Effective May 5, 2006

I am leaving the omidyar.net community. It was a good learning experience and I met or otherwise communicated with some interesting people. However I didn't come here just to learn or converse and so I am leaving.

I recommend to you to remember your purpose when you first came here and to measure the value of omidyar.net in terms of that agenda--or any better agenda you can come up with. The value of this place is how well it meets your agenda.

This is a community and omidyar.net is good for that. But don't confuse the fact that it is a community with being of the same value as what you came here to achieve. It is far more a community and a bunch of people to converse with than it is about making the world better. I don't blame the members of the community for this. The structure of omidyar.net does not set a powerful tone for the place. It does not suggest what kind of people or people with what purposes should join. It is a place with a very poorly defined purpose. You can't change that. Simply put, it is a do-it-yourself place where the culture that has evolved is pretty happy with they way things are. In short, if you find that it lacks a useful structure, then that's the way it is. Or it may work for you.

Occasionally an initiative in the community will take wings and something will happen in the community that will have a good affect on the outside world. But most of the time nothing is going on up here. Or if it is it isn't easy to discover. This place is best for those with a lot of time to spend up here and who like conversing.

Remember your purpose and why you came here.

I live in Chicago, a city with a beautiful lake on its shores, and incredible educational and cultural opportunities.

A couple of my views:

The most important thing one can do in the world, if one has the ability, is to build excellent systems, which either allow individuals to acquire better incomes, or support individuals in such a way that resistance is removed as they try to acquire what is necessary and beneficial for themselves and others. Or, alternately, to contribute to the building of such systems. Bad design is our biggest enemy.

The most important thing one can do for oneself is to determine what gifts one has and get into a position to use those gifts at the highest level. This may mean going out on your own.

To break my daily mindset and patterns, I travel internationally as a backpacker.

My interests include software development, internet development, photography, public speaking, writing, language and tool creation for knowledge and experience transfer.

In the last ten years I have been a consultant and done some high-profile software development for Arthur Andersen, Ernst & Young, and others. Last year I designed and developed an elegant application that automates data-collection internet-application development, including the development of the underlying database. What used to take a developer five weeks to accomplish can now be done in just two days by an analyst.