Pete Read

Role: Manager, trainer and consultant

Pete is an experienced project manager and has significant experience at board level in the private sector and as a Chief Executive for a charity in the Voluntary sector; He has also managed significant projects into the statutory sector working with a number of government departments in England and Scotland.

Matthew Shepherd

Role: Web Development, Web and Graphic Design

Matthew has a strong background in industry, having worked at the cutting edge of automotive design for 8 years.

Before joining our team, Matthew took on projects as a freelance database specialist, creating bespoke web applications for a number of clients, working with Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP (LAMP) - exactly the same combination as is seen in Drupal.

Matthew is a great asset to the team as he is both a qualified graphic designer and a technical developer of web systems.

Matthew is a qualified to Masters level and is qualified in Graphic Design and Photography.

Nick Blundell

Role: ICT Development Worker and Open Source Software Developer

Nick has a background in computer science research (networking and multimedia systems) and has skills and expertise in the following areas:

• Software development (in Microsoft Windows and Linux using Java, c/c++, c#, .NET, visual basic, x86 assembly, tcl, python, php, etc.)
• Linux and open source systems
• Networking protocols and systems (e.g. multicast, peer-to-peer systems, etc.)
• Multimedia communications (e.g. VoIP, video, digital-signal processing, etc.)

Nick is very keen to utilise the latest technological innovations, especially those in the vibrant open source community, to find practical solutions for the VCO sector. Currently Nick is using and researching the following offerings:

• the ubuntu Linux distribution
• django : an all-python web-development framework
• drupal - a powerful open source content management framework