Articles & Artefacts

Posting found#

The role is Network Project Manager / Gestionnaire de projets réseau at Abundant Intelligences, based at its Montréal headquarters. It is not an IT networking/infrastructure specialist position in the usual sense; “network” refers to coordinating a distributed research network. The posting was published August 16, 2026, and appears to be current.¹

Main responsibilities#

The person would coordinate three cross-network research initiatives involving:

Researchers, community partners, and Indigenous Knowledge holders.
Indigenous-led Research Pods across the program.
Project leads and the Research Leadership Group.
Teams working across institutions, cultures, regions, and time zones.

The work emphasizes project coordination, progress tracking, information flow, knowledge sharing, structure, and relationship-building—not VLANs, servers, cloud infrastructure, or network security.¹

The available job-board information lists compensation at approximately CAD $38.03–$42.43/hour, full-time, Monday to Friday. Another listing gives an anticipated contract period beginning around October 5, 2026, ending around October 8, 2027, with possible renewal subject to continued research funding. That timing and renewal detail should be confirmed directly because the primary posting page does not display the full contract information.²

Likely fit for you#

This looks potentially relevant to your interests, but primarily as a research-network and coordination role, rather than as an infrastructure role.

Your strongest points would likely be:

Building structure across complex, distributed projects.
Experience with multi-agent and distributed systems as evidence of systems thinking.
Technical communication and documentation.
Coordinating asynchronous work across tools, sessions, and collaborators.
Understanding Indigenous research contexts and knowledge systems.
Connecting local activities to broader network-level patterns.

Your technical background could be useful if presented as an ability to design workflows, information architectures, coordination mechanisms, and sustainable project practices. I would not lead with the medicine-wheel software work unless it is directly relevant to a question or conversation. A discreet approach would be to describe it more generally as relational, community-informed software and knowledge-architecture work, without making it the centre of your résumé or portfolio.

Application details#

The posting asks applicants to send a CV and cover letter to abtec-lab-manager@concordia.ca. The letter should explain:

Why you are applying.
What attracts you to the position.
How you learned about it.

Interviews may be held in person or through Zoom.¹

The posting does not identify the direct supervisor by name. A related Indigenous Futures Research Centre listing identifies Prof. Jason Edward Lewis as a supervisor or principal investigator for other AbTeC/Abundant Intelligences roles, but that is not enough to conclude that he directly supervises this position.³

Initial assessment#

My quick assessment: worth exploring, especially if you are interested in moving toward Indigenous-led research coordination, relational project infrastructure, and network-level program work. It is probably a weaker fit if your primary goal is hands-on systems administration, DevOps, networking, or cybersecurity.

The key question to clarify before investing heavily is whether the position includes meaningful responsibility for digital coordination infrastructure, research data workflows, technical systems, or knowledge-management architecture, or whether it is mainly administrative and interpersonal project management.

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The important clarification#

You are not looking at a conventional network-infrastructure job. The role appears to be a research-network operations and leadership position: coordinating distributed projects, people, knowledge, timelines, and relationships around Indigenous-led AI research. The “network” is organizational and intellectual before it is technical.⁴⁹

That distinction may actually make it more relevant to you. It is not an unfrosted structure in the sense of a generic corporate IT environment, although it may still contain administrative systems, deadlines, reporting requirements, and institutional constraints.

What the work probably involves#

Based on the posting and related descriptions, expect a mixture of:

Coordinating several research initiatives at once.
Supporting distributed teams and project leads.
Turning ambiguous research needs into workable plans.
Organizing meetings, agendas, decisions, action items, and follow-up.
Maintaining project documentation, schedules, risks, dependencies, and deliverables.
Facilitating communication among researchers, community partners, leadership, and possibly external AI organizations.
Helping establish repeatable processes rather than merely executing an already-defined workflow.

A comparable Abundant role explicitly describes translating ambiguous research requirements into structured workflows, managing distributed expert teams, owning project delivery, and maintaining relationships with AI-lab partners. That is a stronger indication of the operating environment than the title alone.⁵⁰

So yes: there may be substantial human contact. But it is not necessarily constant informal socializing. A significant part of the work could be structured relational coordination:

Prepare a meeting or working session.
Facilitate it.
Capture decisions and unresolved questions.
Convert them into tasks, documents, or system changes.
Track progress asynchronously.
Return to the group with a clearer shared map.

That pattern sounds much closer to what you described than technical support or cybersecurity operations.

Where your software fits#

Your medicine-wheel package and broader distributed-agent work could be relevant—not necessarily as something to put forward immediately under its internal name, but as evidence that you can think about:

Relational structures rather than isolated tools.
Distributed participation and local autonomy.
Shared protocols without forcing every participant into one system.
Knowledge provenance and responsibility.
Coordination between human and computational agents.
Documentation that preserves context, not just task status.
Systems that allow communities or teams to retain control over their own data.

Your previous two years should not be framed as “I tried and failed to build a successful multi-agent system.” A more accurate professional framing is:

I spent two years developing and iterating on distributed-agent software, which gave me practical experience with orchestration, plugin architectures, asynchronous coordination, tool integration, failure modes, and the difficulty of turning conceptual systems into reliable practice.

That is legitimate experience. A network project manager does not need to present a flawless product history; they need to demonstrate that they can make complexity visible, build structure around it, and keep people moving without pretending that ambiguity does not exist.

The fit question#

The role could fit if it offers room to develop research coordination infrastructure, not merely administer existing projects.

Potentially strong fit#

Leadership without requiring conventional hierarchical authority.
Distributed research and cross-network coordination.
AI-related work with Indigenous communities and knowledge systems.
Process design and documentation.
Turning complex or ambiguous work into usable structures.
A possible bridge between your software development and your research practice.

Potential concerns#

A large amount of meetings, email, follow-up, and stakeholder management.
Emotional and relational labour in addition to technical work.
Institutional reporting and grant-related administration.
Less time writing production software than you might hope.
The need to translate your technical ideas into language accessible to researchers, partners, and administrators.

The decisive issue is therefore not “How much networking is there?” but:

Does the position allow the manager to improve the network’s methods and tools, or is the manager mainly expected to keep an existing structure running?

That is the question I would ask before applying or during an initial conversation.

A discreet but open positioning#

You do not need to hide the medicine-wheel work, but you also do not need to make it the entry point. You could present your interest through a broader formulation:

My work has focused on developing relational and distributed software systems that help people, agents, and knowledge resources coordinate while preserving context and local autonomy. I am particularly interested in how research networks can develop practical infrastructures for collaboration, documentation, and shared decision-making without reducing Indigenous knowledge to a purely technical data model.

That communicates the substance without exposing internal terminology or making claims you are not ready to defend publicly.

For a short initial message, I would keep it exploratory:

Hello,

I am writing regarding the Network Project Manager position with Abundant Intelligences. My background combines Indigenous studies, software development, distributed systems, and the design of tools for coordinating complex, asynchronous work. I was particularly interested in the position’s focus on cross-network research coordination and the translation of complex research activities into practical workflows.

I would be grateful to learn more about the balance between project administration, facilitation, research-network development, and the design or improvement of digital coordination practices in this role.

Best regards,
William

That message does not oversell you, does not disclose the medicine-wheel project, and directly tests whether the role has the kind of developmental space you want.

My current reading#

My impression is that this could be a threshold role for you: not necessarily the place where you spend all day building software, but possibly a place where your software thinking becomes useful in a living research network. It could let you test whether your systems work can serve actual people, projects, and relationships rather than remaining primarily an elaborate private laboratory.

And yes, the social dimension may be real. But being the person who prepares the container, facilitates the exchange, records what matters, and turns collective insight into durable infrastructure is not “just social contact.” That is a form of technical and organizational leadership—provided the institution genuinely values the work rather than treating you as a human calendar application with a soul.

I would next investigate three things: the exact supervisor, the proportion of meeting and administrative work, and whether the role has authority to improve digital workflows or develop tools.

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