I’ve been waiting for over a year to write this blog post. I’m extremely excited to welcome Jess Mitchell on board as our new project manager for Fluid. Earlier this week, Jutta Treviranus sent out a great introduction to Jess on the fluid-work mailing list. Here’s a quick excerpt:

“Jess comes with an incredibly rich and relevant background in managing large, complex, distributed projects. She is very familiar with the academic environment, the schools engaged in Fluid and the open source and community source development process. Until recently, Jess was the Innovative Projects Manager at Duke University and managed, among many innovative projects, the Duke Digital Initiative.”

I’m impressed with how diverse Jess’ background is. She has a firm grasp of technical issues and was a volunteer with the Geekcorps project to build independent network infrastructure in Ghana. She’s managed a variety of projects in a higher ed setting, and has taught project courses at Duke University. Her academic background in Political Science and Philosophy brings a unique perspective on community building and open source culture. And I know she’s been learning a ton about inclusive design, too!

A quick bit of history: Fluid has been trying to hire a dedicated Project Manager for over a year now. Hiring at a university can be pretty slow and bureaucratic, and we had several promising candidates who were unexpectedly wooed away by offers from the private sector. Throughout this process, we took the time to be sure that we hired someone who will thrive within the unique constraints of a distributed, community-driven environment. I’m thoroughly confident that Jess will excel in this role, and she is committed to helping us communicate and collaborate better as our community grows.

On a personal level, I’m relieved by the prospect of being able to focus on technical leadership for Fluid. With all the task-juggling and cat-herding I’ve done over the past year and a half, it’s been hard to put enough attention towards architecture and coding. Now that Jess is on board, I’ll be much more focused on development work. I have a backlog of technical writing and coding to catch up with, so expect to hear a lot more from me on the lists and this blog with code examples, screenshots of new components, and more.

Jess will be based in Boston, but is planning to do a fair bit of traveling over the next few months. She’s also really interested in hearing from members of the community, so don’t hesitate to drop her a line. Please join me in welcoming Jess to the Fluid community!