I'm Linda, and I'm your SWSC Representative candidate for the 2-year seat in the July '09 USGenWeb election.
Back Story
I was born and lived more than a third of my life in Philadelphia, PA, then lived in rural Oklahoma for 15 years. In 1995 I relocated to Johnson County, Kansas, in the Kansas City metro area, and have been here ever since.
I've been an IT professional for almost 20 years, and my career has always been focused on the web. I've been a webmaster, web designer, database developer, software engineer, business analyst, and project manager. I've worked for large corporations, small private businesses, and had my own web development business in the dot com days.
Most of my ancestry goes back to Philadelphia and the research has been slow and very expensive - it's all there to find, but I am not there to find it. Meanwhile, in this part of the Midwest, births and deaths weren't even recorded until into the 1900s, and newspapers were sporadic at best - precious little ever existed for the first 50 years of settlers.
So, for the reasons above, I chose to donate my time helping local non-profit organizations that preserve history and genealogy by providing them with websites and improving their visibility. This was also my primary driver 5 years ago to create the Digital Cemetery project, a comprehensive photo-index and study of the cemeteries in my county.
USGenWeb
I joined KSGenWeb 4+ years ago, not long after starting the Digital Cemetery. My short-term goal was to join forces to provide as much access to local data as possible.
Since joining, I've donated cemetery indexes and such to other USGenWeb participating sites, and over time I adopted some orphaned sites. I've been pretty successful with the sites for where I live, but the one out of my area - not so much. All my participating sites are listed in the right column under USGenWeb.
I served one year on the Election Committee and still remember the process. I left the EC to become the National Webmaster and did my best to keep the state, special project, and archive links updated while many of the projects changed hosting and acquired domain names.
My values are
- To make genealogy available free on the web.
- To help others make genealogy free on the web.
- To make the most of what we have.
- To help grow USGenWeb into the future.
Most importantly I will do my best to listen to and represent Coordinator issues and concerns, follow the bylaws and Sturgis, learn the ropes, and earn your trust.
I am open to all ideas and channels to increase positive communication, project participation, project growth and positive excitement. And I'm happy to listen to and help promote or pilot new ideas.
The Project is what we all make of it together, and I urge you to vote this year. We have a proposed Bylaws change on the ballot that, if passed, would change the method of amending the bylaws in the future from a 2/3s majority to a simple majority. Please read more: http://usgenweb.org/volunteers/notice.shtml
Respectfully,
Linda K. Lewis
webmaster@cottonhills.com
http://digitalcemetery.blogspot.com/
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