User:Curtbeckmann: Difference between revisions

• I am an admin here at Appropedia, and one of the founding directors.
• I am also on the board of Village Hope, which works in Sierra Leone.
• I am also on the board of LeapingStone, which is working in Togo.
• I twitter / dent at neophytehuman
• Please help out Village Hope (and others!) by improving this proto-article which I started: Expanding peanut production in West Africa. (Thanks. :-) )

Leave me a note on my talk page!

Personal:

• Married with kids
• Live in Los Gatos, CA

Contact:

• blog: http://wannaresolution.blogspot.com
• email: Click "E-mail this user" in the toolbox at left

Day job:

• Product Management in Storage Networking firm

Schooling:

• BS Physics with Math minor, CSU Fullerton, 1991 (or was it 1990?)
• MBA, Santa Clara University, 1999

Experience in Appropriate Technology:

• Only on the web... You're all miles ahead of me! Working on Appropedia provides me a way to chip in without leaving the country, but the third world is where I really want to make a difference. I think there are a million people like me in that respect, and one of the barriers for us is the difficulty in finding information. See my blog for more discussion of all this.
• I am a recent member of EWB-SFP. (That's Engineers Without Borders, San Francisco Professionals chapter.) The first meeting I showed up for was a fundraising committee meeting, so I'm kind of a member. That's fine, actually; I'm not in a position to travel or contribute much expertise yet, so fundraising is a way to help out. I'm also going to work with them to publish some content that is currently on their internal Twiki onto Appropedia.

Porting Help:

• I'm a "registered Porting Helper". If you've got content, I'm willing to help port it to Appropedia. Send me an email (see toolbox at left), or click on discussion above.
  • If you would like to "register" as a Porting Helper, copy/paste the following at the bottom of your user page:

    [[Category:Porting helper]]

Conviction:

• Humanity is on a treacherous path. It's up to us to make the difference!
• See User:Curtbeckmann/Mission, where I'm working on my answers to the Appropedia Mission questions.

Favorite books, in no particular order (I'll add these to the book reviews over time):

• True Enough, Farhad Manjoo
• The Post American World, Fareed Zakaria
• Deep Economy, Bill McKibben
• Predictably Irrational, Dan Ariely
• Collapse, Jared Diamond
• Nonzero, Robert Wright
• The Mystery of Capital, Hernando de Soto
• The End of Poverty, Jeffrey Sachs
• Globalization and Its Discontents, Joseph Stiglitz
• Mountains Beyond Mountains, Tracy Kidder (interesting "dig" at Appropriate Technology in there)
• Confessions of an Economic Hitman, John Perkins
• Banker to the Poor, Muhammad Yunus
• The Elusive Quest for Growth, William Easterly
• The Poisonwood Bible, Barbara Kingsolver
• Confucius Lives Next Door, TR Reid
• A Fortune Teller Told Me, Tiziano Terzani
• All the Harry Potter series (by You-Know-Who, escapism, helps enable imagining something different)

On my list:

• Development as Freedom, Amartya Sen
• Numerous books on peace (halfway through about 6 books)