Kris Freedain

· Portland, OR · freedak@amazon.com

I enjoy building internal and external relationships to drive community, customer success, and process improvement. I have proven experience driving community engagement initiatives and enjoy being able to bring groups together to find efficient and effective processes.

Experience

Community Manager

OpenSearch at Amazon Web Services

Building a community strategy for the OpenSearch project.

October 2021 - Present

User Community Manager

AWS Elemental, an Amazon Web Services Company

Manage the the day-to-day activities of our user community in order to support the overall community strategy and vision. Ensure proper response times are met for each User Forum question. Develop and maintain site content in an effort to drive engagement and customer satisfaction.

July 2017 - October 2021

Social Media and Communities Sr. Advisor

Dell

Responsible for all Dell Software social media channels. Curating and distributing content to allow for increased customer engagement for our products and solutions. Build cross-business unit relationships to enable our technical experts in their blogging efforts. Work to ensure technical content matches with Agile marketing sprints when possible. Represent Customer Engagement team at various trade shows.

February 2015 - November 2016

Support Release Manager

Dell (formerly Quest Software)

Responsible for planning, managing, and coordinating the support release process. Communicate release related information and training plans. Lead support aspect of project to define and deploy “Offer Lifecycle Process”. Helped define and document a global, scalable, and repeatable release process.

June 2005 - January 2015

Senior Support Engineer

Quest Software

Provide timely installation, configuration, and troubleshooting assistance to internal and external customers for Quest products. Participate in 24x7 product support for applicable products. Take a leadership role in working with other support engineers on resolving customer issues and mentoring newer support engineers.

January 2005 - June 2005

Interests

I am happily married to my best friend, and the proud dad of an amazing young man; my main love in life is being with them. Exploring Portland and the surrounding Pacific Northwest is how we spend most of our time.

I am a Buddhist who seeing every aspect of daily life as opportunity for practice. Meditation is a daily occurance for me as it helps me calm my monkey mind.

I blog from time-to-time at krisfreedain.com, but most of the time you can see me tweeting about what is going on in life at @KrisFreedain.

Opinions are my own.

Volunteering

“If you light a lamp for someone else it will also brighten your path.” ~Buddha

Whenever possible, I feel it is important to volunteer and give back to the community. Below are some of the opportunities for volunteering I have been fortunate enough to spend time doing.

  • AWS Elemental Community Investment (including FreeGeek, Children's Book Bank, and others)
  • Co-President (along with my wife) of our son's Parent/Teacher Organization
  • Hacker Guild (youth STEM program) - Group Administrator and Mentor
  • AYSO - Youth Coach
  • AYSO - Spring Coordinator and Web Content Coordinator
  • Buddha's Light Magazine of Hsi Lai Temple - English editor