Dave Lane - Curriculum Vitae

Open Source Technologist - Open Education Resource Foundation

June 2015 – present

Administer and enhance the Foundation's open source infrastructure to enable collaboration among its member institutions and provide software development services contributing towards a global online compendium of tertiary curriculum materials on WikiEducator and on the OERu website. All of this content is licensed under Creative Commons terms to encourage reuse. Work with the Foundation's thirty+ tertiary institution partners to facilitate collaborative development of Open Educational Resources, and identify technical and social aids for building the growing global OER community.

I maintain a Technology Blog to help others make use of the same open source technologies employed by the OERu. Here're some of the technologies I currently implement, support, and use daily.

Publication:

Lane, D. C., & Goode, C. (2021). Open For All: The OERu’s Next Generation Digital Learning Ecosystem. The International Review of Research in Open and Distributed Learning, 22(4), 146-163. https://doi.org/10.19173/irrodl.v23i1.5763.

Director - Lane Ventures

May 2015 – present

Created a new company as a business vehicle to take full advantage of future professional and business opportunities and to support contracting opportunities in the short term.

Senior Consultant - Catalyst IT Limited

December 2012 – April 2015 (2 years 5 months)

Became senior consultant in the new Christchurch office when Catalyst IT acquired Egressive on 1 December 2012. Performed many roles to help establish the Christchurch office, undertaking commercial work, integrating Egressive customers, maintaining relationships, and helping to build a harmonious, peerless technical team.

Commercial activities included designing complex IT projects, complex multi-stakeholder consultation including mediation, business and requirements analysis, managing projects, tender (RFP, RFI) responses and presentations, and even licensing and contract negotiations. I participated in marketing, presented at conferences, did Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) advocacy, and lobbied government.

Began developing technical IT training materials and conducting training for external and internal customers including other Catalyst trainers.

Director - OpenStrategies Holdings Ltd

2000 – July 2013 (13 years)

Owned and licenced materials and technologies to operating companies OpenStrategies (NZ and UK) Ltd. Both operating companies promote the system developed and refined by four Christchurch-based founders, providing a unique method for creating large scale, multi-stakeholder strategies which can be rigorously validated. Supported by a graphical web application developed by Egressive. In 2013 we transferred the company's assets to the NZ operating company. Co-founded and hold shares in all three companies.

Director - Egressive Limited

September 1998 – December 2012 (14 years 3 months)

Started Egressive to meet demand for reliable, secure and cost-effective networked business IT infrastructure. Initially focused on system integration, installing Linux business servers providing a broad range of services like network file storage, backup, security connectivity, and email. Expanded over time into IT consulting and bespoke web application development, all built on and with FOSS tools.

Employed as many as twelve staff, with my role becoming more focused on software team management, and business development, marketing, and account management. When acquired by Catalyst IT in 2012, had seven staff and a hundred customers - governmental, non-profit, and commercial, specialising in scientific organisations - throughout NZ and in Australia to whom we provide some combination of development and hosting, system integration, communication, support, and consulting services.

After 7 year developing bespoke PHP web applications in 2006 we shifted to custom implementations of the Drupal CMS.  We built a strong team with web design, development, and dev-ops specialists. Moved into Test Driven Development and Continuous Integration, adopting the Ruby on Rails platform and Scrum (Agile methodology) for some projects.

Provided high availability scalable Drupal and Ruby on Rails hosting on virtualised Linux servers on our own hardware. I shared system administration responsibilities. Integrated AWS for unlimited horizontal scalability, CDN services, and static website fail over.

Director - Effusion Group

February 2002 – April 2011 (9 years 2 months)

Co-founder, co-director, and shareholder of the Effusion Group Ltd, an umbrella company supporting our IT and software development cluster comprising as many as twelve companies on the top floor of Kenton Chambers in Central Christchurch. The company was disestablished shortly after our building was destroyed in the February 2011 Christchurch earthquakes.

South Island IT Manager – NZ Forest Research Institute

1997 – February 1999 (2 years)

Formalising my previously informal role at NZFRI's Christchurch office, in addition to my research duties.

Research Scientist - NZ Forest Research Institute

October 1994 – February 1999 (4 years 4 months)

Worked for NZFRI on a PGSF funded project to optimise “bucking”: quality grading felled Radiata Pine (pinus radiata) stems in the where felled and sawing into transportable lengths to maximise the resulting timber and pulp value. Developed TreeGrabber made up of a GPS unit, digital camera, and computer vision system (C++ on portable Linux computer) to capture stem images and compute dimensions and grade stem quality, use cellular data transfer to coordinate measurements with other forestry crews and fill outstanding timber orders. Initially based at Lincoln University's Department of Resource Engineering, spent 9 months as a visiting scholar in Seattle, WA, USA at the University of Washington, College of Forest Resources, and then returned to NZFRI's offices in the School of Forestry, University of Canterbury, Christchurch.

Publications:

• Lane, D.C. and G.E. Murphy. "A multi-image digital photogrammetry tool for tree stem geometry and quality assessment." Proceedings of IVCNZ95, Image and Vision Computing NZ Conference, Lincoln, NZ. August 1995.
• Lane, D.C., Xin Tian, and G.E. Murphy. "New Developments in Stem Feature Recognition using Machine Vision." Proceedings of the LIRO 98 Forest Technology Seminar, Rotorua, NZ. November 1998.
• Lane, D.C. and G.E. Murphy. "Towards An Automated Tree Stem Description Using Machine Vision." Proceedings of Digital Image & Vision Computing: Techniques and Applications, Australian Pattern Recognition Society (ASPRS), Albany, Auckland, NZ. December 1997.

Deputy Chair - New Zealand Open Source Society

December 2020 - August 2021 (9 months)

Also a voluntary role with the Society. In August, I resigned from the Council to create opportunities for new leadership after my long involvement in the Council including 9 years as President (now called Chair). I continue to manage all the NZOSS' online services.

President – New Zealand Open Source Society

August 2011 – December 2020 (9 years)

Voluntary role with the Society, a registered charity. Chair monthly council meetings, presided over sponsorship and educational activities. Implemented and support NZOSS' online services.

Advisory Group – Creative Commons Aotearoa New Zealand

July 2014 – July 2017 (3 years)

On the Advisory Board of CCANZ, concerned with enhancing the knowledge and use of Creative Commons attribution rights (implemented on Copyright Law) in Aotearoa New Zealand.