John Clippinger

John Henry Clippinger is a Senior Fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at The Harvard Law School.  There he directs The Open Identity Meta-system, project for the development of Higgins, an open source, inter-operable identity framework that gives people control over their personal information. The Higgins software is also being developed and supported by IBM, Novell, Oracle, Parity Communications, OpenID, and other software developers.

Dr. Clippinger co-founded the Social Physics project to conduct multi-disciplinary research and workshops in cooperation with the Gruter Institute and the Aspen Institute on the impact of trust, reciprocity, reputation, social signaling on the formation of digital institutions.  He is the author of  A Crowd of One: The Future of Individual Identity, Perseus, Public Affairs, 2007.

He has consulted to the Command and Control Research Program (CCRP) in the Office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense (Networks, Information and Integration) on the role of trust and distributed control for networked organizations. He has also consulted with numerous other government agencies, including the National Science Foundation, Defense Advanced Research Projects Administration, Federal Communications Commission, National Telecommunications and Information Administration, United States Agency for International Development, and the Office of Technology Assessment. He also been the founder of several software companies, Brattle Research Corporation,  Context Media, Lingo Motors, and more recently, Parity Communications, where he is Chairman.

Clippinger has been as a leading innovator, policy maker and strategist in the application of advanced computer technologies and is the recipient of three software patents. In collaboration with a team from the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, he designed the first program to simulate complex, self-reflective human conversation, which led to the book, Meaning and Discourse. (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977). As a Research Fellow at Harvard University, he became involved in information policy, privacy and trans-border data flow issues and in the formation of the National Telecommunications and Information Administration.

He is a frequent speaker at conferences and has appeared on CNN, NPR, CBS evening news, business news radio and talk shows, and in the print media, (New York Times, Industry Standard, Computer World, Network, Release 1.0, Wall Street Journal), as a commentator on the impact of new technologies on business. He has been a regular participant is the Aspen Institute Forum on Communications and Society, Fortune/Aspen Brainstorm Conferences, PC Forum, Supernova, Santa Fe Institute Business Network, Massachusetts Innovation and Technology Exchange, Microsoft Senior Information Technology Officer conference, Arab Thought Leadership Conference, Fortune CIO conference, Oxford Internet Institute workshops, , and the Global Creative Leadership Summit, Pentagon sponsored Highlands Forum, and the Yale CEO Leadership Summits.

Dr. Clippinger is a graduate of Yale University and holds a Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania. He is a regular participant of Renaissance Weekend, and previously was a Senior Fellow at the Boston University School of Management’s Institute for Leading a Dynamic Economy, Research Associate at Brandeis University, visiting faculty member for Stanford University Publishing Program and a member of the Publications Board of the Association for Computing Machinery.