What the Heck Is Lansby?
Honest answer: We made the name up.
We spent hours on it — wanted something that sounded a little British, just two syllables, was fun to say, and, had a little Angela Lansbury in it. You know, a little Bedknobs and Broomsticks, a little Murder, She Wrote, mixed with a dash of Downton Abbey.
Our paths first crossed in 1998, at University Computing and Networking Services (UCNS) at the University of Georgia (UGA). The College of Education (COE) has an Office of Information Technology (OIT) and Alan and I were Network Services Specialists (NSS).
Essentially, we spent our time taking computers apart and putting them back together again. We hooked people up to a thing called the Internet (which used to have a capital letter). We developed local area networks to work inside the larger wide area network of the university. We also designed early websites with a cool thing called HTML, back when they looked mostly like this.
We were total nerds.
Last year we reconnected in a group chat on WhatsApp and it was at the moment I was really diving into the impact of AI on humanity. This was the moment. I started to see a wave happening like it had with social media…things were happening even faster with AI though and a lot of good people, the nonprofits and folks doing the actual work of taking care of each other had a fraction of the budget.
Alan and I started talking about the gap between massive amounts of money on one side and the orgs we loved most being left out.
So we built a bridge.
To be clear, we are not evangelists for AI. We just happen to understand it well, and we think that if it's going to reshape the world anyway, the people doing the most good in it shouldn't be the last ones let in the room.
We're human-first, always. Technology is just the thing we're fluent in.
That's the heart of Lansby.
We’re glad you’re here.
P.S. Also, yes, "LAN" is hiding right there at the front of our name — the thing we were setting up together back in 1998. We told you we were nerds.
Me in 1998 at the University of Georgia - GAP jeans, L’Oreal lipstick and diploma that had nothing to do with my job.
Was this written by AI? Written and modified by Jennifer De Witt, copyedited by Claude Sonnet 5
