life

Karpeles was born in New Haven, Connecticut and lived at 190 Shagbark Court in Cheshire, Connecticut (in this room). In third grade, Mek became interested in computer programming after discovering the features of AOL Instant Messenger. Mek attended Cheshire High School and remained in Cheshire until college-bound at 18, at which time his parents, Dr. Richard Karpeles and Patricia Dimond Karpeles, relocated to 21 Wild Rose Drive in Nashua, New Hampshire.

College

In 2006, Mek attended undergradute school at the University of Vermont (UVM) and received a bachelors of science in Computer Science. Here he led the Computer Science Student Association (CSSA) under advisory of Xindong Wu, Christian Skalka, and Joshua Bongard and met mentor, Dr. Gary Johnson, as well as friend and future business partner, Stephen Balaban. While at UVM, Mek was twice awarded the ACM Faculty award by the Department of Computer Science. During his junior year, as officers of the CSSA, Mek and Gary Johnson earned the opportunity to design and co-instruct a CS-095/CS-195 Special Topics course for three consecutive semesters. During his tenure at UVM, Mek interned at Microstrain, a wireless sensor company which later became LORD Sensing Systems. Much of his work relied on Aaron Swartz's web.py framework. In 2010, after graduation, Mek enthusiastically joined a PhD program at the University of Delaware to study computational linguistics. He was a teaching assistant for Richard Gordon's CISC 355 Computers, Ethics, and Society class and researched under Dr. Stephen Siegel in the Verified Software Laboratory.

Career

Shortly after, Mek suspended his graduate program to join Stephen Balaban as co-founder and CTO of Baybo Labs, a service which enabled self-publishers to create online stores to sell their digital merchandise. The team moved to San Francisco and in 2011 was acquired by Hyperink, a publishing startup from YCombinator's Winter 2011 batch where Mek spent the next year leading development of their hyperink.com platform. In 2013 Mek served a stint as ark.com's VP of Engineering before co-founding Hackerlist with Andrew Valish in 2013.

Presentations, Podcasts, & Interviews

2020-09-04 Internet Archive: Growing Open Source Community (slides)
2020-07-28 HOPE 2020: On Doing Good Enough
2020-05-17 Big Thoughts Little Talks. Episode 3: Mek on OpenLibrary.org and using technology to enable open access to information
2019-02-05 Open Library with Mek (What Origin Podcast)
2019-01-08 Decentralized Web Meetup
2017-11-04 Aaron Swartz Day 2017
2016-06-09 Decentralized Web Summit: Archive Labs
2015-03-16 SuperHappyDevHouse #53 Lightning Talks
2012-03-05 AngelHack 2012 SF

Projects

Want to meaningfully contribute to one of these projects?

Index

Openlibrary.org I currently maintain Open Library, the world's largest online, open-source, non-profit digital public library w/ 3M+ books. Become a contributor!
BookGenomeProject.org Like Pandora for books, a community and technology-powered data processor for revealing a book's unique characteristics
Peanutsforgood.org We produce made-to-order peanut butter and use proceeds to feed SF's needy. Buy a jar (or 2)!
Graph.global (video) aims to become a distributed global semantic database of unique entities (people, places, things) accessible by the entire World Wide Web. #memex We're open source!
Skillsera.org A community-powered encyclopedia which teaches educational concepts by connecting bite-sized youtube video explanations. We're open source & non-profit!

Archive Labs an autonomous, volunteer-run community (of 170) which incubate open-access and public good projects. Request an invite!
FromScrat.ch (pre-alpha) A wiki of composable, modular, axiomatic recipes for comprehensively creating fundamental technologies from scratch.

Hackerlist.net & Upscale spin-up an elastic team of AI software scientists
Miley.io (defunct) is the free, milestone driven, multi-project manager for ambitious people.
Open Journal Foundation unites institutions in universalizing public access to open journals & academic papers. Join working group!
WhyLoop Recursive explanations down to axioms.
Imperatives Make the world objectively better for everyone. Act on the most urgent imperatives.
Todo.rip (alpha) is a free, light-weight, frictionless, rolling todo list with slack-like commands
Dissertate.org (concept) Publish your directed path of academic readings to get to a conclusion
Math.mx is a zoomable taxonomy of thousands of math topics. Read the long term goal
Groovebox.org Listen to archive.org's collection of 135,000 live concerts, hundreds of albums and thousands of artists for free.
Baybo An all-in-one online platform for selling digital goods