About Aaron Beals

Aaron C. Beals is Director of Product Development. What keeps him up at night are the challenges of information access, which he first tackled in software engineering and product management roles at local startups Netezza and Endeca. For the last 4 years at GHD, he has been working to integrate information access theory with online communities of practice — Aaron leads the team behind GHDonline.org in helping health delivery professionals share and access the knowledge they need to deliver better care. Aaron graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology with a degree in computer science and electrical engineering.

Online Communities Are Easy, Right?

Posted on January 20, 2011 by Aaron Beals

Note: We have been working on GHDonline for about 3 years, and the site has been up since late June 2008. Generally speaking, we focus on community, platform, and content development and haven’t blogged much about what goes on behind the scenes here. While we’re going to be working harder than ever to improve the site, one of our goals for the new year is to give more insight into the team behind GHDonline. Expect to see more posts from us in the following weeks and months.

Last April, Joel Spolsky posted about some changes to StackExchange, a Q&A community platform built in the mold of StackOverflow and ServerFault (Q&A sites where software engineers and IT professionals ask and answer questions about tactical issues). The initial version of StackExchange allowed people to create their own Q&A sites on whichever topic they wanted.

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GHDonline.org is hiring!

Posted on November 9, 2009 by Aaron Beals

Over the past year and a half, GHDonline.org has grown from a concept to a full-fledged community and collaboration website where implementers working in health care delivery around the globe discuss proven practices, engage in problem-solving, and address challenges to improve health outcomes in resource-limited settings.

None of this would exist without software engineers building the platform on which GHDonline.org runs. If you are a software engineer with a few years of experience under your belt and are interested in making a difference in global health, this is your chance to join our team. We run Linux, develop in Python using the Django web application framework, and deploy on Amazon’ AWS — all in an agile development environment with a startup feel!

If you are interested, please apply here.