Andrew Cowie is a long time Unix and Linux user & advocate, but somewhat unusually was an infantry officer in the Canadian army, having graduated from Royal Military College with a degree in engineering physics. He saw service across North America and a tour in Bosnia. He later ran operations for an mobile internet company in Manhattan and was a part of recovering the firm after the Sept 11 attacks.

Andrew now runs Operational Dynamics, a consultancy helping clients worldwide with crisis management: crisis prevention, proactively evaluating organizations for resiliency and disaster preparedness; change management, helping plan and execute major upgrades to their critical infrastructure; and troubleshooting, working with people to solve difficult problems in uncertain and complex environments, be they financial or technical ... at levels ranging from the board suite to the engineers doing hands-on implementation.

On the technical side, Andrew has extensive experience as a Unix/Linux sysadmin, Java developer, and has long been an Open Source advocate and a contributor to the GNOME Desktop. Most recently, he has been involved as maintainer and author of the java-gnome bindings library, allowing you to write GTK programs from Java.

Andrew has wide experience as a corporate director, having served on the boards of international organizations promoting excellence, leadership and innovation amongst youth; advocating Linux; and promoting Open Source professionals' interests.

Andrew is a frequent conference speaker, presenting about increasing the level of professionalism in the operations world, and encouraging people to get involved in the cause of freedom, both in software and in the world beyond.

Although he loves to travel and is frequently abroad with clients, you can usually find him online as AfC on irc.freenode.net or irc.gnome.org.

See the contact page for other ways to reach him.