I was born in Ballarat, the eldest of three, and grew up on a farm at Dunneworthy near Ararat. Its still my home
I studied Commerce at the University of Melbourne and played rugby at state level, then semi-professionally in England. A badly set broken leg ended that. I used the long recovery to teach myself to program, which turned out to be the more useful skill.
I spent fifteen years in banking. I learnt how money works, and I learnt that I don’t do well being managed by process.
What I do now
- Princes Park Touch. I founded it, and I’m still its president. It’s now a Melbourne club of more than 760 members, with 500–600 players a season.
- LocalHero. The platform Princes Park Touch runs on: open infrastructure that lets community organisations own their website, members and data, instead of renting them from Big Tech.
- Open source. 100 free plugins on WordPress.org with more than 10,000 active installs, plus contributions to WordPress core and BuddyPress.
- Writing. Essays on community, self-government and the open web, including pieces published in The Canberra Times.
- History. A long-running gazetteer of Australian places, and the E.M. Shaw Cup, a family tradition I convene.
What I believe
My views are closer to the ancient Greeks than to most of Silicon Valley. Freedom means having no master, and you exercise it by taking part in governing the communities you belong to. Today the masters are the platforms. I’d like communities to have their own assemblies back, starting with the places their members meet online. I set out the argument in The polis and the platform.
