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Timlynn T. Babitsky
Ms. Babitsky is an educational specialist, executive level manager, grassrooots policy advocate, rural economic developer, professional writer and skilled public speaker.
Described as a ‘natural teacher’ by colleagues, she has designed and developed medical training materials for use in Saudi Arabia for Trainex Corporation, a Division of Baxter Travenol; statistics and statistical computing courseware for the Learning Skills Center and the Institute of Transportation Studies of the University of California, Irvine, and extensive and varied ESL learning materials for use with corporate and medical professionals for Kyoto Language Center of Kyoto Japan.
Ms. Babitsky has contributed to advancement of the Object Technology (OT) industry through her work in OT education and mentoring and her involvement in OT publications, conferences and consulting.
As a Senior Consultant in IBM's North American Object Technology Practice she designed, developed and managed the NAOTP Mentoring Program to service software developers across IBM and its worldwide corporate client base.
Ms. Babitsky oversaw development of IBM's Object Technology Competency Development and Skills Assessment process/test/interview protocols and IBM Education's School 1 and School 2 Object Technology courses. She designed and developed the entrance test for the NAOTP Object Technology Mentoring Program. This test passed all IBM requirements for validation and is still being used in IBM Education today.
Ms. Babitsky was the Director of Education Services at Knowledge Systems Corporation, in Cary NC. At KSC Timlynn developed certification procedures for Object Technology instructors, master instructors, course developers, and courseware. She instituted look and feel standards and rigorous quality control processes for all KSC educational materials and educational events. The ES offerings of KSC became and were considered the industry standard for a number of years in the object technology marketplace.
Prior to joining KSC, Ms. Babitsky was Vice President of JFS Consulting, a computer based, desktop publishing firm that designed, developed and produced tutorial/reference manuals in emerging object-oriented technology.
In 1998, Jim Salmons and Timlynn Babitsky founded Sohodojo, an applied R&D lab to support solo and family based small business entrepreneurs in rural and distressed urban communities.
Based on Sohodojo's research, and development of business models and Internet software to support sustainable rural communities, in 2002 Ms. Babitsky was recruited by Montana State University - Northern, as the founding director of the North American Rural Futures Institute (NARFI) under a two-year contract. As executive director, Ms. Babitsky designed and developed a five year plan for NARFI focused on a combination of NARFI-led projects and strategic collaborations.
Projects include: the Rural Futures Information and Community Outreach; Interactive Rural Futures On-line Portal; and the NARFI On-line Rural Futures Directory among others. Collaborations include: work on the North West Area Foundation-solicited "Ten Year Poverty Reduction Proposal" for Northcentral Montana (successfully funded); the Rise of the Creative Class in the Small research agenda extending Richard Florida's seminal findings for large urban settings in The Rise of The Creative Class; and the development of "wind power fever" in Northcentral Montana with the National Renewable Engergy Lab and the Montana Wind Working Group.
In support of Timlynn and Jim's work in rural communities, Richard Florida, joined the Sohodojo Advisory Board in December, 2003.
In November 2004 Salmons and Babitsky relocated to Fairfield Iowa to extend their research on the importance of Ties to rural community survival - what they call the fourth "T". Ties are networks of individuals who collaborate to get things done, and Ties that link small towns and rural communities to the global economy. (The other three T's are Richard Florida's Technology, Talent, and Tolerance as indicators of urban sustainability.)
Salmons and Babitsky have developed an ecosystem MODEL and an influence-not-ownership PROCESS that implement rural Ties. They are currently testing and extending both in work with a number of local, regional and global collaborators.
Ms. Babitsky has authored/co-authored over 30 technical periodical/journal articles. As an invited speaker she has presented at a number of conferences in both the U.S. and Japan.
Most recently the Montana Miracle case study which documents use of Sohodojo's influence-not-ownership process was requested by Allan Cohen and David Bradford, for inclusion in the second edition of their management classic Influence Without Authority.
Babitsky and Salmons have just completed a chapter "Affecting Change from the Grassroots - Making a Difference Without Power, Prestige, or Money" in the Idea Group Inc. book, Empowering Marginal Communities with Information Networks.
In 2005, Ms. Babitsky was invited to join the National Renewable Energy Lab's Distributed Wind Technology Strategy Team in recognition of her work in Northcentral Montana. She presented the influence-not-ownership process as a strategy for wind advocacy at the inaugural meeting in Boulder in August. She has just completed a Wind Advocacy Handbook for NREL based on the work she and Jim have been doing at Sohodojo, applied as an advocacy process to move agendas forward when working with diverse, sometimes contentious, stakeholders.
Ms. Babitsky is the founding Co-Editor of The International OOP Directory: A Guide to Object-Oriented Products and Services, published by SIGS publications, producing both the 1990 and 1992 editions. She served on the Executive Committee for the Association of Computing Machinery (ACM) sponsored OOPSLA (Object Oriented Programming Systems Languages and Applications) Conference, the technical conference of record for the object technology industry, in 1988, '89, '91, '92; the OOPSLA Steering Committee '92-'93; and was OOPSLA Conference Co-Chair in 1993.
Ms. Babitsky received her BA in Education at Newark State College (now Kean University of NJ), her Masters in Mathematical Social Science at the University of California, Irvine and was Advanced to Candidacy and had successfully defended her dissertation research for the Ph.D. degree at the School of Social Science, U of California, Irvine before leaving to pursue entrepreneurial activities in the emerging computer industry.
Ms. Babitsky was elected into Kappa Delta Pi, National Honor Society in Education ('65); was named a Summer Study Fellow at UCLA ('79); the Outstanding Teaching Assistant of the Year at U of California, Irvine (Social Science) ('81); and received the George Krambles Transit Foundation National Scholarship for High Academic Achievement in the Field of Transportation ('85); Best Paper Award, Public Sector Division of the Academy of Management Annual Meeting, ('85); University of California Regents' Patent Fund Grant for Doctoral Research ('86). She has traveled extensively and spent six years living and working in Okinawa and Kyoto Japan.
(c) 1998-2006 Jim Salmons and Timlynn Babitsky