Advisor and Board member 2018 ...

Folia Materials has developed technology for affordably impregnating silver or copper into paper. Among other anti-bacterial and anti-viral applications it has been turned into an affordable water filter. Folia Water is bringing clean water to the billion+ who still lack it. By leveraging existing retail chains the problem of scaling solutions is removed. Trials are going really well in Bangladesh. Folia is raising their next round of finance and exploring other uses for the core technology.

Founder mid 2024 ...

Many problems in resource-constrained-environments, such as supporting regenerative agriculture, require affordable sensors. But current solutions are typically in the $200 range, aimed at western farmers. I am working on an Open-Source project that will develop affordable solutions, and a framework that makes it easy for others to build their own solutions.

It is moving forward rapidly - check out the White Paper or the GIT repository.

I'm active as a mentor, through a number of organizations including: Mentor Capital Network where I've been a board member, judge, and entrant in their competition; Tech2Impact; and Sourdough; I have also been a judge on ASME & Engineering for Change (E4C)'s iShow competition & for CleanTech Open Global. I'm always interested in how we can improve the support that can be brought to technology based social entrepreneurs.

Current mentees include: Magi Farm; I am Sustainable/Recyrcle; Anitech.

There are very few sources of funding for technical solutions to important problems. They often fall between the cracks: Too big for Angels; not enough return for VC's; too risky for Philanthropists; and too early for Impact funds.

I'm interested in talking to foundations about aligning some portion of their funding to higher risk, higher impact, developments that have a chance of solving a problem they, or their grantees, care about. I'm also interested in talking with people who may have other approaches to this problem.

Using technology for good has been a thread throughout my career. Some highlights include:

• Founded Lumeter Networks - we developed Pay-As-You-Go (PAYG) hardware and software which was licensed to affordable solar system manufacturers worldwide whose products were sold through locally owned solar distributors across much of Africa, bringing light and phone charging to tens of thousands of houses.
• Starting a solar company in Byron Bay, Australia that, through a rigorous analysis of the broken business models of the time, cut the installed cost by 30% enabling thousands of home owners to access previously inaccessable renewable energy. This region is still a leader for residential solar.
• Mentoring the developers, and raising the capital for, the first viable aquaponics system. Urban Ecological Systems / Blue Smart Farms.
• Three years traveling the world, mentoring, and learning from innovators in technology for international development. See NaturalInnovation.org.

We wanted to bring the resources of the largest online library to everyone including the half the world's population who live where the internet is slow, expensive or censored.

We worked with collaborators who support underserved communities to build a set of tools that allow deploying local servers on really cheap devices, or integrating into apps that get around cost, speed and political limitations.

The project was closed because the content at the Internet Archive was not particularly relevant to those who don't have internet access

The result, open sourced at dweb-mirror, can run in boxes as small as a Raspberry Pi.

In 2017-2018 we worked with some of the other current and former internet pioneers, to advance a vision of decentralized web, where power lies with the users - both writers and readers. Imagine a world where storing in "the cloud" really meant the cloud - all the computers on the net - rather than server farms under centralized control.

This culminated at the Decentralized Web Summit in launching dweb.archive.org which used IPFS, WebTorrent and GunDB to provide a decentralized version of the Archive.

This isn't Blockchain, but its built on many of the same underlying tools that power Bitcoin and its succcessors such as strong cryptography and decentralized file stores or databases, and its open-source.

I was an early pioneer on the internet and the web, with a focus on its use for good, a few examples:

• Started, in 1985, GreenNet, an ISP (Internet Service Provider), supporting the non profit and activist sector, it is still going.
• Co-founded, in 1989, the APC (Association for Progressive Communications), which pioneered the internet into the global South, and today is the main international Civil Society group for civil rights on the internet, especially in less developed countries.
• Active in early Internet standards through IETF, where I co-authored, or was an active contributor to, several standards including: HTTP, the URL, URN, VRML etc
• Co-authored US Patent # 09883064 on swarming and using hashes as file identifiers in Peer-to-Peer, which is the core of the techniques used by Bittorrent, IPFS, and others for downloading parts of files from other participating computers.
• Technical lead for the connection between AOL and the Internet. AOL was uncontrolled users, in a highly controlled environment, while the Internet of the time was largely academics but large (uncontrolled) quantities of information (in Gopher and WAIS - this was pre-Web). Bringing the two together was the first mass use of the internet.
• Led the networking team that built Worlds Chat, the first shared 3D environment on the internet.