please welcome Jim Zemlin as our new Executive Director

To our workgroups and membership:

I wanted to send out a note introducing our members and workgroups to
Jim Zemlin, The Free Standards Group new Executive Director.  After a
long search process beginning back in January, our Executive Director
search committee (composed of Ralf Flaxa, Roger So, Dirk Hohndel, and
myself) found Jim Zemlin and unanimously recommended him to the Board of
Directors.  And after much interviewing and discussion, the board named
Jim Zemlin as Executive Director.  Jim will also be our first employee.

Jim has a long experience working with open source.  He was VP of
Marketing at Covalent since 2000.  Covalent Technologies is the leading
provider of enhancements for Apache and works closely with the Apache
Software Foundation.  Beyond impressing the board during our interviews
and later discussions with him, a former developer from Covalent I know
also thought very highly of Jim and I think he summed up how we feel
pretty well (it's nice to have chat logs).

  : the marketing guy.
  : Nice guy.
  : He's pretty sharp.
  : I like him.
  : He's energetic and a minimum-BS marketing guy.
  : A rare find.

I think that sums it up pretty well.  :-)

Jim has been busy since last week talking to people and coming fully up
to speed.  He has a pretty big job ahead of him: getting our standards
deployed, growing our membership, and managing it all.  So, please
endeavor to welcome him, help him out, he'll be contacting a lot of
people over the coming weeks.

I also wanted to apologize for not getting word out about Jim before the
press release was sent out.  We had intended to send out the release to
our membership, but there was a bit of confusion between who was doing
what between Jim, Scott, and me.  But, if you have any questions about
the hiring process, please feel free to ask me.

Regards,

Daniel Quinlan

Free Standards Group, Chairperson
Filesystem Hierarchy Standard, co-editor
Linux Standard Base, former Chairperson