About the Reviewers

Alex Büchner is the co-founder and technical lead of Synergy Learning (www.synergy-learning.com), the UK's leading Moodle and Mahara partner. He has been working with ePortfolio systems and virtual learning environments of all shapes and sizes since their advent on the educational landscape. Services offered include Mahara and Moodle hosting, support, training, and branding.

Alex holds a PhD in Computer Science and an MSc in Software Engineering. He has authored over 50 international publications, including Moodle Administration published by Packt Publishing, and is a frequent speaker on Moodle, Mahara, and related open-source technologies.

Nigel McNie began his career in free software when he was just 17, working part time as an intern at Catalyst IT. His first contribution to the free software world was the popular GeSHi syntax highlighter, which can be found to this day highlighting source code on sites such as Wikipedia. In 2005, he dropped out of university to work full time, and began on the Mahara project in 2006. Now, Nigel leads development on the project, and has designed and co-written large parts of the codebase, including the Views framework and LEAP2A support.

Catalyst IT has been a top place to work these last few years. I know few companies that trust their developers so much to do the right thing, nor who understand the benefits of free software. Keep up the good fight, guys.

I would like to thank my fellow developers for all the time, sweat, and blood that have gone into Mahara currently, and for supporting me in rough times - in particular, Penny Leach and Richard Mansfield. You guys believe in Mahara, and as a result routinely go beyond the call.

Finally, thanks to the Mahara community: contributors to mahara.org, partners, right through to Richard Wyles at the top. You guys are amazing. You buy into the vision for Mahara, and are putting in the hard yards to make it happen. Wherever you are, I owe you a beer. Especially if you're running Mahara on PostgreSQL.

Heinz Krettek is a German teacher at a school for vocational education. He studied business sciences and sports. His main job is to prepare socioeconomically deprived students for lifelong learning. In 2006 he discovered the portfolio work and began to translate the German langpack for Mahara. The first translations for Mahara 0.6 were published on his own Moodle site. Soon after Nigel McNie installed a git repository the actual files were published in the Mahara git.

He organized several education and training sessions for teachers and was speaker at the German moodlemoots. Since 2008 Heinz has been partner of a company that offers LMS hosting and Mahara hosting. His company is the official German Mahara Partner.

He lives with his wife and the four kids in the Black Forest. In his spare time Heinz prefers the 3 M's: Mahara, Moodle, and marathon. He finished the New York Marathon. His motto is: who finished a marathon will struggle all problems in school ;-)