John Ziniades

Bio

"Meshfield Co-founder, Internet Entrepreneur, Engineer, Facilitator

John is a social change practitioner and tech entrepreneur focusing on the redesign of our global money system as a key leverage point for planetary thriving and social justice. He designs, develops and implements complementary and digital/crypto-currencies, examining the underpinning agreements that shape the many ways humans exchange value, and advocates Ecosynomics as a way to shift our economic systems from being underpinned by assumptions of scarcity to those of abundance. He is an experienced Holacracy facilitator, exploring and developing emergent, agile and distributed organizational forms and practices that are better suited to meet the growing complexities of a globalised, networked world pushing up against environmental limits. He also has twenty years of experience as a successful Internet entrepreneur and innovator, having co-founded 5 companies in the high-tech, Internet and mobile telecommunications space. His current entrepreneurial focus is in the social and green enterprise development space, incorporating Open Manufacturing, Peer to Peer (P2P) production, growing the knowledge commons and lean start-up methodologies.

He works with his creative partner, Anna Cowen, to design and facilitate cross-sectoral, multi-stakeholder large scale systems change processes that integrate system dynamics modeling with participatory, interactive methods that engage personal growth, cultural dynamics and behaviour change at multiple scales. Recent work includes co-leading a strategic process for the World Green Building Council to identify the leverage points that could unlock rapid change towards the global proliferation of a regenerative, life-enhancing built environment (2014), as well as co-designing and co-facilitating the Bergrivier region based African Climate and Development Initiative (ACDI) Climate Knowledge Network’s (CKN) U Process through 2012/2013.

John graduated from the University of the Witwatersrand (Johannesburg, South Africa) with a BSc Eng (Elec) in 1991, worked for a few years at the CSIR, South Africa’s leading research institute where he first discovered the Internet, and then went on to co-found 5 tech companies, the first of which listed on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange in 1998. He resigned as CEO of Consology (his most recent tech start-up) in 2009, to focus his full attention on fostering social change for planetary well-being."