User:Steven Forth

My most frequently updated blogs are

Zawazawa Kitchen about food

and

How I Learn

I an reasonably active on Twitter @StevenForth

I find Wikipedia to be an important source of information on many subjects. I am seldom dissapointed with articles and when I am I can always get to work myself. On controversial subjects the Discussion page can be informative, and my belief, perhaps naive, is that by working through the shared editing process and discussions on the Discussion page people with different points of view can come to at least better understand the many different views possible.

In addition to Wikipedia, I have used Mediawiki in a number of internal and public websites for knowledge construction and in the Earthblog.ca project we experimented with using it as a policy formation and discussion tool - with limited success.

I am also using Semantic MediaWiki in a number of projects and find it a powerful way to help a group to organize its knowledge. I am happy to answer questions about this at stevendotforthyouknowwhatgeemaildotcom.

Born in the late 1950s north of Toronto to a military officer and a nurse, I grew up mostly in Montreal and Ottawa, with a formative one-year stay in Quebec city in the late 1960s (before the October crisis). After attending Carleton University in Ottawa I spent the next decade traveling in Europe and Sout East Asia and living in Japan.

In Japan I married the artist-designer Yoshie Hattori and we had three children - Kaito, Kasumi and Kenji. I worked as a translator (Japanese to English) and in the publishing, software and media industries. Yoshie maintains a photo blog It Is.

After returning to Canada late in 1988 (when my eldest son was of an age to enter elementary school) we settled in the Kitsilano district of Vancouver and started a series of companies in the localization, media and software industries. I also participated in the founding of non-profit organizations for translation and knowledge management.

I was a rather typical Vancouver knowledge worker: live in Kitsilano, cycle most everywhere (though I do own a car and use it once or twice a week), have started a number of companies, and spent my 20s living in Asia (mostly Tokyo). I speak and read Japanese, though I write the language rather poorly. My French is modest.

An update for 2010. In January 2009 I led the spin out of eMonitor from the strategy consulting company Monitor Group. We formed a company LeveragePoint ] that is building a software platform for the creation of eWorking solutions and tools that help B2B companies understand, communicate and capture the value of their solutions. I now live in Vancouver (back in Kits) and we are growing LeveragePoint as a distributed company (we have people in Austin TX, Toronto ON, Vancouver BC and Cambridge MA).

My main interests are life-long learning and how to support it using the Internet and semantic technologies. I am also becoming more and more interested (and committed) to sustainable growth models and the application of resiliences concpets to the design of companies and urban systems.

I will sometimes be found editing pages on Vancouver, its poets, artists and restaurants. And I plan to carve out time to improve articles on Japanese poetry and poetry generally.

One day I hope to translate the works of Fujiwara Shunzei and Fujiwara Teika into English.