Connectable Dots

Hi! Please call me Gail. I use my middle name mainly for disambiguation, as they call it at Wikipedia, since there are other impressively talented and active women named Gail Williams. This is just a semi-stuffy bio I’ve used for speaking engagements and the like. Not very conversational, but this may be interesting to somebody, sometime:

Gail Ann Williams is the Director of Communities at Salon.com

She currently directs Salon’s community initiatives, and oversees all aspects of the operations of their two noteworthy forum-based online communities, Salon Table Talk and The WELL.

She served as Executive Director at The WELL prior to Salon’s acquisition of that acclaimed site in 1999. Originally, Williams got involved in online communities in 1990 as part of a CompuMentor volunteer project to match nonprofits with expert computer professionals. She joined the management team at The WELL — originally the Whole Earth ‘Lectronic Link — in 1991 as Conferencing Manager. Williams served as the primary official liaison with the system’s users for ten years, responsible for the human issues in the legendary discussion community. She managed and trained a dozen staff members and assisted and trained hundreds of volunteer conference hosts, produced monthly face-to-face events, and moved to overseeing all operations. Williams has project-managed, spec’d and QA’d a series of interactive software development upgrades and feature additions over the years.  She’s been deeply involved in developing and expressing policies in the communities.

Williams has spoken on online community management issues at such diverse gatherings as Computers Freedom and Privacy, South By Southwest, MacWorld, IEEE Community Networking, VirComm, CommunityNext, Web 2.2 and Online Community Summit.

Prior to her work at The WELL, Williams was a leader in alternative theater, in both creative and management roles. She was was a core member of the award-winning satire collective, the Plutonium Players, and a writer, performer and co-director of their long-touring hit comedy show about right-wing extremists, “Ladies Against Women.” Her years in theater were marked by her dual focus on irreverent satire and on intense audience interactions, including improv.

Her current passions include social networks, wilderness, baseball and photography. She is a frequent poster at Flickr, as fotogail. In 2000, she was honored as one of the Top 25 Women on the Web.
——————————————–

This blog has infrequent and overly long posts. It exists both to test drive the wordpress platform, which I like, and because I have ideas that are too convoluted to go into WELL conversational posts or Flickr captions. Thanks for reading.