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MITRA ARDRON

Technology, Decentralization, International Development

Byron Bay, Australia

mitra@mitra.biz

+61-491-082-515 voice, sms - Australia

+1(510)423-1767 sms, whatsapp, signal)

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Writings on Sustainability

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Current Projects

Past Projects

Natural Innovation


Technology for Good

My life's main thread is using technology for "good". How can we create and use
technology to make the world a better place.

I'm a do-er rather than an advocate. I work at the creative intersection between
technical and business/organizational aspects, making things happen that can
lead us to a better planet, and doing it at a scale that is relevant to the
challenges we face.

There are three interwoven threads that recur in my career: the internet,
developing countries, and clean technologies (especially renewable energy).

Scalable Innovation for Sustainability & International Development

I'm passionate about developing and using technology and innovation, to
sustainably solve the problems of poverty and international development (aka the
SDGs) at scale. I believe there are many challenges in development that are
amenable to solutions that are at least in part technical, and where often a
solution exists in the West but for a number of systemic reasons we haven't
found a solution that works for all the world's population. I've started several
Social Ventures and NGO's in this theme, and since the sale of Lumeter I am
mentoring, or consulting to a number of interesting technology based projects.

Folia Water and Folia Materials Advisor and board member 2018 ...

ADVISOR AND BOARD MEMBER 2018 ...

Folia Materials has developed technology for affordably impregnating silver or
copper into paper. Among other anti-bacterial and anti-viral applications it has
been turned into an affordable water filter. Folia Water is bringing clean water
to the billion+ who still lack it. By leveraging existing retail chains the
problem of scaling solutions is removed. Trials are going really well in
Bangladesh. Folia is raising their next round of finance and exploring other
uses for the core technology.

Lumeter Networks - PAYG Technology leader Founder 2012 - 2017 ...

CEO, CTO AND FOUNDER 2012 - JUNE 2017

We developed the leading PAYG technology, including hardware solutions embedded
in the products of multiple manufacturers; and a full-stack dashboard enabling
solar companies to deliver solutions to 40,000+ people. We had sales in 69
countries by the time we sold the company to Mobisol in 2017. www.lumeter.net

Mentoring

I'm active as a mentor, through a number of organizations including: Mentor
Capital Network where I've been a board member, judge, and entrant in their
competition; Tech2Impact; and Sourdough; I have also been a judge on ASME &
Engineering for Change (E4C)'s iShow competition & for CleanTech Open Global.
I'm always interested in how we can improve the support that can be brought to
technology based social entrepreneurs.

Ecosystem for technology and development

There are very few sources of funding for technical solutions to important
problems. They often fall between the cracks: Too big for Angels; not enough
return for VC's; too risky for Philanthropists; and too early for Impact funds.

I'm interested in talking to foundations about aligning some portion of their
funding to higher risk, higher impact, developments that have a chance of
solving a problem they, or their grantees, care about. I'm also interested in
talking with people who may have other approaches to this problem.

In the past ...

Using technology for good has been a thread throughout my career. Some
highlights include:

 * Starting a solar company in Byron Bay, Australia that, through a rigorous
   analysis of the broken business models of the time, cut the installed cost by
   30% enabling thousands of home owners to access previously inaccessable
   renewable energy. This region is still a leader for residential solar.
 * Mentoring the developers, and raising the capital for, the first viable
   aquaponics system. Urban Ecological Systems / Blue Smart Farms.
 * Three years traveling the world, mentoring, and learning from innovators in
   technology for international development. See NaturalInnovation.org.


Previous work on early Internet and decentralization.

I was very involved in the early internet and web development, before moving on
to focus on impact and sustainability. But from 2017-2020 I led the
decentralized and offline web projects at the Internet Archive. Its goal was to
further a vision of a decentralized internet, and to bring the Archive's content
to those beyond the reach of the current internet.

Universal Library and Offline Internet Archive

We wanted to bring the resources of the largest online library to everyone
including the half the world's population who live where the internet is slow,
expensive or censored.

We worked with collaborators who support underserved communities to build a set
of tools that allow deploying local servers on really cheap devices, or
integrating into apps that get around cost, speed and political limitations.

The project was closed because the content at the Internet Archive was not
particularly relevant to those who don't have internet access

The result, open sourced at dweb-mirror, can run in boxes as small as a
Raspberry Pi.

Decentralized Web and Archive - dweb.archive.org

In 2017-2018 we worked with some of the other current and former internet
pioneers, to advance a vision of decentralized web, where power lies with the
users - both writers and readers. Imagine a world where storing in "the cloud"
really meant the cloud - all the computers on the net - rather than server farms
under centralized control.

This culminated at the Decentralized Web Summit in launching dweb.archive.org
which used IPFS, WebTorrent and GunDB to provide a decentralized version of the
Archive.

This isn't Blockchain, but its built on many of the same underlying tools that
power Bitcoin and its succcessors such as strong cryptography and decentralized
file stores or databases, and its open-source.

In the past

I was an early pioneer on the internet and the web, with a focus on its use for
good, a few examples:

 * Started, in 1985, GreenNet, an ISP (Internet Service Provider), supporting
   the non profit and activist sector, it is still going.
 * Co-founded, in 1989, the APC (Association for Progressive Communications),
   which pioneered the internet into the global South, and today is the main
   international Civil Society group for civil rights on the internet,
   especially in less developed countries.
 * Active in early Internet standards through IETF, where I co-authored, or was
   an active contributor to, several standards including: HTTP, the URL, URN,
   VRML etc
 * Co-authored US Patent # 09883064 on swarming and using hashes as file
   identifiers in Peer-to-Peer, which is the core of the techniques used by
   Bittorrent, IPFS, and others for downloading parts of files from other
   participating computers.
 * Technical lead for the connection between AOL and the Internet. AOL was
   uncontrolled users, in a highly controlled environment, while the Internet of
   the time was largely academics but large (uncontrolled) quantities of
   information (in Gopher and WAIS - this was pre-Web). Bringing the two
   together was the first mass use of the internet.
 * Led the networking team that built Worlds Chat, the first shared 3D
   environment on the internet.


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