Whodunnit…

The “OpenWetWare Develpers” blog is written by Bill Flanagan.

Bill is a software developer working at MIT in Drew Endy’s lab 100% dedicated to allowing OpenWetWare to continue to grow. His experience is in developing software systems to facilitate collaboration. His goal is to help biology lab scientists to use OpenWetWare to complement the way they currently do their work. If you want to know what biologists want and need, you go to where the biologists are. At MIT, Bill’s located in the lab. He gets to see first-hand how things work.

Bill has been working on MediaWiki, the PHP/MySQL software that drives both Wikipedia and OpenWetWare, for the last few years. He’s written extensions hacked templates, connected it to other systems, and has worked to optimize its performance for large deployments.
Bill’s work in this area started at Lotus Development in 1990 on Lotus Notes. It integrated a multitude of software tools into one package, all designed to allow groups to work together more efficiently. Lotus Notes helped to express the dimensions of online collaboration: individual users could interact with data in a way they could not before. It made people aware of the possibilities of how software could connect people and data together that we all see through the Internet today. He worked closely with Iris Associates, the creators of Notes, to build the Notes API. It integrated other applications with Notes, allowing people to more efficiently move data within business processes or between them . He eventually became a Consulting Engineer responsible for architectural planning and oversight of many aspects of the Lotus Notes server.

He also worked as a consultant and systems architect for Perot Systems, building some of the first major business-to-business electronic commerce systems for the Internet.

Bill also server as the CTO of Ozro, a software company that created a collaborative application framework for moving the complex process of negotiation onto computer systems. He holds 4 patents for his work on that system.