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Member Spotlight: Karen O'Donnell

Resume wrangler to a host of grateful wrrls, Karen O'Donnell is this month's spotlighted member. Karen is the Online Services Project Manager for the American Immigration Lawyers Association.

Talk about connections, she heard of the job through a posting on DCWW. Karen said, "Maybe it was good karma… I help other wrrls find jobs … and it's very satisfying to give back to the community."

Karen has pretty much stayed in the legal profession, although she's migrated to the technology end of the business. Karen obtained her JD from Golden Gate University School of Law in San Francisco. She began her professional career as a tax attorney and also edited an online daily tax newsletter. Karen said, "I've been doing this a long time," meaning that the newsletter was published in the era of mainframes, before GUI interfaces, when 2400 baud modems were state-of-the-art.

She moved on to writing about early childhood issues, having run the Head Start Bureau's bulletin board system. (When Head Start went the way of the Web, "That's when I became an Internet/Web diva," Karen commented.) How many of us can say what we write outlasts our tenure? In 1994, she wrote a short paper on online issues for a government agency which provided the rationale for why the agency should go online. Karen quipped, "It's a little piece of research that's held up well over the years." You can also read her contributions to an educational statistics agency and IRS testimony. Lest you think she's all government-ese, Karen also teaches HTML classes to regular people, like parents and teachers, too.

When not writing, Karen is webmastering. She's worked on the Head Start Bureau and the Aspen Institute. Another site for the Very Early Childhood Web was later folded into the Head Start Bureau's site. It doesn't faze Karen that what she has created lives only a short time in the electronic world. She's worked on conference web site, extranets, and "did some work on dot-com sites that are now dot-gone."

Karen is also actively involved in environmental issues. She said that, " If we can each take tiny actions in our own lives to help the environment, it will add up." You'll find her up to her hip boots cleaning out Four Mile Run on occasion. She obviously enjoys the outdoors, not just keeping America beautiful, but also jaunts to Grand Canyon, Yosemite, and Chicago. She plans to go to Memphis for "some blues and barbecue."

When asked about her favorite web sites, Karen offered these:

• Techsoup is a site aimed at nonprofits
• Try http://javascript.internet.com for cribbing JS
• For fun, I like Eurekalert.org and the Annals of Improbable Research

Contributed by Beth Archibald Tang

Curious to see who our previous member spotlights were? Check out our archives!

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