Moving to Australia

Melbourne, 1st January 2012.  Hello – My name is David F. Flanders. This blog post is being published as part of my move to Australia from the United Kingdom as I begin my new job at the Australian National Data Service (ANDS). As my job includes working with Universities accross Australia, I thought a quick bio on my background and experience (up to this point) might speed things up so we can get on with the exciting innovation of making research more openly reusable!

My background: the most obvious thing when you meet me is that I have a funny accent: I was born in Colorado (two States over to the right from California, with the Rocky Mountains running through the middle of it). I grew up in the United States, and went to Colorado University in Boulder for my undergraduate degree. I took a gap year living in Spain and Portugal prior to doing two postgraduate degrees in the UK, one in Renaissance Theory and Culture (with emphasis in computational humanities) and the second in Information Systems and Sciences (empahsis in the Semantic Web).  I’m proudly a dual citizen of the UK and US.

Previous working experience in the UK includes (chronologically):

• Intern at a small software company specialising in 3D modelling
• Database Developer at the British Library (for the teaching and learning department on learning objects),
• Multimedia Developer at the University of London
• Project Innovation Manager at the Bloomsbury Colleges (Repositories, VLEs, CMSs, CRMs, Cloud and developer communities around these systems), and most recently
• Programme Manager, Digital Infrastructure team at the JISC (with responsibility for programmes in Linkeddata, Geospatial and Identifiers).

My job at ANDS (Senior Business Analyst) includes three significant remits: 1.) overseeing the management of projects and their deliverables (I lead our software assessment team), 2.) analysing the products that come out of projects and making those available for other institutions to reuse (via our Product Catalogue), and 3.) encouragement of an independent developer community. I also lead and advise on various technical innovation initiatives given my developer background, though I pride myself in translating the technical into human terms.

In my spare time I dabble in 3D printing, reading on the beach (hence the move to Australia), the history of Universities and their organisation and discovering the wonderful culture and geography that is Australia (“we are eternal tourists“).

I look forward to meeting you face-to-face (this virtual stuff just doesn’t quite do it when it comes to knowing humans!)

~ by dfflanders on February 19, 2012.