Mark Verber |
My pages are in the process of being re-arranged. Some content is no longer visibly linked in but will reappear shortly Redirects are in place so old URLs continue to work.
Interests: Doing good, building effective enterprises (organizational learning, leadership, etc), systems (architecting, complexity theory, game theory, emergence), learning & growth (psychology, education, science of the mind, epistemology), and matters of faith. I believe that the world is complex with far more inter-connections than most people realize... so small changes can often make a huge impact. I seem to spend a lot of time mobilizing or organizing people. My wife and I have run Perspectives a number of times. I donate my time and skills to organizations that perform humanitarian service or result in effective development (commercial, missions, NGO, and governmental). I think society can be best judged by how it treats those with the least power.
Home: Libby and I were married in 1985. She's my best friend. I strive to love and support her, and to be a good parent to our daughter Helen who is a delight! Don't take my word for it, even her classmates feel this way. My favorite quote is "Even if you don't want to, you've got to love Helen". We are blessed to live in the San Francisco Bay Area. Our family enjoys keeping pets, especially house rabbits.
Work: Working on a new path... stay tune. I was at Metaweb which was briefly described in an economist article about metaweb. You should check out some of our artifacts including freebase service, acre hosting, the parallax visualization tool and mjt in browser app framework. I have been been building teams and computing infrastructure since the early 1980s. If you want to know more, ask me for a current resume. I have been active in ACM and USENIX (program committees, reader, etc). I had the privilege of being an industry advisor for the joint UC Berkeley & Stanford ROC and UC Berkeley RAD Lab projects, and interacted a bit with the Oasis crew. Check out TIER to see what happens when good systems research meets the developing world and Captology to see how technology can can change people's thinking and actions. I am interested in many aspects of computer science... but focus mostly on systems.
Hobbies: outdoors, travel, reading, photography and music. I love hiking and find it a wonderful way to remember the importance of beauty, simplicity, and living in the present. A number of years ago I invested some time into building a stereo system and like many geeks play with consumer electronics.
Learning: I grew up in an academic environment where nearly everyone seemed to have at least one PhD, but where it was also understood that wisdom was more valuable than mere book knowledge or academic success. These days my learning come mostly from sage advise from great co-workers, interesting web sites, books, the media, and learning things the hard way through direct experience :-) I believe that the unexamined life isn't worth living. I think sharing knowledge and wisdom is very important. Sharing can be done on a small scale via mentoring, but often requires writing to be useful to a larger audience. Alas, I am an extremely slow writer. I work hard to get other people to write on topics which I think are important. As a last resort, I will write myself. Most often, what I write starts as an email, or maybe a brief outline. Over time I add content to transform notes into something that is hopefully useful to others. Papers which are refined enough to be useful to others include:
Pages I plan to finish some day include
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