506 N State St

Ann Arbor, MI 48104
(734) 239-3836 [email protected] @wecanconnectus

Ron Suarez, Ph.D.

I would like to apply my experience as a paradigm shifter to assist the state of
Michigan with addressing the Digital Divide. I am particularly interested in new
technologies, e.g. Althea’s pay-per-forward bandwidth market and Helium’s
decentralized wireless infrastructure. We need to make systemic changes that
level the playing field for ISPs to compete in a free market and provide
last-mile services that will extend middle mile networks to unserved and
underserved areas.

EXPERIENCE

Broadband Institute Foundation, Ann Arbor, MI Founder
2022 – PRESENT
Volunteer, Board Chair of this charitable, educational Michigan nonprofit
We create and curate educational materials, licensed as Creative Commons, to
address the Digital Divide by teaching community members to build and own local
Broadband Internet infrastructure. Together we can make the Internet be like the
sidewalk connecting people, students, teachers, nonprofits and businesses with
our P2P (peer to peer) learning Platform Cooperative.

LoudFeed, Inc., Ann Arbor, MI — President, Founder Founded 2006
2010 – PRESENT: LoudFeed is a two person consultancy (Ron Suarez and Margarete
Koenen) providing a full spectrum of web and mobile tech services for Social
Good, from digital strategy and branding to solutions with WordPress,
BuddyPress, CSS, HTML and JavaScript. Ron does more of the architecture and
modeling, while Margarete spends more time editing code and debugging.

2017 Worked with NYC Mesh – https://nycmesh.net to begin developing educational tools for help with scaling a decentralized model of community owned networks for Broadband Internet access.

2015 – 2016 Primarily engaged in pro bono services to create web properties supporting horizontal communication tools for grassroots activists involved in the Bernie Sanders primary campaign. Ron was an elected as a NY 14 CD Delegate, pledged to Bernie Sanders.

1 of 4

2014 – 2015 Designed and developed a social network for Management Sciences for Health, with online courseware for healthcare administrators in Africa fighting HIV, TB, Malaria and Ebola. See: https://leadernet.org We also developed GovScore Global, http://bit.ly/govscore – a governance maturity assessment tool. Phonegap and the JavaScript FLOT library were used for a mobile app governance survey with mobile offline data collection and online data visualizations.

2011 Ron Suarez and Margarete Koenen were developers #1 and #2 for the website that registered 9,000 users in 100 Working Groups for Occupy Wall Street. We used a Multisite WordPress installation with BuddyPress to build a social network, where each Group maintained minutes of their meetings, their own calendar and discussion forum. We thus centralized the engineering, but decentralized content control that enabled each Group to employ consensus democracy for governance and decision making. Today we work with other technologies that grew out of the Occupy experience: Loomio.org for consensus decision-making and OpenCollective.com for financial transparency and fundraising.

2006 – 2010 Loud Feed was originally spun off from Object Insight in 2006 to help music distributors, labels and artists manage and monetize their music, video, show ticket info and related metadata using their own branded web site and e-commerce enabled social media widgets. The Loud Feed platform included an integration with Amazon Web Services for storage, bandwidth and e-commerce, plus Clearspring technologies to support widgets for dozens of social networks and blogs. I began podcasting services for independent artists, e.g. Aimee Mann, in 2005, and built Toolshed.biz, a music promotion site for 30 independent labels in 2006. Artists included: Ani DiFranco, Beastie Boys, Spoon, XTC, The Chemical Brothers, and Cat Power. In 2007 LoudFeed managed the creation of tools used by Tunecore to deliver music for artists into iTunes, Amazon, Emusic and Rhapsody. In 2008, we launched MyReggae a digital music store with over 10,000 albums in the catalog. In 2009, I built a social networking site for the American Association of Independent Music.

Object Insight, Inc., Ann Arbor, Michigan — President, Founder

1997 – 2009

I founded Object Insight to create “UML for the rest of us” (Unified Modeling Language). Object Insight’s JVISION tool was a lightweight, round trip software engineering tool for Java programmers, which generated code from diagrams and also reverse engineered diagrams from code. Thousands of customers preferred our approach to the IBM, Rational Rose heavyweight approach. JVISION customers included: USGS, Detroit Edison, Dresdner Bank AG, HewLett Packard, Harvard Business School, GTE, Gartner/ Griggs-Anderson Research, Florida State University, FermiLab, Federal Express, FAME, ESRI, Millennium Pharmaceuticals, MCI, Lockheed-Martin, Knight Rider New Media, Kaiser Foundation, IBM, Honeywell, Pratt Whitney Canada, Oracle Corp., Nortel Networks, National Bank of Georgia, Motorola, Mitre Corp., Raytheon, Swisscom AG, Sprint, Sony Online Entertainment, Smith, Kline and Beecham, SDRC, Schlumberger, Sandia National Laboratories, Quest, Chase Manhattan Bank, ThoughtWorks, Inc., Tivoli Systems, University of Michigan, Wells Fargo Bank, and Yale University.

2 of 4

As JVISION reached the end of its product life cycle and Object Insight went back to the consulting business, I provided Object Technology training for companies like UNISYS and the Santa Fe Institute. I managed consulting projects including large scale digital asset management for JSTOR and ProQuest (two of the largest providers of digital “text oriented” libraries). We architected JSTOR’s next generation Java based system in 2003, which provides millions of students worldwide with access to virtually every online academic journal at thousands of universities. We also implemented the Open Archives Initiative for bibliographic metadata management and updates.

City Council, Ann Arbor, MI — Elected Councilmember 2006 – 2008

I worked to hold back special interests from wasting taxpayer money and create more transparency in government. It wasn’t easy to go from being a serial entrepreneur to the bureaucracy of government, but I continue to believe that many more citizens need to take a turn in government. I was on the Cable Commission, the Liquor Commission, the Housing Board and I was the Chair of the Zoning Board of Appeals.

Arbor Intelligent Systems, Ann Arbor, MI — President, Founder 1988 – 1998
I sold Arbor in 1998 for $3.1 million, after building Arbor on a $30,000
investment. Recruiting over USENET, I built the company from 3 to 30 engineers
with a focus on Object Technology from Smalltalk to Java. I ensured the success
of a multi-year “process monitoring system” project at an electric power plant
for Dayton Power & Light. Influenced by the HyperCard UI, in 1988, I developed
a HyperMedia Power Plant Interface Building Toolkit with drag and drop
features. Plant diagrams were scanned and links to live data could be added by
technicians with high school educational levels. In 1992, when Ford needed an
“automobile design change management system,” I mimicked early group
collaboration software change management (in tools like Smalltalk ENVY) to
build a system used by 15,000 employees worldwide involved in the design
process. I designed the Arbor Help System product, which enabled
non-programmers to create context sensitive online help in the live application
(an early example of the “Stay on Page” usability design pattern). Arbor
contracted with Sun Microsystems for curriculum development and delivery of
Java programmer training (Java Factory). I also personally created curricula
and led training sessions for expert systems development and Object Oriented
Analysis and Design. Arbor was a part of the Chrysler payroll project with Kent
Beck. This project inspired the Extreme Programming book series and influenced
the move to Agile methodologies.

Small Systems Guild, Ann Arbor, MI — Co-Founder, Director

1986 – 1988

Co-Founder, Executive Director and Project Manager for computer consultants worker owned cooperative: In 1986 we organized MacHack and the first National Apple Users Group Conference, Ann Arbor, MI. Under contract with Apple, we developed curricula and delivered nationwide training for Macintosh programmers. I was also the Project Manager for Dayton Power & Light’s contract.

3 of 4

ACADEMIC POSITIONS
University of Michigan, Albion College, Eastern Michigan University— Teaching Assistant, Post Doctoral Fellow, Assistant Professor

1976 – 1986
Teaching and research with a focus on Cognitive Psychology and Human Factors
Engineering laid the theoretical basis for later work with the Object Oriented
paradigm, agile methodologies and user experience (UX). Work included
computerizing a Cognitive Psychophysiology Lab, which I directed, writing a
successful Federal grant proposal and supervising a staff of six from 1981 –
1986.

Downstate Medical Center, Brooklyn, NY — Technician, Statistician 1974 – 1975
I worked in a lab conducting sleep research with alcoholics.

Maimonides Hospital, Brooklyn, NY — Technician, Statistician 1973 – 1974
I worked for Dr. Stanley Krippner in an ESP Dream Lab funded by the US
Government National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH).

EDUCATION
New York University, NY, NY

BA Mathematics, 1967 – 1972

City College and City University of New York, NY, NY

Part-time Psychology Masters Courses, 1974 – 1976

University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI

Ph.D. Cognitive Psychology, 1976 – 1981

University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI

Post Doctoral Fellow Cognitive Neuroscience, 1981 – 1985

University of Virginia, Charlottesville, VA

School of Commerce Business Certificate, 1986

4 of 4