Heather Flanagan
Principal at Spherical Cow Consulting, LLC
Vashon, Washington, United States
Summary
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Senior🎓
Top SchoolHeather Flanagan is a Principal with 12+ years guiding cross-sector collaborations in digital identity, authentication, and web architecture, leading standards development and practical implementations for universities, publishers, startups, and global consortia. She runs Spherical Cow Consulting while serving in high-profile volunteer and advisory roles—recently appointed to the W3C Technical Advisory Group and chairing Identiverse 2026 content—bringing together technical, policy, and community stakeholders. Heather’s strengths are in facilitation, technical editing, and process architecture: she translates complex standards work into accessible guidance, white papers, and programs that drive interoperable, privacy-preserving solutions. Her work spans operational program leadership (e.g., SeamlessAccess/RA21, IETF RFC Series) and hands-on training delivered internationally, reflecting a focus on practical adoption in research and education networks. Based in Vashon, Washington, she combines scholarly rigor (MLS from UNC Chapel Hill) with decades of systems and operations experience dating back to university IT leadership. Colleagues note she excels at turning volunteer-driven consensus into durable, vendor-neutral infrastructure and communications.
12 years of coding experience
27 years of employment as a software developer
Master's Library Science, Master's Library Science at The University of North Carolina at Chapel HillBA History, BA History at Agnes Scott College
Stackoverflow
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0reached
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Github Skills (64)
ccpa10
ajv10
federated-identity10
saml9
identity9
journal9
schema-validation9
fedcm9
digital-identity9
schema9
php9
api9
w3c9
verifiable-credentials9
rfc9
Programming languages (10)
Github contributions (5)
IDPros/bok-toc
Feb 2019 - Sep 2022
Collaboration on the table of contents for IDPro Body of Knowledge
Contributions:25 commits, 20 pushes, 1 comment in 3 years 7 months
table-of-contents
hlflanagan/Registration-Data-Dictionary
Nov 2021 - Nov 2024
repository for draft-ietf-regext-datadictionary
Contributions:7 PRs, 19 pushes, 11 branches in 3 years
dictionarydata-managementiana-registryregextietf
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