Bill Fitzgerald Email & Phone Number

Portland, Or, Us

Portland, Oregon Area

At FunnyMonkey, we worked primarily with educational organizations and social justice oriented non-profits to build systems that supported communication, learning, and community growth. While we often solved problems with technology, we looked at writing code one means of many to address needs. When working on a project, we found two questions helped inform the scope:* Why is this project essential? * How is the organization staffed to maintain the successfully launched project over time?With these questions in mind, we would work with people to define goals and a process for the project, and figure out design, training, staffing, user experience, and technical needs. FunnyMonkey worked primarily with open source tools and openly licensed content, and regularly released code and tutorials under open licenses to support reuse. While the range of our work varied widely by project, most projects involved the general areas outlined below.

San Francisco

As the Director of the Privacy Evaluation Initiative, I worked with a small, talented team to design a system to evaluate privacy policies, terms of service, and basic information security of commonly used EdTech apps.The Privacy Evaluation Initiative is led by over 140 schools and districts. The central deliverables of the work are the individual service evaluations, but the foundation of the work rests on communication and outreach with different stakeholders.The Privacy Evaluation Initiative requires an equal blend of custom software development, original research, technical expertise, a thorough understanding of legal compliance issues, an understanding of how education and pedagogy are mediated via technology, and an ongoing commitment to building comunities and partnerships. The ongoing work of the Privacy Evaluation Initiative includes:* growing and staffing a consortium of schools and districts. In 2016, the District Consortium grew from 30 to 140 participating schools and districts.* publishing a 17,000 word Information Security primer. The information security primer is released under a Creative Commons license, and is available as part of the Common Sense Privacy site, and on Github at https://github.com/billfitzgerald/infosec-primer* building and maintaining an API that harvests the text of privacy terms. We currently have terms from around 1200 software applications archived. It's worth highlighting that the Policy API could be used with any text that is available online, from Wikipedia to a NY Times article to an openly licensed textbook.* surveying 1125 commonly used web sites used by youth to get a sense of how these vendors supported encryption and other security best practices, and writing up a 5000 word research summary.* creating a five part, 6000 word series on personal privacy, and how an awareness of how to maintain privacy can help reduce filter bubbles and increase information literacy.