Zann Gill is Founder of earthDECKS, comprising three complementary components: earthDECKS Enterprise, earthDECKS.org, a non-profit under fiscal sponsorship of the Ocean Foundation, Washington, D.C., and our blog site, earthDECKS.net. While a graduate student (M. Arch. Architecture Harvard), Zann worked with Buckminster Fuller, whose concept for World Game preceded the public internet and mobile computing, inspiring earthDECKS as “the neXt game” to harness next generation social networks, the public Internet, and mobile apps toward global problem-solving.

Her entry to the international smart city competition Kawasaki: Information City of the 21st Century tied with Matsushita (now Panasonic) for First Prize and won the Award of the Mayor of Kawasaki, placing higher than entries of other large Japanese corporations, including Shimizu and Taisei. She proposed an IIS (Intelligent Integrating System) to harness distributed nodes and devices to aggregate and make sense of data. This work initiated her recognition of the need for the discipline of collaborative intelligence (next generation crowd-sourcing and social networks for problem-solving). She later was a Research Scientist and Program Developer at RIACS (Research Institute for Advanced Computer Science), contracted to NASA (US National Aeronautics and Space Administration) where she entrepreneured her vision for a global sustainability collaboratory. She came to realize that this work needed a platform outside government. So she founded earthDECKS, which draws analogy to card games, but in this “deck of cards” each card is a knowledge resource in a distributed knowledge network. She holds several PaaS [Platform as a Service] patents and has also won awards for her film scripts. earthDECKS collaborates with Moody Studio to turn stories into films as portals to knowledge. Our first prototype is the back end under development for the short film PLASTIC.