Thomas Vander Wal

Life

Current Life:

Work...

Works on consulting, advising, contracting, fractional leader roles, and targeting full-time opportunities. Always open to interesting projects. Also working on a stealth project.

I have availability and interest in helping organizations improve their technical approaches, systems, workflows, process, and working in today's world productively.

Side Projects...

Lives in...

Bethesda, Maryland.

Written About

• Social Machines in MIT Technology Review
• NY Times 2005 Year in Ideas
• Folksonomies Tap People Power by Bruce Sterling in Wired News
• "Folksonomy" Carries Classifieds Beyond SWF and "For Sale" in New York Times

Interviews and Presentations

• Seeing Clearly Through the Fog of Complexity - Complexity Lounge - YouTube
• Sustainable AI that Has Our Backs - Imaginize a New World - YouTube - Will Future Technology Have Our Back? Summary on Gig Mindsetters – Imaginize a New World
• The Omni Show: How Thomas Vander Wal Uses Omni Software

Also see Press Coverage

Past Lives:

Worked...

• UTC / RTX, Head of Strategy and Planning for DevSecOps
• Rhizome Innovation / Mile Out, Director of Product Design and Senior Consulting Advisor
• GigaOM Research, Analyst
• KM World, Columnist
• Adjuvi, Senior Consultant
• Design for Context, Senior User Experience Designer and Strategist
• InfoCloud Solutions, Senior Consultant and Principal
• INDUS Corporation, Web Services Program Manager & Subject Matter Expert - Internet
• PSS, Inc. - Director Information Application Services & Director Product Development
• InterImage, Inc. - Senior Business Analyst & Tech Lead
• CompassRose International - Director of Strategic Analysis
• AILA - Information Specialist
• AMCRA - Research Associate
• U.S. Senate - Fellow
• Fritz Companies, Inc. - Account Rep. & Data Analyst
• Commonwealth Club of California - Membership Development
• Wells Fargo Bank - Backshop Services Associate

More detail can be found on many of these on my LinkedIn profile for Thomas Vander Wal.

Past Side Projects...

Web Standards Project, Steering Committee
AIfIA, Founding Leadership Council
Boxes and Arrows, Alumni Tech Lead

Education

• Georgetown University Public Policy Institute MPP degree
• Centre for Mediaeval and Renaissance Studies, Oxford, England
• Saint Mary's College of California for BA degree
• Lincoln High School in Stockton, CA

Lived...

• Arlington, Virginia
• San Francisco, California
• Oxford, England, UK
• Moraga, California
• Stockton, California
• Pacific Palisades, California
• Portland, Oregon
• Bellevue, Washington
• Spokane, Washington
• San Francisco Bay Area, California

Getting Here

I am fortunate that work and play intersect to a great degree. I research, design, advise, and build information applications based on internet technologies and leverage my foundations in information architecture, organizational efficiency, IS/IT management, product & project management, social interactions & analysis, and interaction design (see Technosocial Architect for an understanding). I work and have worked inside organizations and consulting/contracting, which helps know the pain felt on both sides. I work in and across nearly all sizes and sectors of organizations.

In college I chose communication as my major (over economics, the draw to this subject stems from a great econ teacher in high school) as I did not have a great grasp of how people interacted and shared information easily nor effectively. What made a good speech that hit home? What made an advertisement stick in your head? These sort of questions triggered a tidal wave of interest. The digital information trends in the office and home really added to the interest and created a deep rooted passion.

While, it is not recent, the interview by Peter Bogaards for InfoDesign - Understanding Design: Profile of Thomas Vander Wal is still quite good and rather relevant overview of the design slice of what I do.

The Site

Early on, much of this site is built with TypePad (Mac), and a touch of Homesite and put into place with FTP. The graphic elements are created and modified with Adobe PhotoShop and Macromedia FreeHand. The site is moving toward validating XHTML and CSS.

Today, there have been many iterations of the backend and that has been done with PHPStorm, Nova, by Panic Software, and BBEdit for code in PHP, HTML, and CSS (very little JS used).

The "Off the Top" section, is managed with a blogging tool built from scratch using PHP and MariaDB. This is a light content management system that I built to ease content creation and upkeep.