Side hustles, volunteer, & philanthropic work:
Leader for 6+ years of a philanthropic giving circle advancing awesomeness in Washington, DC through $1,000 monthly grants funding arts, culture, and community projects, events, and ideas
Founder and Director of the workshop for more than a decade that trained the past 5 generations of White House Photographers, dozens of Pulitzer winners, and the world's leading photojournalists
Executive member and Treasurer and global board steering the international Awesome Foundation's 90+ chapters from around the world in 20+ countries
President and Founder of the Virginia Ave Dog Park partners association who are the community stewards of DC's largest public dog park in Capitol Hill and Navy Yard
Director for the Awesome Foundation's global convening of organization leaders from around the globe; I re-envisioned the event structure and content expanding it to focus on actionable results and shared content
Executive Director for the Society for News Design's 2011 convention in St. Louis which I won two SND President's awards for going above and beyond in the event planning and execution
From 2010-2011, I was appointed a Fellowship at the University of Missouri's Donald W. Reynolds Journalism Institute to research mobile reporting and content strategy, and product development for multi-platform news in the modern age
I was elected the youngest-ever director for the Online News Association's Board of Directors where I was the Secretary, and pioneered board transparency, the MJ Bear Fellowship for young journalists, and an emerging technology focus
Back when I lived in Florida, I helped organize a Bubble Flash Mob (back when that was a thing). We organized it through MySpace (seriously). It was pretty cool.
In 2013-2014, I lead crafted, created, and recorded multiple series of "Massive Open Online Courses" (MOOC) for the Knight Center for Journalism in the Americas and Google on mobile reporting and introduction to mobile for newsrooms. The mobile reporting course was also recorded and translated into Portuguese.
I was a very early journalism tech blogger in the 2000's and gained global notoriety for my thoughts, analysis, strategy, and acute pulse on emerging technology in the media. From this work, I experimented a lot in social, mobile, and multimedia technology and became heavily recruited to speak and teach at conferences and events from ONA, SND, NPPA, SXSW, INMA, MPA, The Poynter Institute, more than two dozen universities, and also named by Harvard University's Nieman Journalism Lab as one of the 10 best "future-of-journalism" blogs.
Director and Founding Board member of the non-profit group working to help nurture and grow the Capitol Hill and Navy Yard community park, featuring a community garden and DC's largest public dog park.
Visual Journalism Fellowship
I was selected to be a visiting fellow at the prestigious Poynter Institute for their Visual Journalism Fellowship in 2005.
I've lived a fairly simple, Spartan life, but have always made time and energy to travel with a life's mission to have visited more countries than my age -- and I'm doing well ahead of the curve currently at 55. I've also visited all 50 states, and 6 of the 7 continents.
I worked as an early strategic advisor to this Y-Combinator funded startup, building targeted browser-based push notifications, and I eventually became an angel investor.