I'm running for the 2018-2020 AST Board of Directors

I’m running for the 2018-2020 AST Board of Directors this year. I’m asking for your Vote! (If you are an AST member you’ll see an email for voting on August 6th!)

If my name sounds familiar to you it could be because I ran and failed to be elected to the AST Board of Directors last year. (If at first you don’t succeed…?) Or it might be because I run and host AST’s webinar series which you might have attended, seen a blog post about or even read a newsletter article about. Or maybe I answered a question you sent to the AST via a web form, or maybe I taught your BBST class.

The point is I’ve been around helping out AST for a long time because I in it’s mission, only I think I can do more and I’m willing to dedicate my time to do so.

As part of the nomination process all of the candidates answered member-submitted questions. Please read mine and let me know what you think (even if you aren’t an AST member.)

After the questions were published a few things came to mind and might influence whether or not you’d vote for me:

• This current slate of candidates isn’t as diverse as it could be because no women are running. From the sounds of it, the women and PoC who the board reached out to didn’t want to run or weren’t qualified. This makes the diversity question even more important and goes back to my original point -> we need to have a diverse membership in order to be able to tap those people for board candidates.
  • I love the questions regarding diversity. It’s a hard problem but I like that we are actively thinking about it.
• CAST, the Conference for the Association for Software Testing, is partially PayToSpeak (the amount they cover isn’t enough for international speakers) which can have an impact on the diversity of speakers who can attend (only those who can afford to travel on their own dime). If elected I’m definitely going to change this.
• When I ran (and lost) last time, one of the board members who won didn’t continue into the second part of their term. This happened the year before as well. Basically what I’m saying is this is a tough job but I’m willing to do it.

All of this is a way to remind and ask those AST members to vote for me when the time comes!