Hi, I'm Mel Chua. Mchua's my usual nick on wikis and IRC (and most everything in general).

My areas of expertise are largely:

  • engineering education research (Purdue University PhD in Engineering Education)
  • Free and Open Source Software/Content/Culture (veteran of Red Hat's community team, Fedora Linux's conference/marketing work, One Laptop Per Child's original engineering team, Sugar Labs's oversight board, and the Ada Initiative advisory board, among others)
  • Electrical/Computer Engineering, especially as it relates to the above two topics.

I'm generally happy to help with universities trying to raise awareness and Wikipedia editing skills in their community, so feel free to contact me about that. Before becoming a professor myself, I worked with other professors to bring open source/content participation to their campuses by running the Professors' Open Source Software Experience as an official Red Hat educational outreach program (it's now an NSF-funded project). I've worked with Harvard Law School, Purdue Engineering, etc. on Wikipedia-specific efforts in the past, and have also spoken at and helped to organize international Wikimania conferences (Boston, Taipei), administered several large-scale wiki efforts (OLPC and Sugar Labs) in both the technical and social sense, and worked with plenty of smaller teams trying to start a wiki-based infrastructure for their Free Culture projects.

Projects

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Some things I'm doing, or thinking of doing, as Wikipedia contributions. Comments totally welcome.