Hypothesis was excited to bring Butch Porter on to our team as Vice President of Partnerships earlier this year and we’ve been wanting to take the time to introduce him to our community. I sat down with Butch recently and got him talking about why he joined Hypothesis and his deep experience working for more than 20 years at the intersection of education, publishing, and scholarly communication.

Butch has worked for large educational companies as well as founding, growing, and successfully selling companies that utilize open-source software in a SaaS environment. Butch has spent a great deal of his career working with digitized content both in a personalized learning platform as well as in a vast network of learning object repositories. Butch has testified before state legislatures on the benefits of digitized content and has been an advocate his entire career for the implementation of learning tools that improve student success while driving down the cost of materials. Butch has a passion for education as his dad was a high school principal and his mom a school nurse. You can learn more about Butch in our conversation below and on his LinkedIn page, and reach him at bporter@hypothes.is.

[Nate Angell]: You’ve done many things. What drew you to working with Hypothesis?

[Butch Porter]: As quality content becomes digitized, we must do all we can to make sure that this content is read, understood, and remembered. The tools that Hypothesis is building support these three key goals for learning. When doing my research prior to joining the team I discovered a top-notch school in North Carolina that referenced the importance of annotation in their learning center: “Time spent annotating isn’t time wasted — its time invested.” I believe this to be true. Annotation has already proven to be extremely valuable not only in education, but also in scholarly publishing and in news media fact-checking efforts. I want to provide students, faculty and administrators with tools that will enable annotation at scale so all students can engage and improve. At the same time, I am committed to the openness of Hypothesis. Improving learning while keeping tools very affordable — that’s why I joined Hypothesis. To do something very special at scale. 

Read the full interview.

About Hypothesis
Hypothesis is a nonprofit organization dedicated to the development and spread of open, standards-based annotation technologies and practices, enabling anyone to annotate anywhere. Our mission is to help humans reason more effectively together through a shared, collaborative discussion layer over all knowledge. Hypothesis is based in San Francisco, CA, USA, with a worldwide team.

Hypothesis has developed its open source annotation software in collaboration with many partners and sponsors, including specific projects to augment groups and authentication capabilities with eLife, to enable annotation on EPUBs with NYU, the Readium Foundation, Evident Point, and EPUB.js, and many others. We thank our partners and community for working with us to advance standards-based, interoperable annotation for all.

Contacts
Media: Nate Angell <nate@hypothes.is>, Director of Marketing
Partnerships: Butch Porter <butch@hypothes.is>, VP, Partnerships
Web: hypothes.is
Twitter: @hypothes_is