Employment Narrative
My employment experience includes a versatile range of management and content/web development experience, most of which demanded learning on the job. My first professional position, seven years as Editor-in-Chief of a national start-up magazine Alternative Press, required comprehensive development of skills in editorial/freelance contractor management, resource budgeting and print-production oversight.
During an additional eighth year at the magazine, I worked to launch the company’s first website, which initially involved negotiating contracts and fees with site developers, planning budgets for site set-up and maintenance, and obtaining clearances and rights from writers and photographers for content.
This led to the position of Managing Producer of Cleveland Live (Cleveland.com) for two years, overseeing development of specific website projects by working directly with area publications and local attractions/venues to share their content with this online guide to the city, while also providing oversight and guidance to other content producers. The design and overall presentation of the site was in continual flux, and it was important to adapt quickly to the company management’s evolving objectives.
My position as Content Developer at Zin Technologies followed, and for seven years, I was involved with a dozen NASA websites in a variety of capacities, from working with NASA points of contact to develop site content to promote their projects; to content databases to archive a project’s documentation history; to providing maintenance updates to an ASP.net database application on the Human Capital Development Branch (HCDB) site.
For all websites, ongoing adherence to government-mandated Section 508 guidelines provides me with a current knowledge of usability and accessibility issues.
This web development activity was balanced with outreach work that included developing handout and display materials for numerous events for the NASA Aviation Safety Program, including three years supporting the program’s detail-intensive presence at the EAA Airventure event and three years managing the logistics for the annual Weather Accident Prevention Review event.
This experience was further supplemented by serving as the Logistics Chair for the annual NASA ICNS Conference from its inception in 2001 to 2006. My work managing the budget, leading the event support team, and working with NASA Conference Chairs to ensure a smooth, professional experience for the attendees was met every year with a NASA Achievement Award.
Support has continued with this conference since 2006, after event oversight was handed over to the IEEE and AIAA organizations for the following year’s event, as I responded to regular requests for documentation and event statistics vital to the Conference’s future and continued to supported the event as Publications Chair, with a new website designed and developed for the 2008 event.
The aforementioned work at Zin Technologies, including website development, transitioned me to Analex Corporation in the Fall of 2006 with a change in government contracts. Notably, in of 2007, I worked with a fellow NASA contractor to take the existing, official, NASA CSS-based design theme and integrate it into the open-source WordPress content management system (CMS), performing proof-of-concept and Section 508 accessibility testing. Analex was eventually acquired by QinetiQ North America, so my role as NASA contractor continued for a tenth year in 2009.
At NASA, I continue to use, modify and upgrade this CMS implementation, which ultimately allows multiple NASA Glenn Research Center project and program websites (ones that specifically can’t or don’t use the main NASA public-face CMS) to be updated rapidly, and which provides the average HTML-knowledged user a method to more easily add a variety of content, static and dynamic. In February 2010, I provided these results in a February 2010 presentation to the GRC Webmasters Special Interest Group (WebSIG), “Using WordPress as a Content Management System (CMS) at NASA Glenn.” The work is documented at the website, NASA GRC Wordpress Users Guide.
Finally, to keep current on the state of web development and clients’ needs, I complement my experience with freelance projects (as owner of Empathik LLC) such as the Smoke Free Ohio website that helped lead to a successful campaign win in the 2006 election, as well as variety of small business and non-profit sites currently in development (see web site history in Portfolio).
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