User:Ryan Lanham

My name is Ryan Lanham. My primary interests are educational technology, learning sciences, social innovation, social entrepreneurship, leaderless organizations, borders and boundaries, non-governmental organizations, civil society in the Caribbean and Africa, and budget matters of all sorts. I am also interested in Wikipedia as a theory of democratic governance. I have been fleshing out the section on public administration and related topics.

At present (2007), I am a graduate student (PhD candidate) in Planning, Governance and Globalization at Virginia Tech. My dissertation is on organizational theories of leaderless organizations. My bachelors degree is from Johns Hopkins University where I mostly studied the History of Science and Technology. I was influenced there by J.G.A. Pocock and Stuart "Bill" Leslie--my advisor.

I have worked at Virginia Tech as a professional political geographer at the Center for Regional Strategies. I am affiliated with the Institute for Policy and Governance run by my dissertation chair, Max Stephenson. My committee includes Bruno Sobral, Bruce Goldstein, and James Martin II. I have also worked for Minnis Ridenour, the former COO and EVP of Virginia Tech.

Prior to being a mid-career graduate student, I was a entrepreneur who raised venture capital for a firm called Blue-Suit. We licensed the Star ATM brand name as a vehicle to provide financial services online through small banks. I was also a product manager at IBM and a computer consultant in various manifestations including working for Roger Schank as a Technical Director for a time in his Northwestern University artificial intelligence lab--Jorn Barger once worked for me! In another avatar, I helped automate the Johannesburg Stock Exchange in South Africa in 1996.

My research crosses boundaries and I am a pretty big fan of actor-network-theory. I read social sciences--anthropologists, social psychologists, food web ecologists, panarchists, polyarchists, and the like. My writings tend to construct organizational and social theories of post-Weberian (i.e. post-bureaucratic) organizations--like community foundations. I work a great deal in the areas of humanitarian relief and disaster preparedness and recovery.

I am very interested in food webs and other ecological models as they are applied to organizations and social networks.

Big current influences on my general work and thinking include Gary Wamsley, J.G.A. Pocock, Roger Schank, Bruno Latour, John Law, Robert Greenleaf, Michel Maffesoli, Ted Case, Karl Weick, Tim Flannery, Nassim Taleb and Howard Gardner amongst others.

Sometimes I flyfish, read contemporary poets, and play around with power tools. I'm a fan of local baseball teams, whatever local means in a given day. I'm interested in the Chicxulub crater event and other boundary events. I am increasingly reading about megafauna die-offs and the Clovis/Climate change controversy. Tim Flannery's work and other general interests in pre-Columbian cultures, especially Mayan also tie in.

I have a family that includes my wife, Kate, and two sons, Fisher & Eli, and myself.

email: rlanham@vt.edu or RLanham1963@gmail.com Blog http://ryanlanham.wordpress.com/