Robert
McConnell
I build systems where public infrastructure, accessibility, and evidence meet.
Telecommunications access, open-source release assurance, civic infrastructure, and recovered computing history. Different domains, same instinct: make the machinery legible enough to trust, operate, and improve.
Make the machine path boring. Make the evidence undeniable.
Why shared infrastructure matters.
Why Apache Matters: The Infrastructure Beneath the Infrastructure
A concentrated run through release identity, SBOMs, artifact binding, attestations, and the ASF parent POM. The interesting part is not one patch. It is what happens when a working primitive reaches a shared inheritance point.
Work you can inspect.
ACE accessibility infrastructure
I was a key contributor to the MITRE/FCC ACE portfolio: direct video communication, ACE Connect, ACR test tooling, V‑ATRP/WebRTC, ACE Quill, data logging, deployment, and the later ACE Omni experiment platform.
Browse the public portfolio →Artifact-bound release evidence
Source identity, dependency inventory, SBOMs, immutable digests, attestations, and downstream verification — wired into existing release paths rather than built as a parallel compliance ceremony.
See the upstream trail →The lineage map
A living record of institutions, people, technology, governance, accessibility, testing, and the evidence that connects them.
Enter the timeline →The Genie's Lamp BBS
A preserved Renegade 05‑11‑96 process running in the browser from both caller and SysOp sides. Not a recreation: the machine itself.
Call the board →The claim should point to the artifact.
Artifact-bound CycloneDX SBOMs, immutable image digests, keyless attestations, and a consumer-side verifier.
↗ Native Conan SBOM pathCycloneDX generation around the dependency graph the project already resolves and ships.
↗ Assurance through inheritanceMove release-time CycloneDX behavior to a shared Apache inheritance point instead of repeating it project by project.
↗ Final-version build provenancePreserve the exact voted release-candidate bytes while giving the final release its correct build identity.
↗ Sharper schema diagnosticsSmall upstream work at the boundary where tooling needs to tell a human exactly what failed and why.
↗ Hall of Fame · 2016Gallaudet's record: four consecutive Nationals, back-to-back national championships, and an Academic Bowl Hall of Fame induction.
↗The work underneath the experiments.
Telecommunications accessibility
Policy, program infrastructure, technical oversight, and systems work around accessible communications and relay services.
Key portfolio contributor
Direct video, test-lab infrastructure, applications, instrumentation, and the technical path from research artifact to usable system.
Upstream assurance
Small, reviewable changes in Apache, NIST, Cloudflare, and other projects where release behavior and evidence can compound.
Deaf systems builder
The work is personal: language access, civic infrastructure, networks, and the machines behind them.