Dawn Foster
Consultant, Fast Wonder Consulting

Web site | @geekygirldawn

Dawn Foster provides consulting services for companies wanting to engage with online communities by focusing on the business value of engaging with online communities and social media and helping companies find a way to engage that supports the overall strategies and business goals of the company. Dawn has more than 14 years of experience in business and technology with expertise in strategic planning, management, community building, community management, open source software, market research, social media, and RSS.

Dawn has experience and a passion for bringing people together through a combination of online communities and real-world events. Dawn has experience building new communities, managing existing communities, and providing consulting and advice to companies with a particular emphasis on developer and open source communities. While at Jive Software, she was responsible for building a new developer community for Jive’s new Clearspace product line and managing the existing Ignite Realtime open source community. She is a co-founder and board member of Legion of Tech, a non-profit chartered with organizing free events for the Portland, Oregon technology community. As part of her work with Legion of Tech, Dawn is an organizer for Portland BarCamp, Ignite Portland and other events.

Dawn holds an MBA from Ashland University and a bachelor’s degree in computer science from Kent State University. Previously, she worked at Intel, Jive Software, Compiere, and a Midwestern manufacturing company in positions ranging from Unix system administrator to market researcher to community manager to open source strategist. She uses a combination of technical and business expertise and education to help companies get real business value from participating in online communities. Dawn regularly blogs about online communities as the author of the Fast Wonder Blog, and she blogs for GigaOM’s WebWorkerDaily. She is the author of the book, Companies and Communities: Participating without being sleazy.