CNI Podcast: An Interview with Julian Lombardi, Executive Director of the Open Croquet Consortium

In this 15 minute podcast, we feature an interview with Julian Lombardi, Assistant Vice President at Duke University and Executive Director of the Open Croquet Consortium. Croquet is a powerful new open source software development environment and software infrastructure for creating and deploying deeply collaborative multi-user online applications and metaverses on and across multiple operating systems and devices.

Dr. Julian Lombardi is the Assistant Vice President of Academic Services and Technology Support with Duke University’s Office of Information Technology, Senior Research Scholar with Duke University's program in Information Science + Information Studies (ISIS), and an adjunct professor with Duke University's Department of Computer Science. He is also one of the six principle architects of the Croquet Project, executive director of the Open Croquet Consortium, and a co-chair of MacLearningEnvironments.org. A former biology professor, Lombardi combined his interests in information technology, complex systems, and the phenomenon of emergence in biological systems and began designing and developing computer-supported collaboration systems involving self-optimizing massively multiuser online 3D environments in the mid-1990s. He eventually founded VIOS, Inc. in 1999 where he acted as the venture capital-backed company's first CEO and then Chief Creative Officer/Software architect. From 2002-2005, he managed a learning technology research and development group in University of Wisconsin-Madison's Division of Information Technology.

This interview is provided courtesy of CNI and was recorded at their 2007 Fall Task Force Meeting.  The Coalition for Networked Information (CNI) is an organization dedicated to supporting the transformative promise of networked information technology for the advancement of scholarly communication and the enrichment of intellectual productivity.  You can learn more about CNI at their web site, http://www.cni.org