Introducing Jon Ericson

From the very beginning of the project, OpenSSL has depended on a community of experts to enable secure and private communication. It’s safe to say that without volunteers contributing code, tests and documentation, we wouldn’t have the modern internet. In order to preserve and grow that ecosystem, the OpenSSL Foundation has brought in Jon Ericson as its first Communities Manager.

Jon began his programming career as an intern at the US National Weather Service where he designed software to test instruments for the Automated Surface Observing System (ASOS). He continued as a programmer at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) with the Shuttle Radar Topography Mission (SRTM) ground-data team. When that project ended, he managed data processing for the Tropospheric Emission Spectrometer (TES) mission which collected global atmospheric data from heliosynchronous orbit. Along the way he participated in open source projects such as Perl and Emacs via Usenet groups and mailing lists.

When Stack Overflow launched in beta, Jon joined that community by asking and answering questions that came up in the course of his work. Over time he grew into a leadership role in the site’s Meta community and was later hired as a full-time community manager. He advised dozens of Stack Exchange communities ranging from philosophy to gardening to space exploration and beyond. While the job was generally more social than technical, Jon used his programming knowledge to automate community elections and collect data about social dynamics on the sites.

More recently he’s worked with a variety of communities that focus on topics such as college admissions, investing, PostgreSQL, and nutrition for dogs. Jon’s technical skills come in handy when communities need their software to be customized or fixed. With deep understanding of community dynamics, he’s turned around dying communities and laid the groundwork for new growth.

As Jon learns about the OpenSSL community, he’s excited to get to know people who care about the project and its mission. If you have insight to share, please contact him via jon.ericson@openssl.org.