The companies I’ve started are organized around themes. My first one, roark design, was built around a desire to bring the same technologies and expectations I had when at a large organization like Peace Corps, to small and medium size firms. High speed internet connectivity, powerful server capabilities, the ability to access the network remotely, enterprise email, high speed networks, were all unheard of for SMB businesses and I was determined to bring them to my clients. That would entail designing and building Cat 5 structured cabling, installing and configuring high speed hubs, switches, routers and firewalls, designing and building enterprise servers, installing server software on those servers, and configuring internet services like dns, smtp, imap, and others to communicate with those servers.

In later years, I expanded to database design, and other programming projects, and consulting on various technology projects.

In 2020, I made the decision to reposition RDI as an incubator for a number of other startups that I envisioned creating.

In order to understand the vision that each of these companies fulfills, I needed an epistemological foundation to contextualize the purpose they were serving. That foundation begins with IDRC, or Independence | Dignity | Respect | Consent. I began with this because I noticed that far too many organizations don’t establish from the beginning the ground rules under which they operate and what their purpose is in respect to those ground rules. Anodyne and meaningless sayings like “Don’t be evil” or “Bring the world closer together” have little effect or meaning in guiding decisions and, as has been shown lately, conveniently sidestep responsibility for how they interact with their users and the consequences of their companies products and decisions. I thought it imperative to build a strong, clear moral and aspirational vision that informs a new organization from the beginning rather “on the fly”.

In order to create a practical application for fleshing out that vision, I created Scale, a detailed lexicon of how to implement IDRC. Scale incorporates a number of concepts such as, Privacy by Design,

The next step was to articulate what needs the companies were going to fulfill that weren’t being met currently, i.e. what problems were they going to solve. But before that could happen, I wanted to re-imagine HOW they were going to solve these problems, specifically the corporate vehicle the companies would use in order to comport with IDRC. I envisioned a model that would empower individuals, incorporate free market mechanisms while satisfying basic human needs and allowing for maximum flexibility in how those needs are met and what resources could be utilized, including governmental and other entities.

This led to the American Model which provides a foundation for a number of Public Management Corporations focused on solving specific needs of humanity. The needs they are meant to address, to establish a basic threshold for these human requirements, are the following: Universal Identity, Healthcare, Education, Retirement, Investment, Philanthropy, Shelter and Conservation.

The first one is Syngulis which focuses Personal Identity, It’s an Identity Management Corporation or IMC). Its vision is that every human should have a verifiable, authenticatable digital and physical identity, one that can be used simply and securely.

The second company, Omnulis, is a pivot of roark design, but with a much broader and deeper vision of its capabilities. Since the companies envisioned in the American Model are by design limited in scope, there would need to be a company that could implement technological solutions that will inevitably asked for by clients but that would contravene the limited purpose and fiduciary agreement the PMC stipulates. A jack of all trades entity. For instance, a company might want the identity technology Syngulis develops to be implemented for itself but that’s not what Syngulis is chartered to do. Omnulis is the entity that can do that work in addition to a wide variety of other technology work.