Biography (Connecting the Dots of an Eclectic Career)

Arthur’s career has been a continual process of honing his talent at developing systems for social change. Inspired by reading Summerhill in 9th grade, Arthur Brock started on the path of designing systems to create intentional social patterning by designing his own education. In high school, he crafted a new language – one that could be processed by computers and contain, embedded within it, a more empowering cosmology and metaphysics. He pursued this interest in college by designing a degree in Artificial Intelligence.

After college, Arthur researched non-traditional methods of social change. He realized that instead of opposing established systems, more could be accomplished by creating healthy alternatives. His passion for design led him to invent a highly-efficient, multi-fuel turbine engine to create real environmental impact.

Arthur began his career in the corporate world working in natural language processing at General Motors. Then he went on to work at Chrysler in Expert Systems and later brought his leadership and technical abilities to Hughes Aircraft in Colorado.

Breaking out of the bounds of corporate culture, Arthur started a consulting business, Artful Solutions, a software design firm developing custom financial software for investment companies and process management tools for small businesses. Arthur also focused on building communities to accomplish the kind of changes he envisioned. He published the Journal of Integral Living while also building a holistic health center, leading youth groups, and hosting community salons.

Out of his commitment to youth, he founded the Foundation for Inventive Learning, which delivered immersive programs for youth in participatory learning communities and sponsored the first democratic free school in Colorado, which still operates today.

Seeking greater leverage to change organizational models, Arthur applied his approach to building “learning communities” for business. He gathered together his own “dream team,” to found Dream Team Technologies as a flagship organization to demonstrate the viability of participatory business models. Dream Team developed software for online collaboration and community building. Under Arthur’s leadership, Dream Team Technologies was listed as one of Colorado’s fastest-growing privately-held companies, was a finalist for Denver Small Business of the Year, and won the Colorado Ethics in Business Award in 2001.

Recognizing the value of his creative solutions for managing incentives and performance in a poorly funded dot-com business, Arthur built innovative systems to unleash cashless resource flows and shape community incentives. He implemented several currency systems for organizations, conferences, and communities to shape patterns of participation, reputation, and trust. He has been recognized as a leader in the emerging currencies field. His most recent organization, Targeted Currencies Network, has been building a configurable currency engine providing the extreme flexibility required for functional adaptation derived from community response. Programmers from his current software company, The Geek Gene, have provided the core infrastructure for the currency engine.

A Gift: ContextCrafting

An answer is only as good as the question asked. A solution can only be as good as how the problem was defined. All knowledge and information is only as good as your frame of reference for understanding it. In fact, knowledge becomes a serious impediment when it’s married to one worldview. All too often people look for more information, but it’s all shaped by their old framework.

We often forget that everything happens inside a context. Our power to shape that context literally determines our power and freedom. You can call it revealing your assumptions, shifting your paradigm, expanding your worldview, re-engineering your operations, transforming your organization, re-inspiring your relationship... Whatever the current buzzword for it is, it requires bringing the invisible truths in the background into plain view and transcending the unconscious limitations imposed by them.

This is my gift. In even a brief conversation, most of those truths in the background and their consequences become clearly visible. Sometimes all it takes to surpass them is having them echoed back to you. Sometimes it takes expanding or exploring other possible options. In any case, reshaping foundational assumptions allows for something completely new to be built, liberated from the constraints of the past.

I'm usually doing it whether or not I'm trying to. If you think this is something you're looking for or you should be talking with me about, then contact me.

My omidyar.net groups:

• Targeted Currencies Network