I can be reached at Tom@munnecke.com

After 30 years designing large scale hospital information systems, I quit my job as a vice president and chief scientist at a Fortune 500 company to ask myself, "What is the simplest thing I can do which will have the greatest benefit for humanity?" This lead to the formation of the Uplift Academy (formerly GivingSpace), a networked-based think tank to explore innovative ways of using technology in humanitarian activities. I became a fellow at Stanford's Digital Visions Program, and am also a senior fellow at Civic Ventures who present the Purpose Prize.

I have had a long term interest in the role of networks and change. I designed and introduced an electronic mail into the VA and DoD hospital information systems that grew to 300,000 users, and accounted for up to 25% of the hospital workload. I participated in the initial meeting of the World Wide Web Consortium at MIT, the Valeo Initiative with Dee Hock attempting to apply his "chaordic" model of organizational design to health care reform, and participated in a variety of activities at the Sante Fe Institute looking at ways of applying Complex Adaptive Systems thinking in the context of our rapidly growing network environment.

I am focusing my attention on what I call the "transformational sector" - those activities that involve an "inside-out" change - such as health, international development, and education - that is not easily measured in terms of monetary transactions. I have also noted the rise of "Problem-Industrial Complexes" - industries that arise with a vision of solving a problem, but whose growth is fueled by the problem getting worse. I discovered that using technology to make a problem-industrial complex more "efficient" can result in its getting worse faster.

I am also very interested in the role of what I "positive discourse" in our understanding of transformational issues. This is reflected in the trends of Positive Psychology, Appreciative Inquiry, Positive Deviance, and Positive Organizational Scholoarship, for example.

Some of my activities around omidyar.net have been forming the Better World Media and Networked Theory of a Better World groups as well as stimulating the creation of Better World Island on Second Life.