As we look to the future, humankind faces challenges that are increasing, while our resources are declining. To survive and thrive we need to work together – no one individual or organization, agency or even government can address these global challenges all by themselves.

Collaborate.org was borne from hundreds of interactions across government, academia, industry, nonprofits and social sectors. Across all these groups we kept hearing the same themes – to access and integrate all kinds of data to understand what is happening, to work across organizations, to derive a shared vision, and to coordinate action, share resources, and achieve more than any organization or entity can achieve alone.

Collaborate.org is an open global online community of people, working together and sharing resources, expertise and enthusiasm, empowered with advanced technologies including collaboration and visualization tools, and all the world’s geospatial data at your fingertips real-time sensor data, GIS and database information, news/RSS and social media, and satellite and aerial imagery. It currently hosts over 2.5M layers (over 5PB), with the ability for users to upload and share their own data with those they wish. It provides a comprehensive suite of collaboration tools (videoconferencing /messaging, file sharing, forums/blogs, calendars/task lists, etc) over a secure worldwide cloud computing infrastructure with the goal of enabling everyone to work together, connect with others, and together make an extraordinary, exponential positive impact on the world.

This talk will focus on the rationale behind global collaboration, but also dive into the technology behind hosting such a service- worldwide cloud computing, massive multimodal data integration at scale, extreme security, analytics and visualization, and will discuss several projects currently using the platform to make significant impact and an exploration of business models and techniques to incentivize engagement and mass social change on an exponential scale. If not to do good with technology, then what are we building it all for?

Dr. Kevin Montgomery is the founder of Collaborate.org, an award-winning site for global im- pact. He was previously a Senior Researcher at the Center for Innovation in Global Health at Stanford University, and cofounder of the National Biocomputation Center, where his team de- veloped technologies for computer-based surgical planning, augmented reality surgery, surgical simulators, anatomical atlases, and wireless telemedicine.

He regularly serves as an advisor for DoD, NIH, NSF, and other agencies, as well as advises and consults with several small, high-tech companies in the Silicon Valley. He earned his PhD in Computer Engineering from the University of California.