Portfolio / Resume / Who I Am

Tim Shores

I make complex systems legible
and trapped knowledge valuable

Leverett, Massachusetts, United States

Tim Shores portrait

About

Most useful information is stuck. It's in people's heads, buried in systems nobody reads, jargon nobody outside the room understands, or data waiting to be shaped into a decision. I've spent my career finding it and making it useful.

At Cisco, that means leading content strategy and information architecture for security products — structuring technical knowledge so customers can find and act on what they need. I'm currently a member of a cross-organizational tiger team transforming Cisco's technical communications into an AI-native content system, focused on content modeling and context engineering that structure knowledge for AI reasoning and dynamic, persona-driven experiences. This builds on earlier work documenting Cisco's LLM-powered assistant feature and prototyping AI generation of identity-based technical content.

Before Cisco, it meant building databases of European Parliament voting patterns for a forest policy campaign, designing donor data systems and writing program concept notes for a Haiti-focused nonprofit, and constructing the knowledge base that cut support call volume by 20% at a software company.

Outside work, I serve on a planning board and two school committees in Western Massachusetts and on the board of The 'MPOWER Project. Municipal budgets, policy, and community needs all hold trapped knowledge, and the value comes when it's made legible to the people making decisions about them.

My range of work is deliberate. Illegible complexity shows up everywhere, and the work of solving it transfers across contexts more than people expect.

I work regularly with AI tools, Python, and open-source data as part of how I approach making institutional knowledge accessible at scale. I'm building professionally toward the intersection where structured content, AI reasoning, and human judgment work together.

Core Focus

Practice Areas

  • Community-based participatory research
  • Community building
  • Knowledge architecture
  • Technical content strategy
  • Data storytelling
  • Policy and civic research
  • Cybersecurity documentation
  • Facilitation

Working Skills

  • Content Strategy
  • Context Engineering
  • Cybersecurity
  • Data Science
  • Communications
  • Technical Writing
  • Research
  • Facilitation
  • Storytelling
  • Community Development

Selected Work

Cybersecurity

Cisco Secure Access Content Strategy

Content strategy lead for Cisco Secure Access, architecting end-to-end content strategy and launching documentation for SASE Management in close collaboration with product, engineering, UX, and CX teams.

Member of Cisco's AI-Native Content Strategy tiger team, focused on content modeling and context engineering for graphRAG-structured knowledge, AI reasoning, and dynamic persona-driven content experiences.

Content StrategyInformation ArchitectureAI-Native ContentContent Modeling
Communication Strategy

Duo Customer Communications Program

Served as customer communications lead for Cisco Security Documentation, translating release and vulnerability changes into clear action-oriented updates.

Improved communication process consistency while coordinating impact studies with Product and Data Science teams.

Release NotesComms PlanningRisk CommunicationMentorship
Policy Analytics

Forest Defenders Alliance Research and Monitoring

Managed campaign web and research for the Forest Defenders Alliance and analyzed parliamentary voting patterns and committee memberships.

Produced campaign monitoring datasets that supported outreach strategy and policy advocacy across the EU context.

Data CollectionPolicy ResearchDatabase DesignCampaign Strategy
Nonprofit Systems

Hope for Haiti Data and Donor Experience

Owned revenue data management, grant pipeline operations, and donor support systems.

Strengthened fundraising operations and decision support for mission-critical programs.

Grant PipelineDonor SystemsRevenue DataOperations
Automation and CRM

VentureWell Platform Operations

Supported Salesforce planning and implementation for grant, community, and program operations.

Improved cross-team workflows and user support with scalable platform operations.

SalesforceProcess BuilderFlowIntegration

Credentials

Certifications

  • AI Foundations for Business Professionals, Saïd Business School (Feb 2026)
  • Project Management Professional Certificate (v2), Google (Oct 2025)
  • Systems Thinking, Cornell University (Feb 2024)
  • Communicating for Impact, IDEO (Jul 2022)
  • Dialogue Facilitation Across Divides, Paula Green (Oct 2021)
  • Basic Mediation Training, CRG (Jan 2020)

Education

  • University of Michigan BGS, Linguistics, Philosophy, and Psychology September 1998 - June 2004
  • University of Massachusetts Amherst Graduate Certificate, Data Analytics and Computational Social Science (DACSS) November 2022 - December 2024

Community

I currently serve in local civic and education leadership roles, where policy, budgets, and community needs are translated into decisions people can use.

  • Planning board member in Western Massachusetts
  • Energy committee member in Western Massachusetts
  • Two school committees in Western Massachusetts
  • Board member, The 'MPOWER Project, NYC