I am a researcher in outer space policy and governance at the Open Lunar Foundation, with a particular focus on policy and coordination questions for near term lunar activity. The space domain is what is called an Area Beyond national Jurisdiction (ABNJ), and involves wrestling with many questions similar to those raised by commons management from the high seas to the Internet. I have co-created self-governing collectives, autonomous networks and place based intentional communities for almost two decades. These projects have led me to a broader interest in the foundational ingredients of international law, and new approaches to sovereignty, jurisdiction and institution design.
Currently, I am also an affiliate researcher at the Berkman Klein Center at Harvard and the French Centre d'Etudes et de Recherches de Sciences Administratives et Politiques at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) with Primavera de Filippi.
Experience and Education
I'm an alumni of the Fellowship for Good at the Institute For The Future, and the Innovation Fellowship at the City and County of San Francisco. My background is in computer science. Iworked on the founding team of the NASA Nebula cloud computing project, which later became OpenStack; developed flight software for Astra's rockets 1.0 and 2.0, and worked with Open Government data at the Sunlight Foundation. I have a bachelors in Astrophysics from Queen’s University Canada, a Masters in Computer Science from the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey CA., and 2 years towards a PhD in distributed computing.