Jill Foster was originally a physicist with a first degree in Physics, an
MSc. in Solid state Physics and a postgraduate certificate in education.
She enjoyed teaching young adults for 5 years, as the head of a Physics
department in a traditional grammar school. She then changed career by
taking an MSc in Computing, and becoming a network systems programmer in
the Computing Service at the University of Newcastle. She has been based in
the Computing Service for the last nineteen years, becoming involved in
user support and training and founding two major Internet Services for the
UK Higher Education Community. She is now Director of these services:
Mailbase and Netskills.

She originally set up Mailbase, the UK national Mailing List Service, 10
years ago out of a desire to encourage the broad spectrum of academic and
research staff to make use of the Internet. (It had previously been the
province of computing scientists and physicists.) Mailbase discussion lists
are now in use by some 50% of UK academic staff. (There are more than
170,000 users of some 2,500 lists covering a broad range of academic
subjects.)

Helping and encouraging others to use the Internet involved providing
training workshops, and this in turn lead to the highly successful
Netskills project. Netskills, which has been operational for 4 years,
provides quality Internet training and training materials for the UK higher
education community. Over 10,000 staff have been trained already, and are
using their skills to exploit the Internet and Intranet technologies for
teaching and learning, administration, research and support.

Jill has been actively involved in national and international network
groups. She chaired the European TERENA Information Services and User
Support (ISUS) Working Group, the IETF Networked Information Retrieval
Working Group and the Network Training Materials Working Group, and was
author of two Internet RFCs. She is track leader of Track 3 (Internet
Information Services) of the Internet Society Network Training Workshops
for countries in the early stages of Internetworking.