CZ:Nomination page/Management Council/Dan Nessett

Greg Mullane, CZ's technical lead, has decided not to run for the Management Council. If he had decided to do so, I would have declined. However, I think we need senior technical staff representation on the Management Council to advise it on technical matters. This includes how we might decrease our costs for the servers that run CZ software.

The Management Council has the responsibility for the technical, financial and legal aspects of Citizendium. My qualifications in each of these areas are:

Technical: For 20 years I was a researcher, first at the Australian National University and then at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. This gave me experience in evaluating and creating new technology. I then spent the last 10 years of my career working in industry. I worked in software development for Sun Microsystems for 2 years and then as an architect, inventor and internal consultant in the Technology Development Center of 3Com Corporation (acquired in April of this year by HP). At the latter firm I was appointed a consulting engineer. From Aug. 1997 - Aug. 1999 I was a DARPA principal investigator examining active networking technologies. I am co-inventor on 22 patents, one of which is the basis for the IEEE 802.1x standard. Another provided the foundation for a 3Com product family.

Financial: I served as Director of Technology Strategy at 3Com. In that position I worked with 3Com's comptroller office and an external consultant to develop a rational approach to technology investment. This gave me beneficial experience in how organizations manage their finances.

Legal: My legal experience is limited. However, I was the president of QuietBird Consulting from 2002-2004. This provided opportunities to work with an attorney in crafting consulting contracts.

My Citzendium contributions have been mostly in the technical area. Here is a summary:

• I created the test wiki, so we can test out code and configurations before implementing them on the live wiki.
• I wrote the instructions for implementing clone CZ wikis on personal development machines (see A CZ clone on Ubuntu and A CZ clone on CentOS 5), so tech staff can fix bugs and develop new CZ wiki functionality without disrupting either test or live wiki operations.
• Along with Greg, I respond to operational problems, such as system and web server crashes, in order to keep the wiki running.
• After Greg Mullane installed our software version management system, I populated it with CZ's wiki software and have updated it with bug fixes, code enhancements and other changes (currently we are on the 148th version). I manage this software control system for Citizendium.
• I manage the bug management system (bugzilla) used to track and correct problems in the system infrastructure, wiki software and forum software.
• I installed a test forum in order to experiment with upgrades and changes to our forum software.
• I am currently refactoring the CZ wiki software in order to move CZ specific modifications out of the base on which our wiki runs (The Mediawiki software) into an extension and a patchkit. There are 36 modifications that require such treatment. I currently spend about 4-6 hours a day working on this.