Cameron Colby Thomson

Cameron Colby Thomson

Farm near Viñales Cuba

MIT Innovations Publication

OSE Background/Role: Board Member - I met Marcin at TED, and soon after visited Factor e Farm. I have assisted with the creation of the foundation, accounts, writings (Journal, Article), strategic issues, business nonsense like legal/accounting/recruiting, and with investor/donor/team relations.

Locations: Lincoln, NE, Kansas City, MO, San Francisco, CA (SOMA), Brooklyn, NY (South Williamsburg)

Email: colby at colbyt com Skype: CameronCThomson

Education: I have a degree in Computer Science, and an MBA from the Raikes School, where I now serve on the board. The school is named for Jeffrey S. Raikes, CEO of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and is an experimental program designed to create leaders at the intersection of technology, business understanding and global issues.

Hobbies: My first job was as a professional water skier. I enjoy snowboarding, wakeboarding, marital arts, yoga, meditation, cooking, photography, and music mixing/tinkering.

Life Projects:

• Local Means of Production and Innovation

In addition to OSE's board, I serve on the Farm Committee of Community Crops, an organization working to create community based agriculture, CSAs, farmer education, and refugee agriculture programs. As part of my investigation into this topic, I have traveled to 30 some-odd countries, including developing economies in Central and South America, the Middle East, Africa, and Asia. I co-founded and serve on the board of the idea community Turbine Flats, a prototype local innovation center, built in a large abandoned warehouse in Lincoln, NE. I also served on the innovation task force and provided assistance with and briefly co-chaired the design committee of UNL's R&D Corridor. In Kansas City, I co-founded the Mason School Ecology club, and founded an annual event with Kauffman Foundation and UMKC where students meet entrepreneurs and investors. In 2012, I served as an American delegate to the G8 Young Leaders Summit, drafting the communique on entrepreneurship and economics. I try to stay active in these topics.

• Long Term Thinking / Future Perspective

I served as Director of Strategy at the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence, a research organization that studies the benefits and risks of advanced AI systems, and helped develop the Singularity Summit, an annual summit where researchers, futurists, and corporate leaders explore the influence of science and technology in society. I am an occasional adviser at Singularity University, a new university that focuses on emerging technologies, a Thiel Fellows Mentor for bright young students ready to skip college, and have served as a collaborator with silicon valley futurist groups focused on long term thinking. I have participated in political and economic think tanks and served as a principal grant collaborator and system designer for a $15m consortium application to the Department of Homeland Defense for the 'Center for the Study of High Consequence Event Preparedness and Response'.

• Fix the Insurance Industry for Consumers:

In 2003, I co-founded Allied Strategy, an investment group and tech shop, with the goal to solve problems with the insurance industry I encountered watching my parents struggle with health insurance claims, and having a house fire. Allied Strategy has since spun off several small companies in pursuit of this goal, and participated in lobbying and grassroots efforts. I currently serve as CEO of Honest Policy, a company creating tools for consumers to compare price and quality of insurance providers on the web. Immediately before that, I served as CEO of SEMCAT Corporation, a company I co-founded to give insurance agents the tools needed to make a price comparison on behalf of consumers. SEMCAT is the largest commercial application built on Mozilla Foundation's open source web framework.

• Resume/CV http://www.linkedin.com/in/cthomson