About
As a social business information technology consultant, I assist progressive small- to mid-size enterprises and not-for-profit organizations adopt free/libre open source technologies for collaboration and to make more effective use of social media to engage with their constituencies.
I’m an avid environmental and social justice advocate interested in issues of ecological sustainability, climate change, population growth, food security, consumerism, extreme poverty and international development. I am also a strong advocate of free and open source software, and intellectual property law reform. As for my religious and political beliefs, I am a mindful agnostic teleological existential atheist — an absurdist, really — and a green social democrat. I value integrity, honesty, intelligence, passion, compassion, fair play, tolerance, humour, adventure, an open mind, a stout heart, … and a sense of purpose.
For most of the past 25+ years I have been an investor in The Hunger Project, a strategic not-for-profit organization committed to ending world hunger and extreme poverty by empowering women and men to end their own hunger. I served for ten years on the board of directors in Canada and three years as president of The Hunger Project-Canada. More recently, I have also been volunteering at Connexions Online, an information clearing house and organization for connecting people around issues of democracy, economic justice, environmental responsibility, civil liberties, and community.
The Greater Toronto Area has always been my home, although I do enjoy traveling, such as when I accompanied my daughter to Bangladesh & Malawi on study trips with The Hunger Project and to safari in Kenya. For recreation I enjoy camping, canoeing, sailing (in my youth, I crewed on a square-rigged sailing ship). I’m also an avid reader, particularly of non-fiction (especially history, philosophy, socio-economics and science), although I’ve recently taken an interest in classic literature.
Copyright
The copyright for all original work published on this site belongs to Murray J. Brown. Some rights are reserved. Use of this work is permitted subject to the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.5 Canada License. Excerpts from other works included herein are published subject to the principle of “fair dealing” (commonly called “fair use”) in Canadian copyright law, unless otherwise implicitly or explicitly permitted.
Colophon
This web site is built on free/libre open source software: the WordPress blogging engine hosted on an Apache web server running on a Debian GNU/Linux operating system.
Site security
Secure access to this site is assured via an SSL server certificate issued directly from a self-published Root Certification Authority with a self-signed root certificate, rather than a trusted third-party CA. Consequently, unless users choose to explicitly trust these certificates, they are likely to encounter browser security warnings when accessing this site via the TLS/SSL protocol. Nevertheless, as secure access is not required, except for site administration by the operators, this seems wholly acceptable. You are welcome to download and explicitly denote this as a trusted certificate, at your own risk, of course, which I can assure you is minimal. ;-p
