I am a web software architect and developer. I see software as applied epistemology, sentience as composed of intelligence and care, and those combining to form systems of symbiotic care for our earth and for us, by us. The enabler is structural coupling of group attention to software’s call-by-future.
I aim to design and architect software for society, with focus on web systems for collaborating, learning, problem solving and caretaking. I contribute to projects on Global Sensemaking, complementary currencies (particularly as applied to health care), leadership, intentional software, and identifying leverage points for fundamental change.
My current work includes consulting, design, and implementation of open-source approaches to the semantic, symbiotic, and intentional web; user and resource identity (OpenID), social networking APIs, multi-site integration, search, metadata and semantics, user interface, and including humans in solving the binding problem (since they already do). While with Knowledge Navigators in 1997-2001 I built a Learning Management System with reusable learning objects (Learning Engine), followed by a topic-oriented multi-workspace agile collaboration system (MyLearningPlace and coachingplatform). Prior to that I did language, user-interface, and product design for the Prograph pictorial object-oriented programming language, and developed an expert-system based medical Patient Simulator for emergency-room training. My first steps in the noosphere were in the early seventies with Community Memory, which turned out to be the world’s first public computerized bulletin board and information flea market.
My language tools have included Lisp, Prograph, Java, Ruby, PHP, Lua, AJAX and associated open standards, frameworks and databases, as well as technologies for social innovation such as Theory U.
I received a BA in Philosophy and Cognitive Science topics at Boston College, and did graduate work in Phenomenology at Fordham University. I have been a student of buddhist mindfulness/awareness practices for several decades, and find compelling a vision of a society that while separating church and state explicitly acknowledges the sacred in politics, economics, and technology.