I’m passionate about how Internet technology opens up democratic participation in culture, business, and politics and think that we have hardly begun to explore what is possible through our connections with community. I intend to apply my knowledge to projects that aim to revolutionize commerce, politics, and education.
In web development, I do client work building personal, blog, portfolio, wedding, and eCommerce websites. I build on my own ideas in my spare time.
In business, among other initiatives, I want to be part of creating a distributed system of community credit clearing that is free from the inflationary growth pressure created by money-as-debt from central banks.
In politics, I want to be part of weaning politicians off their dependence on money by creating open fora where issues are debated thoughtfully and the most important questions rise to the top through community moderation. In order to give force to ideas and policy over partisanship, I advocate for Instant Runoff Voting (IRV), a system that forces the big two parties to compete against others by removing pressure to vote for the “lesser of two evils.”
I will be involved in education, regardless of where my other interests take me. I believe learning will change inside and outside of institutions to pedagogies that emphasize using technology to spread access to information, connecting people and ideas. We will be abandoning higher ed business models that depend on scarcity of knowledge. My honors thesis at the University of Oregon focused on how intellectual property protection affects the spread of information and culture. I encouraged content creators to open up and spread their work as freely as possible, adopting business models that are not scarcity-dependent.
I weave an interest in the Mozilla Open Badges Infrastructure into all these threads.
Specialties: Intellectual property law and theory, open education pedagogy, customer relations