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Description
Frank Catanzaro is a co-founder and senior partner of the Arcturus Research & Design Group in Hawaii, and a charter member of the Millennium Project, an internationally recognized think tank for global foresight research. He is chair of it’s experimental cyber-node. He attributes much of his success as a futurist to his unique engineering education at Worcester Polytechnic Institute, where he was one of the first to take advantage of the WPI Plan, a bold, nationally recognized initiative in the transformation of engineering education. He designed his own curriculum that was equal parts engineering management, artificial intelligence, transpersonal psychology, and graphic arts, pursued at WPI, Clark University, the School of the Worcester Art Museum, and the Rhode Island School of Design. The goal of this eclectic mix was to study the convergence and convolution of cyber-space with built-space and new social and economic inventions made possible through such convergence.
He was influenced greatly by his mentors, John Platt, Manfred Kochen, William Irwin Thompson, and Willis Harman, and the ideas of Erich Jantsch, Magoroh Maruyama, Ted Nelson, and Buckminster Fuller. Through them he gained a critical perspective of the role of technology in society which inspired much of his work in pioneering early online communities in the late 1970s, and in incorporating innovative use of computer and communications mediated collaboration tools in the 80s and 90s. Through their diverse council, he also learned the art of, what Manfred Kochen called, "Peopleware"-- the social inventions needed to hold hardware and software development to the highest standards of advancing the human potential, not just the corporate bottom line.
• His work with the Karass Foundation laid the ground work for the first Eco-Village Conference held at Findhorn Scotland, which resulted in the establishment of a world-wide Eco-Village Network.
• While consulting to Boston's Deputy Mayor Kathy Kane, he initiated one of the first uses of online community conferencing among Urban Planners around the world for the production of the "Great Cities of the World" conference for the city of Boston.
• Again, in Boston, he participated in two years of cutting edge creative community action research experiments. With the help of a small grant, he and a network of social architect pioneers and local artists and technologists, produced highly creative experiments turning unused built spaces, within the Boston-Cambridge community, into "Temporary Autonomous Zones". Incubating new social inventions, strategies for creative development and reuse of under-utilized spaces and greyfields.
• In conjunction with former partner, Susan Gill, Frank’s pioneering work integrating computer and communications technologies with new social inventions, tied for a first prize award in the Kawasaki, Japan "International Concept Design Competition for Advanced Information Cities."
• He authored and taught a module on Self Organizing Community-Based Economic Development (SOCBED) for the ongoing "Family and Community Leadership" training's at the University of Hawaii.
• While serving on the Mayors Higher Education Committee in Maui Hawaii, he produced a highly successful Learning Community experiment using his SOCBED approach, which resulted in a heavily utilized Community Visioning Center open 24 hours a day. • His work with Arcturus Research and Design in Hawaii was cited in a "White House Sustainable Community Award" recognizing the work of Arcturus Design in the transformation of the North Kohala District of the Big Island, especially the town of Hawi.
• Arcturus Design has developed a comprehensive solution to quick and sustainable construction of living footprints for village/community life, suitable to both rural as well as urban neighborhoods. Called the "Nuu Mau" village model, it is based on a ten-layer deep design template starting with the ancient footprint of nature and ending with the social dynamics of a healthy village. The "Nuu Mau" model is informed by advanced social architecture insights and results in creative new approaches to advanced construction strategies.
More generally, clients such as the Hudson Institute, Fujitsu, Harvard Institute for International Development, Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Sprint, Perot Systems, Arlington Institute, the Waitt Foundation for Community Development, the Nation of Cape Verde, and the Kuwait Oil Company, have benefited from his innovative leading edge software solutions, interdisciplinary insights, collaborative tools and strategies and insightful perspectives.
Frank’s public sector work has included consulting on a National Library of Congress study on the role of hypermedia in the libraries future, participation in the Congressional Peace Academy hearings, and being appointed as a voting delegate to the White House conference on Libraries and Information Systems.
His current work with the Millennium Project of the World Federation of United Nations, involves researching the state of the art in online collaboration tools, the Open Source Software Movement, and their impact on various cyber futures scenarios. Specifically focusing on web 2.0 and 3.0 architectures, and the role of distributed grid, mesh, and ad hoc computing technology as drivers for the emergence of new social and economic futures.
Lecture:
lecture![]() as author at 2nd CEE/SEE Regional Colloquium Capacity Building on Global Governance and the UN System: Teaching Climate Change and the United Nations System 2010 - Belgrade, together with: Jerome C. Glenn, 3484 views |