After spending a decade in higher ed. at Stanford mostly and earning a Masters in ethics and Ph.D. in Policy Analysis, I was deeply enmeshed in the networking and personal computing revolution. I'd served in the Provost's office helping to gather and develop new IT resources that would serve undergrad education.

It' was an important development and the upshot is I became convinced in the early 1990's that the Internet we were all using in research and education circles only just had to be made available for everyone in the business and private sector. I also could just see that the feds were not going to keep footing the bill for the Internet and it had to be paid for by commercial and personal use, primarily.

So, I left higher education and became executive director of CIX -- the commercial Internet eXchange -- and began lobbying the feds to rescind their acceptable use policies. This was a once in a lifetime experience and between 1992 and 1994 I led that lobbying effort. It came to fruition in the Summer of 1994.

I helped build the Internet World trade shows and magazine in the U.S. and internationally. Later I helped get RealNames started and served as Chief Policy Officer and Privacy Officer there. For me, this brought the basic concern of "building the trustworthiness of the Internet" into sharp focus.

The last four I've spent largely on the "bleeding edge" of the Internet again as the Managing Director of what is now known as XDI.ORG (formerly XNSORG). This is an Internet public trust organization devoted to building and promoting a trusted, community owned layer of the Internet infrastructure for digital identity management.