John O'Duinn

John O'Duinn has written code and led teams in organizations ranging from four-person startups to nonprofits to multinationals—including the US Government as part of the Obama White House, for the US Digital Service. For more details, see: www.linkedin.com/in/joduinn

As a computer guy, John is comfortable with high stress, high ambiguity projects and enjoys using his skills with large complex distributed systems to solve problems that make a measurable difference to real humans.

In addition to technology, John loves growing a culture where diverse groups of humans work well together in a distributed global workplace. He has worked in distributed companies of one form or another for 28 years and led distributed teams for 14 years. Over the last 7 years, he has consulted at large organizations in transition; mentored fast-growing distributed companies; and presented at universities, startup incubators, and conferences. In addition to writing “Distributed Teams: The Art and Practice of Working Together While Physically Apart”, John also helped write the State of Vermont’s “Remote Worker” law – a very different approach to Economic Development which was so wildly successful that John is now helping draft bills and write policies for multiple other jurisdictions worldwide.

John received his B.Sc. and M.Sc. in Computer Science from Dublin City University (Ireland), blogs on oduinn.com, has a Shodan black belt in Aikido, loves travel and is on track to fill his passport again. So far, John has lived and worked in 13 cities across four continents.