After a long search, we’re happy to introduce Alain Wong as our new Community Caretaker. I’ve known Alain since he joined our friends at Standout Jobs two years ago, and he really made an impression on me, both through his warm and open personality, as well as his interest in social entrepreneurship and community-building. Alain embodies the Akohan spirit, having recently biked 3000km from Vancouver, Canada to Tijuana, Mexico to promote and raise funds for micro-credit.

When he’s not biking around the world or helping us spread the Akoha love, Alain teaches and competes as a professional swing dancer. Stealing a line from my friend Ben Yoskovitz, that’s just the type of person we like to have on our team, passionate and multi-talented.

• Alain Wong

  Community Caretaker

  Fresh off his previous adventures — working at his first startup and then riding his bike down the Pacific coast — Alain will do anything to put a smile on your face. Having studied business, law and the art of gifting, he works hard everyday to keep the the Akoha team focused on you, the player. More than anything, Alain is a good listener — so don’t be shy!

  In his spare time, you can find Alain cutting a rug to traditional jazz, teaching Lindy Hop, DJing, and blogging about the swing dance scene.

  

We’re still on the lookout for more great people who share our vision at Akoha. View our job openings here.

For the first time since we launched our closed beta at TechCrunch last fall we’re experiencing what’s referred to in tech circles as “unplanned downtime”. In regular-speak this means that our production servers just decided to stop working all of a sudden.

We’re really sorry if this causes you inconvenience and we wanted to let everyone know that we’re working hard to figure out what’s wrong and get Akoha.com back up and running again.

We have just got the machine that hosts the blog back up and running but we’re still working on the problems that have been plaguing our production servers (these issues may be due to hardware problems on the hosting machine). We expect that all servers will be fully operational within the next few hours.

In the meantime, you can check out our twitter feed for updates on the situation.

Thanks for your patience!