Mr. Anderson is an accomplished software architect and entrepreneur with over fifteen years of experience delivering commercial applications to enterprise customers. Mr. Anderson brings his experiences in designing software from both an engineering and business standpoint and in building teams that turn design into reality. Most recently, Mr. Anderson started Digipede, Inc, a company that built an award winning distributed computing platform.  He also helped to found Energy Interactive, an energy information systems and services company. As the Vice President of Technology he was responsible for software development, product management, …

Principles
Jim Benson
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Jim’s background includes high tech, urban planning and cognitive psychology. He has been involved in the creation of community, from small groups to metropolises, since 1989. Much of his community focus has been in the creation of applications and processes that increase communication and focus attention. Jim’s other focus has been the building blocks of community and the barriers to it. He has worked with government at all levels and major corporations to untangle culture from bureaucracy. After …

The Need:
California Department of Pesticide Regulation (DPR) had to deal with a large number of databases from commercial pesticide vendors, in order to understand which pesticides were sold in what quantities in a given watershed. However, these databases had no common fields. The department and David Evans and Associates had given up trying to solve the problem of extracting any useful information from the databases, and gave the project to GHS hoping to get 25% of the records to relate to DPR’s master list of pesticides.
The Solution:
GHS’ objective was to take …

The Need:
Los Angeles County’s Fire Prevention Unit tracks the location of flammable plants (known as “fuel”) on both public and private land. County Ordinances require land owners to prune and maintain plants with certain characteristics. The existing system utilized by LA County to alert land owners of their responsibilities and of potential violations was misidentifying the ownership of certain plants. Land owners would consequently receive letters telling them to resolve issues which didn’t rightly concern them, and would then be responsible to clear up any misunderstandings. The system needed to …

The Need:
The US Forest Service had no central management system for stream diversions in watersheds crossing USFS land. Many stream diversions and water rights date back to the settlement of the US West. This has led to many redundant, inaccurate or outdated records populating water-rights databases in the large number of local, state and federal bureaus having jurisdiction over them. It became necessary for the USFS to have an up-to-date watershed data management system combined with a geographic information system (GIS) that would allow the Service to efficiently and effectively …