let me make myself perfectly clear.

“Information wants to be free.”
I design tools that deal with the consequences.

I want to see the web help us come to a better understanding of each other and the world we inhabit together. To that end, I have been helping clients turn good ideas into elegant web applications for over twelve years. My focus is interface design, but my contributions to a project frequently extend into product strategy, brand development and software engineering. I love working through the perceived boundaries between these disciplines.

In January 2006, I joined Metaweb to work on Freebase, a massive collaboratively-edited database of deeply cross-linked public domain data, made accessible through a powerful API and Creative Commons licensing. I also provide design support to The Long Now Foundation on projects like Long Bets, an arena for making long-term bets about the future. Before Metaweb, clients included Kevin Kelly, Applied Minds and Cartesis SA.

Right now, I'm trying to understand how people curate large datasets, and what kind of tools Freebase can offer to make it easier to collaborate on things like schema creation and data reconciliation.

I'm also interested in:

attention literacy, or how we decide who we pay attention to and who we want paying attention to us;
intimacy gradients as applied to personal web presence;
data visualization of large structured datasets;
JQuery and emerging server side JavaScript frameworks;
the Django and Pylons Python frameworks;
personal and community branding;
artifacts that can't be mistaken for products.

I want to give you my undivided attention, but I can’t stop thinking about the light in here.

I tend to complicate moments of intimacy with cameras. My friends and lovers tolerate this with an astonishing patience that I'm very grateful for. I try hard to take decent pictures of them in return.

I also take a lot of pictures of machines, especially old cars and industrial infrastucture. I haven't quite figured out what story I'm trying to tell with these, but it has something to do with how people decide the individual fates of all these machines they've bought or made, and whether they wind up meticulously restored, grudgingly maintained, or mercilessly forgotten.

There are about a million words in the English language. We chose Home.

When kristie dahlia and I got married in 1999, we both changed our last names to Home. We have some pretty unconventional ideas about home and marriage, and we've been talking about trying to write them down somewhere for most of the last nine years. More on this project to come.

We live in a TIC called hartford.st in the Castro district of San Francisco, with Dan Haskovec, Jennifer Lynch, their daughters Hazel and Oona, Todd Elliott, Judith Zissman, dog Lyle, and cats Boogie, Oh and Po.

Our websites live on minerva, a FreeBSD-based system that I've maintained for my community since 1997. minerva shares a cabinet with the rest of The Bandwagon Cooperative, an independent bandwidth co-op that I helped found in 1999.

I'd rather help throw the party.

I love parties, especially ones that compel clever people to work together on something genuinely new. I want to make more of that kind of party happen. To learn how, I've made Thursday Night Dinner, danced at Chillits, burned in Black Rock City, grilled cheese with Bianca, and listened at eTech and SXSW. I was volunteer staff for Richard Saul Wurman's TED Conferences for six years, and now manage volunteers and on-site logistics for his new conference, The Entertainment Gathering.

let me make myself perfectly clear.

“Information wants to be free.”I design tools that deal with the consequences.

I want to give you my undivided attention, but I can’t stop thinking about the light in here.

There are about a million words in the English language. We chose Home.

I'd rather help throw the party.

“Information wants to be free.”
I design tools that deal with the consequences.