I have a hard time with the question “So, what do you do?”. It varies from day to day. A lot.

My Twitter Bio currently reads “Internet Technologist, Start-up Founder, Systems Thinker, Disruptive Innovator, Technoprogressive, Truthseeker, Freethinker, Altruist, Moderate, Kiwi, Geek.“, which is a reasonable high level summary of what I’m all about.

To go into a little more detail on some of those bullet points:

Startup Founder

I’m the founder behind Interclue, the browser addon that tells you everything you need to know before you click, and Lazarus, which autosaves everything you type into a browser so that you’ll never have to retype another webform.

I’ve also got several other startups in the nascent planning phases, and this year I decided I had better figure out how to do several start-ups at once because I couldn’t seem to focus on just one thing long enough to make it a big success. Unfortunately, around that time there was an earthquake that more or less leveled the central city area my office was in, which sent me to another city where I met people, had many more ideas, and still haven’t got around to figuring out all the details of how to do so many things in parallel. The idea is disparate but occasionally overlapping teams, partners, co-founders, and investors. I honestly thought it could work out rather well once we got moving, but getting it moving is taking me well longer than it should, and meanwhile I keep having new product and feature ideas at an occasionally alarming rate of knots.

In general, start-up founders take on a lot of roles. At the moment I’m our CxO, essentially the sole member of the management team. I keep dipping my toes back into operational roles and usually I regret it – I used to be quite good at rather a lot of things, but my expertise has faded and these days my skills are broad rather than deep. I try to stay focused on the high level stuff. I’m often pretty good at figuring out what ought to be done, the problem is that I’m often pretty hopeless when it comes to actually doing it myself!

Thus, I am always keeping an eye out for folks who will compliment my strengths and cover for my weaknesses. I know a lot of people I’ll be contacting as soon I have the resources to pay them with more than sweat equity, do let me know if you’d like to be one of them.

Internet Technologist

Essentially, this means I love technology, obsess about it constantly, and for the last decade or more, I’ve mostly been focused on the Internet. I know all the internet related TLAs and ETLAs. I watch for new ideas and new platforms (lately, mainly NoSQL, Mobile & HTML5 related). I speculate on trends, and how to get ahead of them. What I don’t do a lot of these days is actually hack code, which makes me a lesser Internet Technologist than say, Brad Fitzpatrick, Chris Messina or Nathan Torkington, but on the other hand, I doubt that Tim O’Reilly or Mitch Kapor hack out a lot of code these days, so I figure it’s possible to maintain at least some hacker cred after moving on from codeage to wordage, as I mostly have. On the other hand I’m currently taking the free online classes in Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning from Stanford, which I highly recommend. Sometimes it helps to know the low level detail as well.

Technoprogressive

Politically, I consider myself a technoprogressive. This is a very new term, and there is some debate as to both its value and its future. Wikipedia currently says “Techno-progressivism, technoprogressivism, tech-progressivism or techprogressivism (a portmanteau combining “technoscience-focused” and “progressivism”) is a stance of active support for the convergence of technological change and social change. Techno-progressives argue that technological developments can be profoundly empowering and emancipatory when they are regulated by legitimate democratic and accountable authorities to ensure that their costs, risks and benefits are all fairly shared by the actual stakeholders to those developments” – among other things. Now, whether or not the term “technoprogressive” has a future, I am certainly more in favour of it than any of the “traditional” political labels.

Freethinker

Occasionally I also refer to myself as a Freethinker. This is term with a much longer history, but although I claim no affiliation with the Freethinkers of old, I subscribe to Freethought as a “philosophical viewpoint that holds that opinions should be formed on the basis of science, logic, and reason, and should not be influenced by authority, tradition, or any other dogma.” – but having said that, I’m not fundamentalist about this – I accept that given our human limitations, cognitive shortcuts are often quite useful, some cognitive bias is thus inevitable, and thus opinions shouldn’t be discarded the moment they show signs of being influenced by things other than aforementioned science, logic, and reason. On the other hand…

Moderate

I am not really a “fundamentalist” about anything. Thus I include “Moderate” in my twitter bio. Essentially, I can share a pint with almost anyone, and understand most points of view even if I don’t agree with them. I have no problem with people holding unsubstantiated beliefs just so long as they don’t try to force them onto other people. I guess I don’t have much time for opinionated bigots, but I am more inclined to pity them than to hate them. I’m not even a fundamentalist on the technology front – not particularly in anyone’s “camp”, although I do have a fondness for Google and their array of impressively “open” solutions, and the Mozilla Foundation‘s manifesto strikes me as highly impressive and worthy of my support.

Also, while I greatly respect anyone who contributes their time and other resources to Open Source or Open Data projects, I have no real problem with people who have chosen to remain with OSX or Win7 as their operating systems, or choose to make their living from leveraging this stuff they call “intellectual property” – while such an intuitively odd concept still exists. In fact, for the moment, that’s exactly what I’m doing. Sadly, I feel much of the commentary in this particular area reeks of tribalism. Us geeks, it seems, are far from immune to the usual array of human cognitive biases. Makes it pretty hard to find the truth, or closest approximation thereof, at times.

Truthseeker

By “Truthseeker” I simply mean that I usually try to tease out the truth from what is often a confused haystack of spin and counterspin. Having come to an opinion about where the truth lies, I only rarely bother to point it out to people, particularly if it would mean getting into an argument. I’m not great in arguments. While offline I don’t really have the great memory and aura of confidence (the fact that people respect confidence much more than they do doubt is the cause of much pain in this world) that makes for a good debater, and while online I find I am prone to spending far too much time explaining the truth to people who really, really do not wish to hear it, because my alternative strategy of “withering contempt”, while viscerally satisfying and often surprisingly effective, is ultimately not the sort of person I want to be. I’d prefer to be a Stephen Fry or a Daniel Dennett than a Christopher Hitchens or a Richard Dawkins, although I fully respect those who would choose otherwise, partly because I’ve been there. These days I pretty much stay out of the fray – I really don’t have the time for it and my fingers can only take so much typing in any given day.

Still to be covered: the Altruist, Entrepreneur, Kiwi, and Geek labels!