Dave Atkins

Current

Principal at Dave Atkins Media!
Editor at WestwoodBlog
Blogger at DaveWrites

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Past

Content Manager for /Recovery at Mass.gov
Social Media Strategist at Heroix
Technical Operations Manager at Spire

Engineering Manager at QuitNet.com, Inc.
Director, Engineering Operations at ConsumerReview.com, Inc.
Manager, Operations at RealCommunities, Inc.
Director, Online Services at Decisive Technology Corporation
Online Projects Director at Smart Valley, Inc.
Editorial Assistant/Director at US Senate Committee on Veterans' Affairs

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6 more...

Education

Seattle University School of Law
Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Recommended

10 people have recommended Dave

Connections

199 connections

Industry

Internet

Websites

Dave Atkins’s Summary

Writer, IT professional, and community activist who uses social media and technology to solve problems by applying a range of skills from over a decade of hands-on technical work in startup companies, coupled with several years of blogging and social media writing.

Dave Atkins’s Specialties:

social media communications, interactive media, technology operations and web application development

Dave Atkins’s Experience

Principal

Dave Atkins Media!

(Internet industry)

December 2008 — Present (1 year )

Dave Atkins Media! provides strategic advice and technical services for companies seeking to execute social and online media communications.
Editor

WestwoodBlog

(Publishing industry)

November 2006 — Present (3 years 1 month)

I created WestwoodBlog to inform and connect residents of Westwood, Massachusetts. The site is a blog built on the Drupal platform with other community features to create not only a blog, but a resource for residents. I have worked offline to involve our Selectmen, residents, and business leaders in discussing public policy and promoting community events. The blog has become a trusted alternative media source in a town of about 13,000 people, receiving approximately 1,000 unique visitors per month.
Blogger

DaveWrites

(Internet industry)

October 2006 — Present (3 years 2 months)

I started blogging in 2006 with DaveWrites--my exploration of how I blend life, work, and action to live a creative life. Many of my posts are on issues of economic development as I see much of the intersection of work and life revolving around how we relate to our communities. Ultimately, economic development is about the growth of those communities, the infrastructure we build, and how we plan for the future.
Content Manager for /Recovery

Mass.gov

(Internet industry)

May 2009 — October 2009 (6 months)
Social Media Strategist

Heroix

(Privately Held; Information Technology and Services industry)

January 2009 — August 2009 (8 months)

Developed and executed a social media engagement strategy for Heroix including blogging, Twitter, and Facebook.
Technical Operations Manager

Spire

(Online Media industry)

December 2006 — December 2008 (2 years 1 month)

Spire created a resource targeted at affluent consumers looking to get the most value from their travel and dining experiences and share perspectives on living a quality lifestyle. As an internal project of the larger parent company Circles, I used principally open-source tools to build out an operations platform that saved the company tens of thousands of dollars in IT expenses, allowing resources to be directed to development and content.

To avoid hardware build-outs, I set up virtualization. To maximize our reporting capabilities and generate timely metrics for evaluting the effectiveness of our site, I set up mysql replication and created php-based reporting tools, installed open source monitoring applications, and created a load-balanced archtecture based on apache/mod_proxy and squid.

Our small distributed team needed ways to collaborate more effectively, so I deployed a wiki and integrated Wordpress with a structured blogging plugin (converts posts to xml) as a hybrid content-managment system to allow editors to post content to our core application--based on the Liferay platform.
Engineering Manager

QuitNet.com, Inc.

(Public Company; HWAY; Health, Wellness and Fitness industry)

July 2002 — December 2006 (4 years 6 months)

QuitNet helps people quit smoking by connecting them to a vibrant community of supportive users, integrated phone counseling, and other health services through a web site and backend member/community management applications.

When I began, we had only two engineers. I worked with our systems engineer to stabilize the platform (IIS/vbscript/MS Commerce Server) and, through a series of server relocations, get the equipment out of a closet and into a hosted data center. Our developer was a brilliant coder, so I focused on administering Microsoft SQL Server (~50GB data over a dozen databases) myself and making our operational technology as bullet-proof as possible. We needed a faster, more efficient means to generate business reports, so I coded vbscript reports with Excelwriter to create complex reporting spreadsheets for our partners.

Our budgets were always minimal, so I planned a series of incremental improvements--load balancing, database log shipping, automated/scripted deployments, etc. to keep us moving forward with the money we had.

QuitNet also applied for several patents and administered research studies (R01, SBIR)--I offered my legal experience and drafted up key privacy documents as well as managing the patent application process.
Director, Engineering Operations

ConsumerReview.com, Inc.

(Internet industry)

November 2000 — June 2002 (1 year 8 months)

I managed a team of 9 engineers to develop web applications and operate the internal and external company networks. I migrated our many websites from older technologies (ASP Classic) to one of the first implementations of Microsoft.NET. During development, following a series of company layoffs and reorganizations, I took direct leadership of the effort as Director of Engineering and completed the project with dramatically-reduced staff. When I left the company, the completed application was successfully managed by two developers and a single systems engineer.

I led the development team through a difficult time of layoffs while keeping focused on a technology project necessary for the survival of the company.
Manager, Operations

RealCommunities, Inc.

(Internet industry)

November 1999 — November 2000 (1 year 1 month)

At RealCommunities, I worked with the first software engineer to get his prototype running on a Netscape web server and Oracle back end. As the company grew, I managed QA, and worked cross-functionally with product managers, a Director of Engineering, and a software team.

I did a little of everything, including project managing our integration with our first two customes.
Director, Online Services

Decisive Technology Corporation

(Internet industry)

May 1997 — January 1999 (1 year 9 months)

My role at Smart Valley made me eager to join a real start up company. I found such an opportunity as the first web developer at Decisive Technology, where I created a perl-based online reporting interface to support the company's email surveying tool.

As web-based customer and employee satisfaction surveys caught on, I grew my role into hiring and leading a team of web developers who built "dashboard" applications for companies that hired Decisive Technology to conduct their surveys.

My team grew to include half a dozen developers, and our division went from being an experiment to being the core business, with my manager becoming CEO.
Online Projects Director

Smart Valley, Inc.

(Internet industry)

October 1995 — May 1997 (1 year 8 months)

Smart Valley was a great opportunity for me during the beginning of the first wave of internet development in Silicon Valley, allowing me to serve as the "webmaster" for a nonprofit spun off from Joint Venture: Silicon Valley. We provided facilitation and project management for commuinty/corporate partnerships around technology projects such as "NetDay"--wiring California schools to the internet. I used the opportunity to learn the technical details of systems adminstration and web development and how to create web-based collaborative efforts--such as the NetDay volunteer database and SmartVoter (http://www.smartvoter.org), probably one of the first websites in the country to allow voters to generate personalized sample ballots with integrated candidate-provided information.
Editorial Assistant/Director

US Senate Committee on Veterans' Affairs

(Government Agency; 11-50 employees; Government Administration industry)

January 1994 — March 1995 (1 year 3 months)

After graduating law school, volunteering and organizing several grassroots political campaigns, I moved to Washington, DC determined to find work on Capitol Hill and ultimately a policy-influencing role in Congress. My editorial and desktop publishing skills helped me land a position as Editorial Assistant for the Senate Committee on Veterans Affairs.

I produced all Committee publications including hearing transcripts, bill reports, and the yearly legislative activities report. I automated the Committee's process to turn around publications in a matter of weeks instead of months.

My objective was to use this job to get "Hill Experience" while I searched for a more policy-related job.However, with the 1994 Republican sweep of Congress, I realized my opportunities were dramatically reduced, and I decided to start my life anew and move to California.