My name is William Tozier. You’re to call me “Bill”, but I pre­fer “Tozier” if you’re here in the room with me. You can just roll your eyes when I’m not there, and they’ll know who you mean.

I have no for­mal cre­den­tials in any field you care about, no mat­ter how pre­ten­tious I might act in per­son. Even if I did, I prob­a­bly wouldn’t tell you about them.

For the twenty years or so I’ve been a pro­fes­sional gen­er­al­ist, engi­neer­ing ency­clo­pe­dist, and know-​​it-​​all. Some­body once referred to me as the Knowl­edge Fixer. That’s a good way to think about it: act towards me as you might towards Mis­ter Wolf from Pulp Fic­tion, but for fix­ing engi­neer­ing projects in addi­tion to clean­ing up cars. Most of the tools I bring to bear are from the field of com­plex sys­tems research and machine learn­ing, fancy stuff involv­ing “engi­neer­ing emer­gent dynam­ics” and “machines that think”, genetic pro­gram­ming and arti­fi­cial life and swarm intel­li­gence and other self-​​important bull­shit like that. If you know what any of that pre­ten­tious junk is, you prob­a­bly already know some­body who knows of me or my work.

For the last ten years or so, I’ve been much more focused on what you might call “dis­in­ter­me­di­a­tion of employ­ment”, espe­cially the Acad­emy. Politely put, that sounds some­thing like: Free­lancers and inde­pen­dents, mean­ing peo­ple who live out here in the real world with actual jobs and bills and who have per­fectly good edu­ca­tions but no access to grants, who pur­sue careers of diverse prac­ti­cal­ity and inar­guable util­ity, deserve access to all the pro­tec­tions and rewards typ­i­cally reserved for the cod­dled min­ions of the Acad­emy. I do a lot of innocuous-​​sounding things that have to do with sub­vert­ing the aca­d­e­mic cre­den­tial­ing sys­tems and cul­tural norms of sci­ence, engi­neer­ing and human­i­ties work. That involves build­ing soft­ware and cul­tural sys­tems per­mit­ting peo­ple to more eas­ily work with printed mate­r­ial, dis­cuss and explore com­plex sys­tems and sci­en­tific stuff, build inno­v­a­tive stuff, and in gen­eral be more eas­ily help­ful to one another.

For the last five years or so, I’ve been focused on cowork­ing com­mu­ni­ties and agile man­age­ment, mainly as Vague Inno­va­tion, LLC. In March 2009 I became one of the ear­li­est mem­bers of Workan­tile Exchange in Ann Arbor, and in Novem­ber 2011 with three other mem­bers there arranged to take it over as a sort of owner/​manager and re-​​launch it as Workan­tile. It’s now a pri­vate club for free­lancers and remote employ­ees, peo­ple who would oth­er­wise be work­ing in iso­la­tion at home or in cof­feeshops. Now we share a place in the city where we can work inde­pen­dently with one another.

All those things over­lap as part of one 20-​​year project.

You might detect an over­ar­ch­ing theme in this twenty-​​year arc, maybe some­thing about “new economies” and “mak­ers” and the sort of “flat world is a dif­fer­ent place because of the social Inter­net” pop­u­lar­iza­tions you hear all the time in the pop­u­lar press.

Yes, if you press the “what do you do?” ques­tion hard enough, it will become appar­ent that I do that stuff you even­tu­ally read about in edgy hip­ster geek places: dig­i­ti­za­tion and arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence and mass cus­tomiza­tion and star­tups and junk on the Interwebz.

If you detect two themes in the story, then the sec­ond one will direct how you should treat the peo­ple around me. I’m an affa­ble old soul, with some capac­ity left for bemuse­ment. But these other innocuous-​​seeming folks I work with? The ones who seem to not be “doing much” but look­ing at lap­tops and chat­ting, most of the time? Peo­ple who don’t trot out their Per­sonal Brand­ing Web­site or their CV right away? Who raise their eye­brows when you ask them “where they work”, and say “it’s com­pli­cated” when you ask about what they do?

I am priv­i­leged to be allowed to move among them, and I’m quick to remind you to act accord­ingly. Spend pre­cious time with them to learn, and lis­ten, and expect to be shown won­ders, and to have your expec­ta­tions bro­ken and re-​​formed and in gen­eral to be made bet­ter by their plen­ti­ful gifts.

Because that sec­ond theme is about other people.

And if you can spell out the deepest-​​running theme of my life’s work… well, are you sure you want to? OK then.

Now you have some life choices to make, don’t you, Smar­ty­pants? Wel­come to the club.

Theme three is some­thing about you, and about the story you tell about yourself.

This is my per­sonal blog. I get to use it for note-​​taking and mus­ing out loud.

Every­thing else is yours.