Archives for July 2025

I have been reflecting on Ikigai a Japanese concept blending passion, talent, purpose, and fulfillment.

For me, the magical intersection is in the design and facilitation of interactive events for high performance collaboration communities. 

My offerings are now updated on the unconference.net website. 

Check out the three new case studies!. 

1. The Internet Identity Workshop which features a quote from Kim Cameron. The take away from IIW is that Open Space Technology can successfully bring together multiple perspectives on addressing complex challenges. 

2. Work with  RadicalxChange on their post pandemic conference series of three events using Open Space Technology.  

3. Work with RadicalxChange and their collaboration partners Dark Matter Labs and Margaret Levi’s research lab as the lead designer of an invitation-only gathering focused on the transformational question of how we can “rethink” / “revamp” the institution of property. The conference was called What and How We Own? The Politics of Change. The events accelerated the group’s effectiveness. 

I am keen to work with more clients around the world with convening power who are working to solve hard complex challenges. 

With the complex challenges facing organizations at this time, conferences with a “sage on stage” format limit the flow of information. When people come together in person, it’s crucial to design the spaces for maximum flow of energy, discovery of new synergies, and co-strategizing in this rapidly-changing environment. Open Space Technology provides a solution, and with proper event design, it’s possible to drive a wider range of solutions and innovations for rising to the challenge.

Grace Rachmany is working collaboratively with me on business development and sales. 

I’m excited to share that I have joined the Verifiable Community project led by Grace Rachmany. 

This is a full circle moment for me, returning me to the roots of why I devoted 20 years of my life to the digital identity field. My passion has been in fostering the creation of distributed identity protocols that support people’s having control over the identifiers and share meaningful information about people, organizations, things, agents and really anything that can be pointed at with an identifier. 

After 20 years of work, we have the baseline protocols. Now the question is how we will use them. I believe now is the time to dive in and work with others on developing real products for real people and communities. 

I plan to contribute to efforts: 

• Being spearheaded by governments to use the protocols in digital public infrastructure. 
• By large consortium that steward global registries for products to leverage the technology in supply chains
• By organizations trying to support clarity in global trade and financial systems with entity identifiers for organizations. 

However, having said all that, I began my career working to build distributed social networks for communities working on improving the world. This is my personal “why” I dedicated 20 years of my life to cultivating a community that could produce the protocols we now have. 

When I learned more about Verifiable Community and Sideways.Earth and got to know the technical team, I was compelled to join them. I feel Sideways is on a trajectory to help make key aspects of the original Planetwork Augmented Social Network vision. This is the vision that  is at the root my work for all these years. 

Grace will be in Geneva this week on behalf of the project and I hope you get to meet her.