A Short history of the Uplift Academy

Welcome to the Uplift Academy. This is a concept that I've been working on for some time now, and this web site represents a major step forward towards implementing ideas that I've been working on for some time. The bulk of my career was spent in the design of large scale hospital information systems. I was one of the one of the initial software architects of the Veteran's Administration Decentralized Hospital Computer Program (now VistA), and the Department of Defense's Composite Health Care System (CHCS I) systems, two of the largest hospital information systems in the world. At the peak of my career as a vice president and chief scientist at a Fortune 500 company, I decided to quit my job to ask, "What is the simplest thing that I can do to have the maximum uplift for humanity?" This triggered a 5 year process of travel, study, meditation, and experiments. In February, 2000, I travelled to India and had a Do Something Moment. On the flight home, I wrote a paper outlining my initial ideas. I seemed to be off-topic everywhere I went, so I decided to start visited the Santa Fe Institute, during which time Murray Gell-Mann suggested we hold a meeting on Complexity and Philanthropy in May 2002. I held a workshop in Washington, DC in Jan, 2002. This was followed by another workshop in September, 2002 in Asilomar, CA. I accepted a position as Visting Scholar at Stanford's Digital Visions Program during which I shifted my focus from purely charitable giving and philanthropy to a more general notion of humanitarian uplift. This was an attempt to get away from strickly financial considerations, and open the path to other forms of interaction which may or may not involve writing a check. I began a prototype of the Uplift Academy. The site is no longer available, but here is an archived version of it. Here is some of the design material collected at this time. I held workshops at Stanford to explore ideas for an online community, including one on reputation systems. with Toshio Yamagishi, on gift economies and community with Larry Harvey of Burning Man, social networks and complementary currencies, and an Appreciative Inquiry into what we could do to help the people of Iraq.