NFC Forum’s pick for its new executive director, Paula Hunter, will be taking over the day-to-day operation of the standards and trade group as it seeks to help spur more market adoption of NFC technology.

The forum board went outside the NFC industry for Hunter and apparently wanted her mainly for her experience managing nonprofit technology associations.

She most recently served as executive director of the Outercurve Foundation, a nonprofit which enables exchange of code and liaisons among software companies and open source communities. She also held management positions with the Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization and Open Source Development Labs.

“The board wasn't specifically looking for someone outside the NFC industry,” NFC Forum chairman Koichi Tagawa, who is also general manager of global standards and industry relations at Sony Corp., said in prepared remarks in response to a question from NFC Times. “We wanted an executive director with strong strategic, operational and technology experience in association management.”

She takes over for former NFC Forum director Debbie Arnold, who early this year oversaw the launch by the forum of five special interest groups, to try to push market adoption of smooth commercial launches of the technology. The special interest groups, or SIGs, target five vertical market segments: payment, retail, transport, health care and consumer electronics.

The special interest groups marked a bit of a shift in focus for the NFC Forum, which has spent the past several years developing standards and certification programs for NFC but has been light on its market outreach.

Hunter told NFC Times that some aspects the highly collaborative culture of open source could transfer well to her new position at the NFC Forum.

“In looking at the NFC Forum and how they operate, there's clearly no question that it's a very collaborative group, but there might be techniques and lessons learned in the open source world that I can bring to bear here with the NFC Forum,” she said.

Some in the NFC industry have expressed concerns that the NFC Forum is dominated by hardware manufacturers, but Hunter told NFC Times the perception is “not particularly of concern” to her.

“I think that what we've (forum) done in the last year rolling out the SIGs is really to start to focus on the market adoption, and in order to succeed in any of those market segments that the SIGs are focusing on, we have to take a holistic approach, so it's not going to be just about hardware.”

Besides forum co-founders NXP Semiconductors, Sony and Nokia, the board includes  representatives of chip makers Broadcom, Intel, NEC, Qualcomm, Renesas, STMicroelectronics and Samsung Electronics. Samsung, like Sony, is also a large device maker. Nonhardware companies Visa Inc., MasterCard Worldwide and Google round out the board. All board seats go to sponsor members of the forum.

The board has been seen as taking an activist role in running the organization in the past, said some observers, though Tagawa, in his prepared remarks to NFC Times, disagreed with that assertion.

“The executive director of the NFC Forum has always been, and will continue to be, a position of considerable influence, spanning strategy, operations, and outreach.”

There are few mobile operators among forum members. And while there is a liaison agreement between the forum and the GSMA mobile operator trade group, the two organizations do not work closely on NFC standards or NFC market development.

One of Hunter’s key goals, no doubt, will be, in general, to help broaden the membership of the forum. The forum, which formed in 2004, now counts 190 companies as members.

At Open Source Development Labs, Hunter served as director of worldwide marketing and business development, where her work focused on membership growth and industry awareness.

Although she has 18 years of experience in other technology markets, Hunter is new to the NFC industry. She told NFC Times that she does not expect that  to be a disadvantage.

Hunter said her background in bringing technology products to market could be an advantage in her new role at the forum. “I think helping the SIGs that are focusing on different industry sectors fine-tune their technique and approach to those different sectors is going to be something I am really looking forward to doing.”

But she declined to delineate specific priorities or discuss potential shifts in focus for the Forum. “It's early for me to say if some things are going to shift or there will be more emphasis on one or another,” she told NFC Times.

Tagawa said that while the SIGs initiative increased the forum’s focus on market implementation of NFC, the association’s commitment to its technical work hasn’t changed.

“Our technical committee and its working groups remain very active and strong,” he said in the statement to NFC Times. 

Arnold, formerly of Visa, had served as director of the forum since January 2011. She had led marketing staff efforts at the forum prior to that. Arnold had replaced the forum’s first executive director Paula Berger.

In a statement, the forum said “Arnold has elected to step back from day-to-day management but will continue to play a role in key Forum activities.” 

A spokeswoman told NFC Times that she would “carry on work with our liaison partners and support business development activities for the foreseeable future.”