Our mission is to incubate enterprises built upon, and that deploy, the Authenticity Infrastructure.™ Necessarily that means we not only wear many hats, but we change hats frequently. Partly for that reason, and partly because it reflects our view of what's needed to prevail in the age of agile, flattened organizations, each of us carries the same title: Entrepreneur.
Members of our team have built and managed effective and secure online meeting places for Fortune 50 firms, magazine publishers, and others.
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Wes Kussmaul, Founder & CEO
In 1981 Wes founded Delphi Internet Services Corporation, one of the first online social networks.
While CEO of Delphi, Wes launched a spinoff, Global Villages, Inc., to serve magazine publishers and business clients with private-label online services. Global provided business planning, design, engineering, hosting, management and promotion services for Digital Equipment Corporation, William F. Buckley's National Review, BioTechniques, Hardcopy, International Business, Business Digest, and many other companies and magazines.
When it sold to Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation in 1993, Delphi had been profitable for years and was among the four largest online services, along with AOL, CompuServe and Prodigy. Global Villages' hosting business sold in 1998 to NTT Verio.
Wes then turned the attention of his new team to the need for reliable identities on the Internet, starting with the development of the VIVOS™ Enrollment Workstation. Designed to be used by notaries with minimal training, VIVOS™ binds biometrics of the enrollee to digital identity certificates.
While developing VIVOS, Wes began collecting source material for a book about a hypothetical world public key infrastructure, built upon certificates representing reliable identities, to bring authenticity to online interactions and privacy to individuals.
As the book began to take shape, Wes became acquainted with a group at the International Telecommunication Union (ITU) attempting to implement a world PKI similar to the one he envisioned. In 2002 The Village Group (the predecessor to The Authenticity Institute), became a charter signatory to the ITU's World e-Trust Initiative; it is now a Sector Member of the ITU. Wes is one of the five original Individual Experts on Cybersecurity in the High Level Experts Group at the ITU's Global Cybersecurity Agenda, and in an address in 2008 to the U.N. / ITU World Summit on Information Society in Geneva, Wes introduced Osmio, the AuthentiCity.™
Wes received his BS in physics in 1971 from the University of Central Missouri while serving in the U.S. Air Force. For the next four years he was a systems analyst at Liberty Mutual Insurance Company, developing mainframe database applications. Subsequent positions in sales and sales management for Gould Incorporated, Benson SA, and Tektronix, Inc. brought him in contact with the pioneers of the pre-Web Internet. Wes is an individual adherent of the International Union of Latin Notaries and has been appointed a Notary Ambassador by the National Notary Association.
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Peter Hadley, Entrepreneur (Authenticity Infrastructure™, InDoors™)
Peter is responsible for the development of the software components of The Authenticity Infrastructure™ and the InDoors™ Infrastructure portions of the Quiet Enjoyment Infrastructure™.
As a software engineer at Amazon.com Peter developed a new email generating system and gift certificate customer acquisition application. Prior to his Amazon.com experience he had responsibility for all email systems at PlanetAll.com including automated generation and response. Prior to that he was CTO at InfoDeal.com.
He has taught engineering (MATLAB, C Programming, Civil Engineering and wave propagation) as a faculty member at Northeastern University and at Bogazici Universitesi in Istanbul, Turkey. Peter has done volunteer work for Habitat for Humanity and has served as an advisor to Sigma Chi Fraternity at MIT. He recently survived teaching high school level Sunday School in Hazelwood, Missouri.
Peter received his Ph.D. and A.M. from Princeton University, M.S. from Northeastern University, and S.B. from Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
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Sara K. DuBose, Entrepreneur (Organizational Management, Strategy)
Sara helps direct the Institute's charter, with operations, strategy, finance and branding responsibilities.
She previously served as CEO and Co-founder of NuNuMi, an online film market/network, and as a Lead Strategist for IT Services firm i-Cube (acquired by Razorfish for $1.9B in '99). While there she helped corporations transition mission-critical systems from mainframe to three-tier client server/online environments, co-created a Strategy practice and designed and executed a Strategy training program for the company. Prior to that she was an Analyst for Benchmarking Partners, organizing a conference for POMA (Patient-Oriented Management Architecture), a NIST-sponsored healthcare project. Sara started her first company, InfoNow, while a freshman at Boston University; InfoNow was a faxback provider of semiconductor data for Village® client PennWell Publishing's engineering publication Computer Design.
Also a partner in Esobud Films, a motion picture production company, Sara has worked as a Producer, Associate Producer and Production Manager in film, TV and commercials.
Sara received her B.A. in English Literature from Boston University, completing her undergraduate studies at the University of Oxford (St. Anne's College, Regent's Park College). She went on to study European and Middle-Eastern Politics at the University of Edinburgh.
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Peter B. Olson, Entrepreneur (Village® Platform)
Peter Olson's computer career includes mainframe system programming at universities and banks, interactive transaction processing including international packet switching networks, and a long stint at Delphi and BIX, where he had a dual role as technical developer and manager of the people operating special interest groups, a precursor to the social networks we know today.
He has also done speech enabled computing, computer hardware design, and programming language design. Peter also currently does work for the Free Software Foundation and is associated with a Boston area makerspace.
Peter is committed to building the best secure and private social networking in the world.
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Joanna Lilly, Entrepreneur (Identity Professional Programs)
Joanna is a notary thought leader in a state at the forefront of the national effort to improve notarial standards, and with the first Latin (Civil) Notary designation in the U.S. The former Executive Director of the Florida-based American Society of Notaries (ASN), a national non-profit organization, Joanna came on board with us in 2001 as Communications Director, working with Wes to define the new Enrollment Officer profession.
With extensive knowledge of notary law, practice, and procedures from a long tenure with the ASN, Joanna has been Chief Editor of over 40 publications including American Notary (ASN's quarterly magazine) and Notary Tipsheet.
A professional notary public instructor in the state of Florida, Joanna's work as Chief Editor involved her in the writing and editing of state-specific notary handbooks for AZ, DE, DC, FL, GA, MA, NJ, SC and TX, and the Marriage Handbook for FL, ME, and SC notaries. She collaborated on the creation of the Society's classroom and online notary training programs for FL and SC, as well as on the 40-Hour ASN Instructor Certification Program.
Prior to her tenure with the Society, she worked for 3 years with Notary Public Underwriters (NPU), a large notary bond firm, and marketed the company to potential clients, providing extensive technical assistance, customer service, and educating notary clients regarding proper notarial practice. Prior to that she served at Capital City Bank Group for ten years.
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Ed Schmidt, Entrepreneur (Engineering Management)
Ed began his career at Bolt, Beranek & Newman, Inc. (BBN), the prime contractor for the ARPANet, which became the Internet. Although he was involved in early Internet development, Ed's time at BBN began with work on acoustic technologies, predominately forensic and underwater acoustics (Ed and a small team of experts analyzed the acoustic evidence in the US House of Representatives investigation of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy).
After several years as a senior analyst in underwater acoustics, Ed spearheaded a group focused on the development of highly sophisticated SONAR systems utilizing advanced signal processing and systems technologies. This group grew five-fold in three years and developed a substantial reputation among its client community for leading edge system development.
As the Internet grew, Ed developed a successful Internet marketing and Web development consultancy focused on small to mid-sized retail and service organizations.
At LavaStorm, a startup Internet systems engineering firm, Ed managed the design and development of several ultra-high concurrency Internet sites of national and international scope., including a gaming site which could accommodate up to 4 million simultaneous contestants in a head to head tournament with a $1m grand prize.
Ed received a MSEE and MBA from Stanford University. and a BSEECS from MIT.
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Lee Fitzsimmons, Alliance Entrepreneur (PKI Press, 4-Realz)
Lee manages the PKI Press and 4-Realz enterprises. He possesses a wide array of creative and technical skills, bringing a unique perspective to issues of identity authenticity and Internet privacy.
Many of his creative endeavors include writing for Blerp.com as well as editing and creating different types of freelance works for a diverse collection of clients. At a very young age, he began to excel in the creative and academic arts, winning numerous awards for literary, mathematics, and musical achievements. He was a TSSEC outstanding performer in the UIL musical theory and ear training competition, where he won the state championship in 1985 and 1986.
When he was eighteen, Lee received a scholarship to Berklee College of Music in Boston, where he tested out of several semesters of theory and ear training upon arrival. In 2006, Lee won an award at the Miami Museum Film Festival for "Best Musical Soundtrack." In addition to directing different events for the local musical theatre scene and performing at many community functions, Lee has also performed onstage with a large number of nationally distributed artists.
Lee has a degree in English from the University of Houston, where he graduated Magna Cum Laude and was a member of Gamma Beta Phi.
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Christel Haupt, Entrepreneur (Financial Management)
Christel is responsible for the Authenticity Institute's bookkeeping system as well as the financial management portion of Authenticity Alliance member facilitation. In addition to customizing the financial reporting model for each enterprise, she manages tutorials and support for the Authenticity Alliance accounting systems.
Christel was born, raised and educated in Berlin, Germany and holds a Bachelor in Economics from the University of Berlin. After coming to the U.S. in 1962 (she raised two sons and a daughter here), she taught herself to type, then ran the office of her husband's legal practice (Law Offices of Mainini & Mainini), as the firm grew from one attorney to four with a staff of eight. While there, Christel handled the research for a winning U.S. Supreme Court case.
Later, Christel became Personal Executive Assistant and Corporate Secretary to the former Secretary of Transportation of Massachusetts, James F. Carlin. When her children went off to college, Christel spent the next twelve years working for premier Boston law firms (Palmer & Dodge, LLP and Goodwin, Proctor & Hoar) in positions where she flourished.
After a vacation in Egypt, Christel opened African Tours, a thriving tourism business based in Hurghada, that saw a profit from day one. She expanded the business to include over 16 employees and conducted extensive marketing campaigns in Europe. While in Egypt, Christel helped refurbish a children's orphanage; she still contributes to their efforts.
Christel splits her time between her entrepreneurial duties for the Authenticity Institute and her enduring “wanderlust”; there is always another travel destination in her horizon. Christel speaks several languages and is a Notary Public for the State of Massachusetts.
