I love applying innovative tech for voluntary communities. I’m coauthor of Founding Startup Societies, a guidebook on bootstrapping free communities that draws on my experience in more than 50 countries over the past five decades, including the first information technology-focused free economic zones. My current work is on “endowment zones” that broadly share rising land value gains as deep policy reforms and AI-based tools erode top-down systems. In my view, such experimental zones will become pilot areas for scalable alternatives to failing incumbent systems, leading to broad-based wins in learning, healthcare, basic service delivery, and self-governance.

Professionally, my career in free zones began with launching the Earthport project in the mid-1970s, an initiative backed by Bucky Fuller, Freeman Dyson, Robert Heinlein, and Arthur C. Clarke to create an equatorial spaceport for commercial launch ventures. I also served as an early publisher and managing editor of Reason magazine, where I co-founded (with Robert W. Poole, Jr.) the Local Government Center, the first research organization specializing in large-scale transfers of municipal functions to contractual providers. For the Sabre Foundation, I led projects on enterprise zone, land trust, and self-help ventures at local, state, and federal levels in the United States, including projects to form self-funding community land trusts through fiscal incentives. I also researched opportunities, with support from the Paul F. Glenn Foundation, for creation of World Cities as potential Singapore- and Hong Kong scale havens offering fresh starts to economic migrants and refugees.

I have been active as cofounder or lead advisor at Openworld, the Startup Societies Foundation, and a range of technology-oriented consultancies and startup ventures. Beyond dozens of projects to design new legal and regulatory regimes benefiting technology park and enterprise zone developers, my projects have supported entrepreneurial schools and telecenter operators in obtaining microvouchers and land grants (Kyrgyzstan), creating online work-study projects for students (Somaliland), and crowdfunding microscholarships and peer learning (Sri Lanka). I have longstanding interests in peer learning innovations, and have contributed to pilot eLearning design projects with Openworld Learning (a U.S.-Russian eLearning venture), the Center for Advanced Engineering Studies at MIT, and Digiperfect in India. I am presently embarked on a “Neighborhood Share” initiative, in which AirBnb/VRBO hosts set aside a percentage of their earnings to seed local self-help projects that make areas more inviting to visit and live in.

My recently published works are on ways that catalytic philanthropy can spread next-generation free zones, and on AI-enabled cooperation among sovereign individuals across cultural, political, and species divides (chapters in a recent book on Freedompreneurs published by Duncker and Humblot in Berlin, 2025). Earlier writings include The Fall of Tax-Funded Universities and Rise of World-Class Alternatives (Pope Center/Fund for the Study of Spontaneous Orders), Emergence of a New Hanseatic League (Chapman Law Review), Seeding Grass Roots Recovery (ACIR), Stimulating Community Enterprise (Joint Economic Committee of Congress), Privatizing the City (Heritage Foundation Policy Review), Online Free Markets and Entrepreneurship in the Muslim World (Institute of Economic Affairs), Frontiers for Free Trade (American Astronautical Society), and Philanthropy for a Post-Scarcity Economy (Johnson Center/The Philanthropic Enterprise). I have been an invited speaker at the White House Fellows Program, Harvard Business School, New Worlds Conference, Templeton Foundation, International Space University, World Bank, American Astronautical Society, and the Municipal Finance Officers Association.

I hold an interdisciplinary degree in Social Studies with high honors from Harvard University, where I concentrated on outcome measures as a means of holding tax-funded services accountable for results. As a Visiting Fellow with the Lehrman Institute, I researched tax policies to promote divestiture of public sector functions to homeowners associations and other durable neighborhood self-help associations. My wife and I now reside in Virginia and participate in a range of civic causes, including tiny house and ecovillage ventures. Personal interests include kayaking, flying, architectural design, and retro-futurist spacecraft model building.