Community Service

I have always enjoyed community service activities that take advantage of my work-related skills and interests. Over the years, I have been active in a number of different community service activities.

BostonCHI

My longest-term commitment is to the professional association for people interested in human-computer interaction. I have served on the BostonCHI Steering Committee since 1992, hosting the monthly at Sun Microsystems for about 15 of those years. Now I help with publicity and help out at the monthly meetings.

NetDay

In 1996, several years after joining Sun Microsystems, I became involved with NetDay in Massachusetts as one of Sun’s representatives. NetDay was a grass-roots effort to wire all the schools in Massachusetts for the Internet. I worked with several schools in low-income areas to create their school’s first web sites. This experience caused me to recognize that teachers were dramatically under-prepared for the advent of the Internet. I spent six months traveling around the state interviewing teachers who were early adopters of the Internet. Based on these interviews, I put together a 4-hour course for K-12 teachers called an Introduction to the Internet for Teachers. This course, which I offered free of charge in Sun’s training facility, allowed teachers to obtain professional development credits. Over the course of two years, I had approximately 500 teachers take the course. My colleagues at Sun volunteered their time to help the teachers during the hands-on portion of the class.

In addition to my community service activities, one of my Sun Labs research projects, the Wiring For NetDay Hands-Free Manual, was designed to assist NetDay volunteers learn the skills they needed to help wire their local schools.

Open Wonderland Foundation

After leaving Sun in 2010, I founded the Open Wonderland Foundation to act as the new governing body for the Open Wonderland project. I have volunteered my time since then to run the Foundation as the Executive Director. This involved hosting many community meetings, running the on-line forum, and managing the Foundation’s various web properties.

Team Photographer

I volunteer my time as the team photographer for both my daughter’s high school varsity soccer team and her equestrian team. You can see some samples of my work, as well as links to the team websites, on the Photography page.