Here at Document Cloud we’ve finally hired ourselves a Program Director to keep Jeremy, our lead developer, company. Someone to manage our impressive and growing list of document partners and help them get the most out of Document Cloud. Someone to develop some training materials and help our beta testers get started beta testing. For her first challenge, we asked her to write a blog post in the third person.

Amanda Hickman joins us from Gotham Gazette where, as the Director of Technology, she managed development of a series of games about public policy issues, built a pretty cool database of candidates for local office and shared an ONA award for General Excellence with her colleagues there. Prior to joining Gotham Gazette, she worked as a Circuit Rider, providing technology assistance and training to low-income grassroots groups in the U.S. working on anti-poverty issues and as a consultant to foundations looking for ways to support their grantees’ use of technology in organizing work. She taught an undergraduate course at NYU’s Gallatin School on using the Internet as an organizing tool. An active local organizer, she’s got her hands in a few community composting and gardening projects, too. If you ever tire of hearing about semantic analysis of primary source documents, try asking her about the dwarf crab apple trees at Greene Acres or what she does with 1300 lbs of compost every week.

She’ll be back here answering all your questions just as soon as she can manage.