User:Rustin

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Born in the Panama Canal Zone at the end of 1966, Rustin H. Wright has been in the midst of the bleeding edge of many developments, including nerve regeneration in 1981, microgravity liquid lenses in 1983, fiber optics to the desktop in 1984, electronic publishing in 1989, content management and green building design in 1990, off-the grid living, intentional communities, rooftop planting and greenroof in 1990, online privacy concerns in 1993, restructuring of content for the web in 1994, implications and history of U.S. military occupations in 1996, LED lighting in 1997, and social implications of online journals and blogs in 2002. Usually he's focused far more on getting projects done at any cost and on doing cool, leading edge work then on his own self-interest, which is why he has the time to write this profile ;->

His first project involvements were before high school in 1978 through 1980, when he volunteered for Central Park's Shakespeare Garden, the 1980 Democratic elections (marching beside mayoral candidate Frank Barbaro in the Labor Day Parade), and for the Sierra Club's Dump Watt campaign, first as a general volunteer and later as a trainer.

In high school, volunteering was limited to three years in NYU Medical School's Department of Biochemical Pharmacology. Otherwise, as a student at Stuyvesant High School, he won a regional prize from the Space Shuttle Student Involvement Project and was a finalist in the New York Academy of Sciences Junior Academy Competition. Free time was spent with other members of the Mad Scientist's Club.

Having first worked in computers in 1981, he dropped out of Reed College after two years to pursue inventing and work for PolySoft Systems, an early creator of handheld computers. A number of projects reached the prototype stage, including a device for implementing fiber optics to the desktop, for which he received patent 4,808,204. A year of this work was done offsite while living in Wisconsin intentional community, Lytheria, a rwelve bedroom former mansion in Milwaukee.

While carrying out these projects, Mr. Wright laid the groundwork for a Manhattan non-residential intentional community which, as The Nexus, was active for over two years, starting in 1990 with a peak community of over twenty people. By the time the Nexus was phasing out, Mr. Wright was an early and active member of the Society for Electronic Access, an offshoot of the Electronic Freedom Foundation and key player in early battles over the freedom of the electronic commons.

Several years of projects and freelancing lead to work at the intersection of technology, workflow, and publishing, starting with the creation of a uniform naming and tracking system for prepress pioneer Electronic Publishing Center in 1991. During a year at J.Crew's catalog creation department in 1994, Mr. Wright spent a week at Quark's Denver offices training in the then new Quark Publishing System (QPS), an early content management system.

Various magazine launches (most notably TimeOutNewYork and Sports Illustrated Presents) QPS and systems implementations (most notably Woodworker, Institutional Investor, Parent's Magazine, Ogilvy&Mather, and Reader's Digest Books) and high-end tech support work (most notably DDB Needham and Time Magazine) led to extended assignments as acting director of editorial technology for first McGraw-Hill's Construction Information Group (Architectural Record, Engineering News-Record, and Design-Build) and then This Old House Magazine as these organizations went through periods of rapid growth and restructuring.

As this was going on, Mr. Wright developed an interest in helping in the creation and reorganization of leading edge nonprofit projects, creating an experimental garden in the forty foot by eight foot airshaft behind the offices of Soft Skull Press, cocreating the computer lab for Lower East Side community center, ABC No Rio, and assisting many small schools and enviromental groups with techology and infrastructure concerns, leading up to the ten month cataloging and dispersing of the assets of cycling enthusiast Irving Weisman in 2000 and 2001.

In the days after 9/11, Mr. Wright designed and coordinated the implementation of the onsite procedures and facilities of the Salvation Army's primary coordination facility, at their complex on 14th street, getting meeting rooms into use for processing, shelving systems built out of shiping pallets, and coordinating the processing of hundreds of incoming packages of donations by priority, category. and perishability.

Since then, Mr. Wright has focused on various asset management projects and his publishing firm, Reed&Wright. Reed&Wright has focused on creating and publishing guides to complex and sensitive topics such as green(eco)roof construction, biofuels, and documentation of U.S. military history.
A side activity has been helping families and organizations manage transitions such as the movement of seniors to eldercare facilities, coordination of cataloging and dispersing assets in the shutdown of large households, and helping artists and academics manage clutter and the other frictions of mundane life.

Mr. Wright and Reed&Wright have, however, been on hiatus to some extent since late August of 2004, when Mr. Wright's apartment caught fire, destroying most of Reed&Wright's infrastructure as well as all of its stock of products and leaving Mr. Wright in various hospitals until late November of that year. Mr. Wright is still recovering from the injuries sustained in that fire and Reed&Wright is only slowly being reactivated, though others connected to R&W continue work on products for release in late 2006 through mid-2007.

Outside of Reed&Wright, Mr. Wright has also written several pieces (about New York City) for The L Magazine, pieces on gift baskets and thrift store shopping for The Shoestring (now defunct), and about a hundred pages of technology and policy commentary for his Slashdot journal as Perfessor Multigeek. Despite all of this, his most quoted work is several pages on dumpster diving written as background for a 2004 article in the New York Post.

Along with the organizations mentioned above, Mr. Wright has at various times been an active volunteer for the Rick Bauman campaign (an unsuccessful 1986 attempt to dislodge prescandal Bob Packwood) the Gaia Institute, NARAL, and the New York Macintosh User Group. He served in an advisory capacity to the 2002 campaigns of Brad Hoylman, Dan Latner, and Ari Goodman, to the creation of the Neighborhood Energy Network (among other things, coming up with the name) as well as to New York Pagan Pride.