John Watkins has nearly 20 years of experience leading international teams in software and documentation development, internationalization, localization, translation, quality assurance, and international business management methodologies. During his career, John spent 10 years working in Europe, supporting Eurocontrol (a European Commission agency responsible for regulating air traffic control activities). While there, John led an international team of software developers, financial/economic analysts, and technical writers to optimize air traffic flow throughout Europe. Leaving France in 1998, John led the localization operations at Lingo Systems for six years before moving to ENLASO Corporation in 2004. At ENLASO, John is the President and Chief Operating Officer, where he works closely with production, finance, and sales to ensure that ENLASO delivers quality-driven, cost-effective solutions to their localization and translation customers.

As an active member of GALA, I am delighted to see the growth of our organization. Of course, with growth come challenges as GALA offers more support to its increasing membership.

Working together, our members offer the best solution to the challenges GALA faces with our growth. Together, we have the knowledge and skills needed to position GALA to serve the needs of our diverse membership.

I would like to represent you on the GALA board to facilitate the active participation of our members. By increasing participation in membership-driven workgroups, we would have the flexibility to more effectively address the needs of our membership.

As the President of ENLASO Corporation, I represent the "mid-sized" localization service providers. Our company is differentiated by using collaborative experts that provide industry leadership in the development of XML, multilingual publishing, and language technology standards. Our use of collaborative workgroups has enabled us to address technological services that would normally surpass the capabilities of a company of our size.

ENLASO participates and provides technical leadership within various organizations, including the W3C, and various vertical industry associations. Perhaps our most notable technological contribution is the release, through our open source initiative, of our Rainbow suite of localization pre- and post-processing tools. Over 15,000 copies of our tools have been downloaded and more than 200 organizations and individuals participate in our open source project.