Mike Nolan

Conducting mixed method study into how have the recent mass layoffs and rebudgeting within the Western technology industry impacted the sustainability and maintenance of FOSS.

Open@RIT is one of the first University Open Source Program Offices. We specialize in helping maintainers, researchers, and creators of Open Work develop communities of contributors around their work. My responsibilities included:

• Developing funding pipeline to receive over $1M in grant funding over 4 years.
• Overseeing development of all program initiatives, research programs, and technical infrastructure.
• Overseeing team of 5 student workers conducting software development, code review, design, etc.
• Developing novel approach to open source community building & publishing various policy initiatives.

Working with the UNICEF Venture Fund team and the organizations which have received an initial investment to develop a cohesive strategy with regards to software licensing, community development, as well as strategies to mitigate the risks of black boxed machine learning models. Outside of individual strategies, this position also included developing a number of resources for assessing and planning FOSS community strategy such as:

• FOSS community grading rubric
• Community development milestone planning documents
• AI data set schema templates
• Machine learning model transparency cards

Developing open source platform for low-skilled job matching program based out of the IRC's R&D team in Jordan.

• Creating machine learning classification service to find most relevant job seekers for any given job opening based upon existing job match data as well as evaluation exercise given to hiring managers.
• Built multi-armed bandit testing service to select various intervention packages for our beneficiaries in order to determine best performing intervention combinations.
• Lead engineering team in development of a job matching web platform, directly integrated into CommCare.

• Created mass short form video editing tools to process long form video, perform scene detection, and provide editing tools all within browser.
• Built new video editing experience for GIPHY Capture 3.0
• Worked on planning committee for creating specifications for inter-company microservice API contracts.
• Assisted in creation of company tech blog and leading of Open Source initiative

Rebuilt the video editor from the popcorn.webmaker.org project into a modular JavaScript library to be embedded on any website. Built python library which wraps ffmpeg to render video files from the edit decision list given from the popcorn editor

WXXI/Knight Foundation Rochester, NY Front End Engineer Worked on front end portion of Yellr, an open source civic journalism application. Wrote administration interface using Angular.js and SASS.

Helped design and build RESTful Java based API using Tomcat and a proprietary database used to manage schematic data model information. Later served as a mentor and on-boarded 3 other interns.

Research focus on how governance of technological development leads towards specific political outcomes for certain groups.

Minors in Computer Science and Free and Open Source Software

Created a spatial-temporal story-like experience that follows the diary of Mordechi, a Polish jew who was conscripted by the Russian empire to fight in the Boxer rebellion. Collaborated with Russian and Chinese historians and built out a custom CMS for  the Knight foundation project timemapper.js. mordechi.org

Developed Twilio powered SMS experience that showcased a part of the Sesame Seeds experience. This involved users being delivered personalized early childhood education content, push notifications, and Seasme Street themed phone calls. This effort was awarded a $100MM grant from the MacArthur Foundation Github