User:Darenwelsh

My extensions
These are both still in development and are customized for use at NASA. I will eventually make them generic enough for use elsewhere.
 * Masonry Main Page (on github)
 * Summary Timeline (on github)

Outreach
As a co-founder of EnterpriseMediawiki.org, I hope to connect users and organizations who employ MediaWiki in "corporate" environments. While this does not exclude public and non-profit organizations, the focus of this group is on an environment much different than that of Wikipedia. In an organization where member or employees are expected to contribute, it takes a different approach to stimulate user contributions. EMW also hopes to foster collaboration between organizations on new extensions to improve the usefulness of MW as an open-source knowledge management system in an enterprise environment.

How NASA Started Using MediaWiki
During my training in the EVA group, I was appalled with how difficult it was to find documentation and training materials. Coming from a prior job in software development and testing, I couldn't believe how little effort was put into revision control of these documents. Anyone could easily modify or even delete critical information. There had to be a better way. Why didn't they do it like the rest of us? When we want to learn something, we search on Google and Wikipedia.

After years of trying to find the right people who could envision the same system as I had in mind, Jamesmontalvo3 joined the cause and helped make it happen. Since 2012, we have been developing and using an in-house semantic wiki using MW and several extensions. Once we had enough working examples of how powerful this tool can be, we gained approval and support. As of 2013, the MOD EVA group uses the wiki as the core of its knowledge management and we are working to set up multiple instances of similar wikis that can integrate for all of MOD. There's even discussion of how we could make this tool available to astronauts aboard the ISS.

Music
Sometimes I spin music:
 * Beat Portfolio
 * Mixcloud