About the Contributors

Stephen Ibaraki - Port Moody, British Columbia, Canada

Stephen Ibaraki, has been working with technology since 1965 with roles as entrepreneur and company founder, board chairman, board director, president, chief strategic alliance and strategy officer, chief business development officer, vice-president of strategic relations, business plan author and leader, advisor to fortune 1000, senior industry analyst, senior educator and program head, research head advanced professional programs, Gerson Lehrman scholar, division director and founder, journal publisher, managing editor, chief editor, book author, writer, blogger and podcaster.

Microsoft Profile (2005-Present—invited senior industry advisor on technology and strategy to Microsoft Canada and Microsoft Redmond):
http://blogs.technet.com/b/cdnitmanagers/archive/2006/03/15/stephen-ibaraki.aspx

CIPS founding fellows’ profile (board director, vice-president, chairman & president national board, advisor to the office of the executive council [OEC]--2005-Present):
http://www.cips.ca/?q=stephen-ibaraki and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_Information_Processing_Society

Founding chairman global board, Global IT Community Association (GITCA); global board director and advisor as past chair (2008-Present): http://itpro.community.officelive.com/BoardMembers.aspx

Most Valuable Professional (MVP) profile (2006-Present): http://www.webcitation.org/5p0vbkxu

The Mark News author profile (2008-Present):http://www.themarknews.com/authors/479-stephen-ibaraki

NPA founding distinguished fellows profile (vice-chair, publisher, managing editor, contributing editor, director certification board, chair college of distinguished fellows, chair editorial board, board director--2004-Present): http://www.npanet.org/public/leaders/stephen_ibaraki.cfm

For more information, do a search on "Stephen Ibaraki".

Graham Jones - Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada

Graham graduated in Chemical Engineering in the UK over 40 years ago. Over those 40 years he has had a very varied and rewarding career, including process plant design, operation and management; Project, Engineering and IT Management; software and web development; teaching windows desktop and Office, and now dedicated volunteer. He has had a passion for computers ever since his university days and his pioneering approach to the use of computers often helped to solve engineering problems where more traditional manual methods had failed. At the tender age of 50 he went back to school to formalize his passion for IT and has worked in the IT industry ever since.

Sharing knowledge and experience to help others has always been a constant whether professionally or via volunteer work. This includes providing free IT services to non-profit organizations such as the Surrey Food Bank; acting as a mentor for S.U.C.C.E.S.S which helps new immigrants to find work in IT in Canada; acting as President of VANTUG for the past 10 years during which time membership has grown from 200 to over 1500, and most recently as Chair of the Global Board of GITCA which, with a global membership of over 700 organizations representing over 4 million IT professionals, is the world’s largest, independent, not-for-profit organization devoted to the development and growth of the IT Community. He is a Professional Engineer (P.Eng.) in British Columbia, Canada, has passed the Project Management Professional (PMP) exam and achieved the Microsoft MCSD (pre .NET) designation. He is a guest contributor on the Microsoft Canada IT Managers blog and IT Pro blog.

Ashwin Kini - Mumbai, India

Ashwin is passionate about Networking technologies. He works as Technical Consultant CNC on JD Edwards / PeopleSoft ERP with M/s Systime Computer Systems Ltd., Mumbai; a division of CMS Ltd. He holds a Masters in Computer Applications, Bachelors in Computer Applications, and Diploma in Mechanical Engineering. He is also a Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer.

He was awarded the 2008 Microsoft’s Most Valuable Professional (MVP) in Windows Server Customer Experience: Networking and the "Best IT Professional Community Contributor” in India for 2010 by Microsoft India.

He is an active member of IT Professionals communities and volunteers as Vice Chairman (Global Board) for the Global IT Community Association (GITCA), an international not-for-profit organization devoted to the development and growth of the IT communities world-wide. Prior to taking up the role of Vice Chairman (Global Board), Ashwin served as the Regional Chairman APAC (Asia-Pacific) for GITCA since 2008. President of Mumbai IT Professionals User Group (MumbaiITPro); a panel member of Microsoft Online User Group Advisors, and Microsoft User Group Support Services steering committee.

He also serves as a member of the Program Committee for the 45th Computer Society of India (CSI) National Convention as the Track Chairman for Communities, Managing Committee member at the CSI Mumbai Chapter.

Leadership and Team building are the areas of his highest interest. His IT expertise is the areas of Windows Networking and freelance as “Subject Matter Expert” (SME) for Windows client, server, and virtualization solutions.

Meera Joseph - Johannesburg, South Africa

Meera Joseph has over 10 years academic and research experience in the Information and Communication Technology (ICT) and social science fields. She engaged with many non-governmental, academic institutions and governmental organizations to ensure rural and urban women's partnership and capacity building in various developmental projects including WiEBE. Her research interest is "ICT for rural women empowerment". Her passion for web development and her industrial experience in the late 1990's enabled  her to design and maintain many web portals for Faculty of Engineering and the Built Environment at UJ including WiEBE for the past few years. Meera Joseph, a Senior Lecturer at the University of Johannesburg is involved with curriculum development, co-ordination and lecturing IT subjects for the entire Faculty.

She coauthored and authored many publications in SAIEE journal, chapter in edited Springer book, IEEE Xplore online library and IFIP conference proceedings. Her first journal article won the institute premium and cash award by the SAIEE, South Africa on February 26th, 2004. She is currently finalizing her PhD on the topic “A framework for rural women empowerment through the use of ICTs”. She is committed to empowering women and producing high quality work related to her field. Visit her blog. She is a professional member of Computer Society of South Africa.

Tetsuro Kakeshita - Saga, Japan

Tetsuro Kakeshita is an associate professor at Saga University.  His research interest is to handle complexity which lies in computer software and database.  In order to realize his research result, he actively cooperates with various companies.  Recently he developed file management software utilizing multiple classification trees and OLAP operations in order to systematically classify large amount of shared files stored in a file server.

As an educator, he took a central role to build an educational program based on Computer Science (CS) at Saga University.  The program was accredited by JABEE in 2003 so that the program has an international equivalence.  Since 2004, he is an evaluator of JABEE accreditation teams.  Through these experiences, he deeply recognized importance of cooperation among industry, academia and the government.  In 2007 he founded the Forum for IT Professional Development at IPSJ (Information Processing Society of Japan).  The purpose of the forum is to exchange ideas and challenges at various universities, companies and the government and to promote cooperation among them.  Qualification for ICT Professional is an important theme for the forum as well as for IPSJ.  Currently he is a member of IPSJ committees for IT professional development and for education.