An introduction to your new Director of Standards Development and TC Adm

As a follow-on to Scott's announcement of my joining OASIS as the new Director of Standards Development and TC Administration, I thought you might appreciate a bit of background on who I am and what I bring to OASIS.

I have long been involved with XML and OASIS. My employer was one of the founding organizations of SGML Open in 1993 and we built the consortium's first website (fondly known as "SGML Open House" for any of you who remember it). I also served on the TAB in its early years and co-chaired the LegalXML Legislative Documents TC. I feel well versed in both OASIS process and culture.

I first got involved with SGML back in 1991 when my staff and I built a markup-driven, multi-output technical documentation publishing system for a database software company, Information Builders, Inc. I later worked at Matthew Bender, a boutique legal publisher, and at LexisNexis where I managed the development and implementation of content architecture standards and governance for their legal, news and business information products. My most recent position before joining OASIS was at Bloomberg LP, where I used XML data and metadata to package legal information in new and useful ways for customers.

Throughout all these roles, I have concentrated on helping my management, peers and colleagues understand how the use of data standards adds efficiency, reliability and economy to the process of developing complex, inter-related information systems. I have also sought to manage the push and pull between long-term strategy and short-term practicality in productive ways that let us all get work done while making continual improvements in our systems. I hope those experiences will prove helpful in my new roles here at OASIS.

The new Standards Development team at OASIS consists of me, Paul Knight, and (partially) Robin Cover. Let me say from the start that I am indebted to Robin for his extraordinary service as transitional TC Admin. I intend to take full advantage of his knowledge of the open standards landscape in general and the OASIS TC Process in particular as I come up to speed in my new role. I am also grateful to have a seasoned OASIS veteran like Paul onboard. As a team, we are committed to providing you with the assistance, instruction, and advice you need to ensure your goals are met and your TC work is productive.

I will be reaching out to as many of you as possible in the weeks ahead to learn more about your work, your plans, and what I can do to help. In the meantime, if you have any immediate needs, questions, or comments for me, please don't hesitate to get in touch. I am open to your input and excited to be working with you all.

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