Local First conf 2026

Johanna Dahlroos is a brand and product builder with ten years of conference‑organizing experience, focused on creating event brands that grow organically and define their markets. With a diverse background across design, web, and live events, she crafts end‑to‑end solutions that connect clear visual identity and thoughtful attendee experience for communities and beyond.

Emma Tracey is the co‑founder of Moat Studio and Cult.Repo, and has been organizing conferences for the last decade. At Local-First Conf she focuses on logistics and marketing, turning ideas into a smooth behind‑the‑scenes operations.

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Johannes Schickling is a builder and early advocate of local-first products and infrastructure, best known for co-founding Prisma and investing in teams rethinking how data is stored, synced, and shared. He works at the intersection of developer tools and humane software, backing projects that favour offline-first experiences, end-user ownership, and resilient distributed systems over centralised platforms. At Local-First Conf, Johannes brings a founder’s eye for product, a deep understanding of modern data stacks, and a practical path for taking local-first ideas from research into everyday tools.

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James Arthur is the cofounder of Electriq SQL, building local-first data infrastructure that lets applications keep fast, reliable state on users’ own machines while still syncing safely to the cloud. He focuses on making modern distributed systems and transactional sync feel like familiar SQL, so teams can adopt local-first architectures without reinventing their entire stack.

Adam Wiggins is a long-time champion of local-first software, co-founding Ink & Switch to explore how apps can be fast, offline-capable, and truly owned by their users. Through essays, research labs, and hands-on prototypes, he’s helped push the movement beyond theory. Showing how sync, collaboration, and data privacy can work without centralised silos. At Local-First Conf, he brings both deep technical insight and a clear vision for a more humane, resilient software ecosystem.

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Eileen Wagner is a local-first software designer focused on crafting humane, resilient interfaces for data that lives on users’ own devices first. As curator of a UX pattern library for local-first apps, she translates complex sync, conflict resolution, and offline states into clear, trustworthy user experiences, giving teams concrete patterns for building products that feel fast, reliable, and privacy-respecting by default.

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Boris Mann is a technologist, community builder, and COO at Ink & Switch, where he helps steward research into local-first software and new ways of collaborating without relying on centralised silos. At Local-First Conf he draws on years of ecosystem work, connecting researchers, founders, and practitioners and turning experimental ideas from the lab into communities, projects, and tools that move the local-first movement forward.

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