Visudo Labs

Cornell e-Rulemaking Initiative (CeRI) is a multidisciplinary group of faculty and students, based at Cornell University. CeRi works with federal agencies to discover the best ways to use Web 2.0 and other technologies to improve public understanding of, and participation in, rulemaking. CeRi is hosted by the Legal Information Institute (LII), which has been providing legal information to the public since 1992, and is the most linked-to web resource in the field of law.

I joined the research team in 2009 and work as a researcher and lead technologist for Regulation Room, a pilot project that provides an online environment for people and groups to learn about, discuss, and react to selected rules (regulations) proposed by federal agencies.

Candide 2.0 is an experiment in public reading and communal annotation launched in conjunction with the New York Public Library’s exhibition Candide at 250: Scandal and Success.

Littlesis, a project funded by Sunlight Foundation, is a nonprofit nonpartisan research organization focused on government and corporate transparency and accountability. We track the relationships of individuals and powerful institutions with the purpose of exposing those who abuse their power.

The Institute for the Future of the Book is a think tank funded by the MacArthur Foundation and affiliated with the University of Southern California. I joined a small group of multidisciplinary researchers investigating the transformation of intellectual discourse as it shifted from away from printed pages and onto networked screens. We met scholars, researchers, educators, and blogged about our findings. I was also the lead developer of web projects.

I founded digress.it – an online community and open-source WordPress plugin – popular with universities, literary groups, governments and legal scholars.

The American Council on Education, Lumina Foundation for Education and the Ad Council launched the KnowHow2GO campaign in January 2007. This multiyear, multimedia effort includes television, radio and outdoor public service advertisements (PSAs) that encourage 8th through 10th graders to prepare for college using four simple steps.

I developed a WordPress multi-user architecture that centralized the deployment and management of sites as the program expands to new states.

JISC (Joint Information Systems Committee) works with colleges and universities in the use of digital technologies across education and research and funds a wide range of innovative projects and studies. In 2009, in collaboration with the University of Lincoln (UK), I received a grant to further develop digress.it.

Mitchell Stephens, professor of journalism at New York University, in writing a paper titled Holy of Holies, wished to allow his audience to annotate his text with links and references. At the institute, we developed such a a system, and later developed it as CommentPress.

At Future of the Book we developed a forum for Humanities, Arts, Sciences, and Technology Advanced Collaboratory called The Future of Learning Institutions in a Digital Age

MediaCommons, a project-in-development with support from the Institute for the Future of the Book (part of the Annenberg Center for Communication at USC) and the National Endowment for the Humanities, is a network in which scholars, students, and other interested members of the public can help to shift the focus of scholarship back to the circulation of discourse.

I was the lead developer of the first iteration of the website in 2006.

The Institute for the Future of the Book created this project to investigate new approaches to writing in the networked environment, and to see what happens when authors and readers are brought into conversation over an evolving text. Working with McKenzie Wark, we launched Gamer Theory, a  widely reviewed networked book published by Harvard Press.

Greenpress is a community of  bloggers interested in the “green movement.” I developed various themes and plugins in Multi-user WordPress and also developed a custom backend interface and a custom theme editor with real time previews.

Lewis Lapham, editor emeritus of Harper’s Magazine, approached the Institute for the Future of the Book to help him and his colleagues launch the web component of this new journal, called Lapham’s Quarterly. We conceived of a project called Operation Iraqi Quagmire, that provided informed sources and scholars the ability to closely annotate the recently published Iraq Study Group Report. I developed the annotation technology, a WordPress plugin that later became CommentPress.

CommentPress is an open source theme for the WordPress blogging engine that allows readers to comment paragraph by paragraph in the margins of a text. Working with the Institute, I developed the technology and continue to manage the source code and releases.

Smartest is a content management system I helped fund and co-develop; Now managed by VSC Creative.

SocialMonkey, was an social networking service centered around providing friends and family information of your whereabouts. I helped develop the technology that processed the SMS commands.

Opendemocracy.net, an online publication of political and analytical articles from thinkers around the world asked Visudo to build a microsite centered on debate and communication around the effects of terrorism, in the wake of terrorist attacks around the world.

Akaza Research provides data repositories and software tools for public biomedical research. Working closely for over a year, I helped establish the development process for OpenClinica – an open source HIPAA compliant data repository. I also built their intranet, integrated a bugtracker into the application, developed a Q&A strategy, and automated the testing and release process.

As a consultant for e-guana, I primarily handled data migration projects for the American Association for the Advancement of Science and did site analysis research for National Center for Learning Disabilities.