Lili Gangas

Lili Gangas is chief technology community officer at the Kapor Center in Oakland, where she co-leads the Equitable Tech Policy Initiative. Her work asks who gets to build with technology and who is merely subject to it, a question that runs from broadband access in a household to the compute capacity behind a research lab. The Kapor Center describes itself as working at the intersection of technology and racial justice, spanning K-12 computing education, postsecondary pathways, workforce, and venture capital. Gangas holds the part of that portfolio concerned with policy and with the communities that policy either reaches or misses, which is the same distributional question CalCompute exists to answer at the infrastructure layer.

The Equitable Tech Policy Initiative, launched in 2022, tracks and advocates on California legislation across computer science and AI education, worker protections against automated decision systems, algorithmic accountability, and equitable infrastructure. In October 2025 the Kapor Foundation published its position across more than 50 California bills, listing SB 53 under equitable infrastructure alongside broadband and data center transparency measures. That is the statute that created CalCompute. Gangas also speaks for the foundation on the national funding side. When the Kapor Foundation joined Humanity AI, a $500 million, five-year commitment from ten foundations covering democracy, education, the humanities, labor, and security, she framed the stakes plainly: “This moment requires deep, transformative collaboration across disciplines, sectors, and approaches where AI delivers for humanity.” The foundation had already committed close to $10 million to AI justice and equity work, including Oakland’s Innovation Hub and the Brookings Institution AI Equity Lab.

Her policy service extends to the federal level. Gangas was appointed to the Federal Communications Commission’s Consumer Advisory Committee, focused on what emerging AI systems mean for consumer privacy, and previously served on the FCC’s Diversity and Inclusion working group. She has participated in the Aspen Institute’s Latinos and Society digital equity work, the Aspen Fair Data Future initiative, and Rock Health’s Latine digital health innovators working group, and was named a Technology and Emerging Leaders Initiative leader by the Aspen Policy Academy in 2024.

Gangas came to policy through engineering. She began as a senior multi-disciplined software engineer at Raytheon Space and Airborne Systems, building firmware and hardware solutions for aerospace. She then became a founding member of the Innovation Services team at Booz Allen Hamilton, where she specialized in crowdsourcing, prize challenges, and open data solutions for federal agencies, the practical mechanics of opening a public institution’s problems to people outside it. She moved to Silicon Valley as an associate principal on Accenture Technology Labs’ Open Innovation team, connecting startups with large commercial clients across sectors. That sequence, from building the systems to procuring them to deciding who gets access, informs how she reads infrastructure proposals.

In Oakland she has spent more than a decade building the ecosystem she argues for. She helped establish TEDxOakland, where her talk on responsible technology pressed two questions at the industry: just because we can build it, should we, and just because we can scale it, should we. She serves on the board of the Unity Council, the Fruitvale-based social equity development corporation, and has advised the Oakland Startup Network, TechHire Oakland, AI4ALL, Techqueria, Latinas in Tech, and 1Degree. She organized Startup Weekend editions focused on women and social impact, has lectured in the MBA program at Mills College, and is building LTXConnect.org, a Latine-focused multimedia platform.

Gangas holds an MBA from New York University’s Stern School of Business, a B.S. in electrical engineering from the University of Southern California, and a systems engineering certificate from UCLA Extension. An immigrant from Bolivia, she has been named to Latino Leaders’ 100 Most Influential Latinas, ALPFA’s 50 Latinas to Watch, and the San Francisco Business Times’ Most Influential Women in Business and 40 Under 40 lists, and was an Omidyar Network Digital Luminaries fellow and a New America California fellow for Tech for Good. Her through-line is that infrastructure decisions are equity decisions, made once and lived with for a generation.