One Theme – Diverse Stories
All of my work explores how those who effectively disrupt prevailing views succeed if their timing and strategy align with the forces in play. Or how they fail. It’s easy to assume that failure was either their fault, or not their fault, that it was too early for their big idea to gain traction.
What if there’s no credit or blame?
One Theme – Diverse Stories
All of my work explores how those who
effectively disrupt prevailing views
succeed if their timing and strategy align
with the forces in play. Or how they fail.
It’s easy to assume that failure was either
their fault, or not their fault, that it was
too early for their big idea to gain traction.
But what if there’s no credit or blame?
The space between these two extremes
demands our attention – how do big
ideas gain traction? How can we empower
action to address civil liberties so that
those who speak out do not become
scapegoats? Climate change? Saving
our ocean?
STORY Portals to Complex Systems Problems
Why I wrote ALTON. ALTON is based on the original research of my father, John Glanville Gill, who wrote his Harvard Ph.D. thesis on Elijah Parish Lovejoy. Writing this PhD thesis transformed my father from an academic into a civil rights activist, much as his hero was transformed from a neutral Editor into an Abolitionist. Identifying with Lovejoy, he wanted to extend his legacy. ALTON is dedicated to my father’s dream that this story can transform the reality we share. Elijah Parish Lovejoy, the hero in ALTON, was a white man murdered by a mob of white men for supporting the abolition of slavery. Shortly after Lovwejoy’s murder, Abraham Lincoln, (then 28 years old) gave his first major public speech, his Lyceum Lecture, which launched his path to the White House. Twenty years later, Elijah Lovejoy’s brother, Owen Lovejoy, helped Lincoln launch his campaign for the Presidency. Lincoln’s last debate vs Stephen Douglas occurred in Alton, Illinois in 1858.
Why I wrote ALICE in Cinderland. Stream of consciousness writing in 2019 predicted the great California fires and pandemic of 2020, Trump election antics and ensuing violence. Alice faces the writer’s Fiction for Action challenge – to weave thought and memory into an impactful story. The Alice Audiobook precedes the eBook and hard copy books with A.I. generated illustrations.
Publisher – MetaVu Books. The four books in this series have screenplays. POW! [Power Our World] works with innovative leaders to make media actionable.
From CIQ (Collaborative Intelligence) to POW! As a graduate student (M. Arch. Architecture, Harvard), I worked for Buckminster Fuller, whose concept for World Game preceded the public internet and mobile computing, Later, my entry to the international smart city competition, Kawasaki: Information City of the 21st Century, tied with Matsushita (now Panasonic) for First Prize and won the Award of the Mayor of Kawasaki, placing higher than entries of other large Japanese corporations, including Shimizu and Taisei.
I proposed an IIS (Intelligent Integrating System) to harness distributed nodes and devices to aggregate and make sense of data. This was a concept for technology to support collaborative intelligence before we had a public internet. Later, as a Research Scientist and Program Developer at RIACS (Research Institute for Advanced Computer Science), contracted to NASA (US National Aeronautics and Space Administration), I won an Incentive Award for Outstanding Performance for the concept and program plan for NASA University. I also assembled the concept for a global sustainability collaboratory called BEACON (Bio-Evolutionary Advanced Concepts), a precursor for earthDECKS, where DECKS stands for Distributed Evolving Collaborative Knowledge System and is also a deck of “story cards.”
A.I. tools highlight grave risks (longer bio here), but can be a great equalizer, offering ways to realize a vision of the Noosphere and Buckminster Fuller’s pre-Internet concept for World Game, enabled by the internet and A. I. To focus on evolving collaborative intelligence, I founded GAIL [Generative AI Lab + Library] and its action parter GAIL [Global Action Improv Lab].
