I am one of the world’s leading thinkers on infrastructure theory, state failure solutions, and managing global system risks including poverty/development and the environmental crisis.
I work at both the theoretical level, building models and mapping tools like Simple Critical Infrastructure Maps (used by US DOD) and at the completely practical level, where I am best known as the designer of the hexayurt, an award-winning replacement for the disaster relief tent which provides shelter at 20% the cost of a tent.
I helped start the US National Defense University STAR-TIDES program on humanitarian assistance, consulted on urban resilience for Arup, and am an associate fellow of the UCL Institute for Security and Resilience Studies.
You may find my perspective useful in three areas:
-
Managing geopoltical risk in your business and personal life – what if we lose one of the world’s reserve currencies, for example?
-
Strategic perspective on the global development crisis, too few resources for too many people, natural systems degradation – how can we solve this?
-
Philosophical and practical understanding of how to think about very, very large issues in a clear and coherent fashion at both a political and a technical level.
What can I do for you?
You can contact me by email.
The following is a cross-section of my work.
Recent activities
- My Public todo list is fully editable. Please feel free to help if you can!
- I am working on a massively collaborative book about the future called The Future We Deserve.
- I make extensive use of video to communicate, and train others to do the same. I recently released the Gupta State Failure Management Archive is 4.3gb of Public Domain/cc video lectures and documents. You can download it from archive.org or legal bittorrent.
- Hexayurt – the world’s cheapest, most durable emergency shelter. Free/open source. Used extensively in a recreational context. Approaching formal field testing.
- Six Ways To Die – a simple, easy to remember model for managing personal risk. Used by the STAR-TIDES program.
- STAR-TIDES – US National Defense University humanitarian technology program. (founding member)
- Defense Horizons #70 – “STAR-TIDES and Starfish Networks: Supporting Stressed Populations with Distributed Talent” on decentralized disaster response for the prestigious US National Defense University Center for Technology and National Security Policy series. (co-author)
- Networked domestic disaster response – rehousing after “whole city” disasters like nuclear terrorism. Well reviewed by relevant authorities.
- Severe Pandemic Flu Strategies – the only non-classified work done on dealing with H5N1 bird flu if it goes pandemic at its full (60%) case fatality rate.
Access to Resources
- Global Swadeshi – the world’s largest social network for appropriate technology activists. The Guardian newspaper recently featured me as a Swadeshi advocate in a video interview. (I appear about half way through)
- Small is Profitable – The Economist’s Book of the Year 2003, on decentralized energy economics. (editorial team)
- Winning the Oil Endgame – Pentagon-funded study on getting the US to zero oil consumption in 20 years. (co-editor)
- The Future of Poverty/Ending Poverty with Open Hardware/Soft Development Paths – a local infrastructure and networked education plan for global poverty alleviation.
- The Global Village Development Bank – imagine if the World Bank was built around financing decentralized, distributed infrastructure using ICT to manage a hundred million projects globally
Managing States
- Simple Critical Infrastructure Maps – a simple and coherent model for mapping critical situations, from individual survival to state failure.
- Hexayurt Country – a national reconstruction plan for Haiti after the 2010 earthquake.
- State in a Box: Identity Services Architecture/CheapID – a genocide resistant biometrics standard particularly suitable for implementation in failed states. Focuses on providing identity services to combat poverty, not just security. Written for the Office of the Secretary of Defense with National Security Agency oversight.
- The Living City – urban resilience models and philosophy, commissioned by Arup.
- Institute for Collapsonomics – a working group on the theory and practice behind managing massive economic contractions. (founding member)
New Politics for a New Æon
- The Future We Deserve, which is about the role of collaboration in creating the future of the human species.
- The Big Deal which shows how the exercise of grass-roots political power might change the world.