BACKGROUND AND QUALIFICATIONS

Joichi Ito is Vice President of international and mobility for Technorati (http://www.technorati.com) which indexes and monitors blogs and the Chairman of Six Apart Japan (http://www.sixapart.jp) the weblog software company.

He is on the board of Creative Commons (http://www.creativecommons.org), a non-profit organization which proposes a middle way to rights management, rather than the extremes of the pure public domain or the reservation of all rights. He is a board member of Internet Corporation For Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) (http://www.icann.org/).

He is a co-founder of and treasurer of the Japan chapter of CPSR. He has created numerous Internet companies including PSINet Japan, Digital Garage and Infoseek Japan. He was commended by the Japanese Ministry of Posts and Telecommunications for supporting the advancement of IT. He has served and continues to serve on numerous Japanese central as well as local government committees and boards, advising the government on IT, privacy and computer security related issues.

He is currently researching "The Sharing Economy" as a Doctor of Business Administration candidate at the Graduate School of International Corporate Strategy at Hitotsubashi University in Japan.

WEBSITE

He maintains a weblog (http://joi.ito.com/) where he regularly shares his thoughts with the online community.

POLICY STATEMENT

I have experience participating on numerous prominent boards of public and private US and Japanese for-profit and non-profit organizations such as Creative Commons, PSINet and Infoseek Japan in a variety of capacities. I am currently involved in government, corporate and community policy making processes which bridge gaps between these groups.

I am an experienced fund-raiser and have coordinated a number of policy research projects including an international overview of government use of privacy technology which was funded by the Japanese government. I have also participated and lead a number of citizen resistance movements including a movement to stop the national ID in Japan.

I have a well read blog which ranks in the top 100 of 8 million or so blogs and has approximately 150,000 unique visitors per month. I use my blog to have public conversations about global policy issues and can vet many things with the public this way.

My reseach for my DBA will focus on the importance of the commons and public domain from the perspective of business and I believe that the role of CPSR will tie in well with this topic. I will also bring a background and active understanding in privacy, policy, security, mobile devices, and blogging. I have devoted a great deal of my time and energy to supporting and managing non-profit efforts to increase diversity and address social issues.

Although my base of operations is in Japan and the US, I spend the majority of my time outside of Japan and the US and have an active global perspective and network. I believe that my experience and alignment of interests will allow me to contribute in a substatial way to CPSR through participation on the board and expand the global base of participants and supporters of CPSR.