• BS software engr.
• 2 decades in IT industry. worked at 2 dotcoms
• now mainly working in enterprise Java
• amateur complexity theorist. studied P vs NP since college
• esp interested in lower bounds, complexity class separations, and circuits
• dabble esp. in empirical inquiries/approaches

^{my current philosophy of participation (didnt wanna write following but feel compelled. will delete it when circumstances chg.)}

• massive untapped potential & possibility here. this software is cool & powerful and potentially even revolutionary. ie could be a gamechanger for collaborative research techniques coupled with cyberspace.
• think site should allow & encourage/promote work on the famous open problems of CS. you guys really wanna bag important proofs on here or not? lets attack big kahuna stuff on here like... [gasp!] P=?NP
• opposed to heavy handed moderation here, eg quickly or unilaterally closing questions
• some brilliant researchers on here but think site is scaring away solid researchers based possibly on somewhat narrow and artificially limited scope. ie too conservative/constrictive & maybe actually less useful to "professional researchers" for that reason.
• think more reverence to elite researchers in the field should be given & determine the direction more than agenda of grad students and Phd candidates mostly now running the site
• my test problem for the site was this one on tm compression which I believe has many deep links to the theory & have actually done many wks of empirical research on! it was promptly closed in less than ~2hr by kaveh. (much more on that in meta.) 1yr ago he said in his election, "As far as I understand the regular tasks are "deleting obvious spam, closing blatantly off-topic questions". does that look blatantly off-topic to you?
• find kaveh, other moderators, & some respondents aloof, unhelpful, critical, unconstructive, & overly rigid/inflexible so far. he says in his profile he wants to hear about disagreement, but he really doesnt listen or care... unless you're a Phd or have high rep maybe! coincidentally, apparently kaveh is the only moderator that became one by election instead of earned reputation (10K normally reqd, which the other two moderators suresh & david earned...see the gory details on the election here). seem to think goal/job is mainly gatekeeping to "kill lame content" rather than "pump up awesome content"
• bottom line, could make a solid-or-better contribution to site based on my knowledge/bkg & high participation but am right now just trying to avoid being "the nail that sticks up gets hammered down"