As part of Clear ink's ongoing Virtual Community Development Discussion Series, we will be welcoming social computing designer Tom Portante to Clear ink Island this Thursday, February 22 at 2:00 Pacific (SL Time).

Tom Portante's career began in academia - as an undergraduate at McGill University in Montreal and as a Master's and Doctoral student at both McGill and the University of Edinburgh, Scotland.

His work as a Social Anthropologist focused on understanding how communities are formed and was the segue to his involvement with the earliest online communities in the 1980s. Analytic skills and a passion for technologies led Tom to Accenture where he led the Technology Assessment Group for that 50-some thousand employee global consultancy. His group's task was to find emerging technologies and tools and evaluate business opportunities.

Later recruited to Ernst & Young for a similar role - his Navigating the New Technology Landscape group focused on examining technology trends, concentrating on social computing, encryption, e-cash, and ubiquitous computing.

Throughout these two decades, Tom's efforts invariably return to the arena of online communities. During this time, and using tools ranging from Lotus Notes, proprietary software and blogs and wikis, Tom has created online environments for Fortune 100 companies, regional health care organizations, Katrina disaster relief efforts and national political campaigns. As a speaker and writer in many professional forums, he has been quoted on future technology trends in The New York Times, Wired, Atlantic Monthly, Harper's, and the World Economic Forum.