Thomas Kriese
Redwood City, California - USA
Omidyar Network

Biography:

Thomas Kriese is Executive Producer at Omidyar Network, serving as liaison between the members of omidyar.net and the development team that builds the collaborative tools used by the community to share knowledge and collaborate on new projects. Anyone interested in making the world a better place can connect with others who share their interests in the online community of omidyar.net.

Prior to Omidyar Network, Mr. Kriese worked for seven years at America Online and AOL Time Warner. At AOL, he created content programming models and had the opportunity to build, launch and grow AOL's home page community, AOL Hometown. He then went on to work for the AOL Time Warner Foundation, helping create online content and communities to support the offline nonprofit community at large.

What's a recent movie you've seen and enjoyed and why?

I saw The Motorcycle Diaries recently (thanks Netflix) and enjoyed it for the story of two young idealistic med students taking a five month road trip across South America and how the seeds of social change were planted and their futures were changed irrevocably from that road trip experience.

What is "community" and why is it important to you?

I see "community" as any group of people who share the same interests, for a short time or for the long haul, and who collaborate together in some way to satisfy that shared interest. At Omidyar Network, we exist so that more and more people discover their own power to make good things happen. The community is an environment where people are likely to discover their power. And the collaborative aspect of community amplifies the efforts of the individuals within, exponentially.

Pick your favorite technology and explain how it
makes the world a better place?

(I'll resist the urge to say "the technology of omidyar.net") My favorite technology of the moment is wiki collaborative software. As demonstrated via the great things happening over on the Wikipedia (http://wikipedia.org) where anyone can edit the content on a Wikipedia page, wiki decentralizes the power to communicate and removes the traditional top-down control over messaging, . The act of participating in a wiki collaboration is an exercise in sublimating the ego, as the focus of one's energies is on the product and not on the authorship credit.

2-3 questions or issues that you hope we'll address at the "Deepening Online Deliberation" meeting?

- What are the key levers to move a community from talk to action?
- How can we best provide cultural context to facilitate online deliberation?