Governance
WiredWest is governed by a Board of Directors, consisting of delegates from member towns that have established Municipal Light Plant departments, under M. G. L. 164 in their towns; voted to join WiredWest; and signed the WiredWest Communications Cooperative Corporation Agreement. The Board of Directors addresses major policy decisions and meets at least monthly.
The following are elected or appointed officers of WiredWest. The Executive Director and Treasurer are currently hired positions who are not on the Board of Directors. The others are all on the Board.
Douglas McNally graduated from Columbia University with a degree in Pre-engineering. He received a Masters degree in Curriculum and instruction in Science education and completed advanced graduate studies in Curriculum and instruction in Mathematics education at Teachers College Columbia University. After a high school teaching career of nine years, Doug moved to the Berkshires to accept an administrative position in the Pittsfield Public Schools. He served as principal at North Jr. High/Reid Middle School for fourteen years and then returned to high school as principal of Taconic High School where he served for seventeen years. After leaving Taconic he served as director of the Berkshire Readiness Center at Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts under the Race to the Top and Early Learning Challenge Grants. He continued to work at MCLA coordinating the Berkshire Early Learning Lab (BELL) grant training educators, pre-kindergarten through grade three, to develop and implement integrated Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts, and Mathematics lessons. Doug is a Select Board Member and MLP manager in Windsor where he lives with his wife on a small farm.
David is Vice Chair of the Executive Committee.
BA in Mathematics 1975 from Brown University
ME with specialty in Plasma Physics 1978 MIT
David worked as a Research Scientist at Aerodyne Research, Inc in Bedford, MA for 10 years before moving to Rowe, MA in 1988. Since then he has been self-employed doing free-lance work as a scientific programmer, computer consultant, and more recently website developer. David has been on Rowe’s Broadband Committee since 2006 and spent two terms on the Rowe Finance Committee.
David spends a couple of months each year at a monastery in the Himalayas (Sikkim) where he has created a custom Tibetan font and trained monks to use a desktop publishing system to preserve traditional sacred texts and drawings. Over the years he has witnessed Sikkim progress from barely having light bulbs to now having ubiquitous high speed internet and cell phone service while Western MA has languished. He looks forward to having more time to meditate once we get Broadband.
MaryEllen has over 30 years of experience in designing, implementing and supporting large-scale corporate enterprise communications networks. Early on she participated in the creation, operation and technical support of one of the first corporate email networks, eventually scaling to over 100,000 users worldwide. An early advocate for Internet connectivity, she was a key player in adoption of email gateways and other services allowing employee access to (and from) the Internet, and creating new business opportunities in Internet hosting and ecommerce. She was also on the core teams for 2 large corporate mergers, connecting independent networks with minimal service interruption and later part of the IT groups which developed and built new network architectures to enable employee and inter-company communications, leveraging the Internet to reduce cost and complexity.
MaryEllen loves living in in rural Massachusetts and inspired by the energy of the folks who work together to make sure our communities remain vibrant. She is a also volunteer at the Quabbin Harvest food co-op and for the North Quabbin Garlic and Arts Festival.
MaryEllen lives in the town of New Salem.
Jim spent 18 years as a project manager for Third National Bank, Bank of New England and Fleet Bank managing various software development projects and technology integration of acquired banks’ IT, operations, and branches. Following that, he worked for six years as a consultant managing KayBee Toys Year 2000 conversion; Gateway Computer’s Malaysia manufacturing operation year 2000 contingency planning; and developing policies, procedures, workflows, and templates to formalize and standardize Bank One’s Vendor Management practices to achieve CMM certification. Jim also managed the testing and vendor coordination for the Wall Street Journal’s conversion from manual to computer layout of the paper, and the development of policies, procedures, workflows, and templates and a reorganization plan for NY State Department of Labor IT Department. He has spent the last 6 years developing and managing websites for small and medium commercial and non profit clients.
Utilizing his financial industry experience, Jim has served for six years on the Cummington Finance Committee and 15 years as a selectman. He has also served six years on two school building committees, one resulting in a new $16million middle school and another a pending $20million rehabilitation of the regional high school to improve its energy efficiency.
Jim lives in the town of Cummington.