Meet the Candidates!

1. Molly Duncan

Molly, President and Creative Director for Desert Elements Design, brings over 16 years of graphic design and media arts experience to the table. Her creative ideas in defining a look and brand with clients have helped set Desert Elements apart from others. Molly has kept her website and graphics design skills current with futures and trends in this growing field by applying her MFA in Media Arts and Computer Science; and has built from her core skills in graphic design using a rapidograph pen and paper to the first version of Illustrator on a black and white Mac. She brings strengths from a diversified background, including graphics for an architecture firm, layout and design for magazines, making jewelry, designing, marketing and producing her own line of children's clothing, and website design. She has also taught as an adjunct professor at the New School in New York, and is one of the founding members of Desert Elements Design.

2. Jane Hill

Jane heads up Cyber Mesa Telecom, an early entrant into the Internet, and now a competitor with Qwest and WindStream for voice service as well. Her grandfather was a sheep rancher near Springer, so she first visited New Mexico at the age of 2 (a very long time ago).

After college Jane lived in Athens, Greece, for 12 years. She and her son moved to Santa Fe in the last few days of 1980. The 80s were spent as a commercial photographer specializing in fine art bronzes. Toward the end of the decade she made a modest investment in a new, local computer company. By 1991 she was working full-time for the computer company. It was a hard way to make a buck, so at the end of 1993 she decided that the company would become an Internet Service Provider. Various events and trends later led Cyber Mesa to apply to the Public Regulation Commission to become a Competitive Local Exchange Carrier (CLEC). Cyber Mesa maintains equipment in telecom central offices through special agreements with Qwest and Windstream. It offers voice and data services in many parts of New Mexico.

Jane has been a member of the NMIPA since 1999, and she has served on the Board for 6 of the intervening years. She helped with the Web site (in its previous iteration, before DotNetNuke). She contributed articles to the Internet Informer, and also designed and edited more than one issue. More recently – at the end of last summer – Jane unwittingly took over the JumpStart program. She has worked with designers, updated the Web site (jumpstartnm.org) and set up a system where the NMIPA actually makes a modest profit.

Having just written extensively about myself in the third person to match the other bios, let me say that the NMIPA Board would probably benefit from an old, experienced anchor that has only - ever - missed one Board meeting. I would like to stay on the Board, and I would appreciate your vote. Thanks.

3. Chris Kramer

4. Mike Kruchoski

Mike Kruchoski will be a ten-year NMIPA member this fall -- not quite a founding member, but he's seen a few of our more "colorful" members come and go.  As a past membership chair, he was responsible for having persuaded a few of them to maintain their memberships, perhaps a bit longer than they ought to have.

Although Mike didn't help Al Gore (and Barb Tomlin) invent the Internet, he's been a long-time computer network user, dating back to the distant days of gopher, WAIS, and other archaic predecessors of the Worldwide Web.  Heck, he's even used lynx and Mosaic browsers.  Mike was once a self-taught BBS sysop who could do a complete system backup -- a whopping 20MB! -- in less than three minutes, while others took more than three hours.  Today, he's just a retired scientific analyst and engineer, with more than 35 years experience in a variety of military, technical, and social disciplines.

Always the skeptic about the "Internet snake oil" peddled during the early heyday of Internet commercialization, he's a down-to-earth realist.  He stays focused on making technology work for us, not the other way around.  He never lets technology become a substitute for real relationships with people.  (It's just a tool, folks, just a tool.)  He loves to debunk technologists' starry-eyed claims and help everyday users find tools that work for them.  He promises to do a conscientious job on the Board for you.

5. Michael Odza

6. John Schroeder

7. Peter Small

Peter Small has over 21 years of software engineering experience in many different environments from data analysis, avionics, to multimedia authoring systems, to ultrasound machines, a few years working in Redmond, WA, and a founding employee of Ingeniux Corporation in Seattle, WA.  For the past 10 years, he has been involved exclusively in web applications.  He was using AJAX before he knew it be that name.  A fanatic about code quality, Peter brings a software engineering approach to web development.  He is also an ardent Mac user, since the advent of OSX.

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