User:Ryan Lanham

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My name is Ryan Lanham. My primary interests are social innovation, social entrepreneurship, community foundations, borders and boundaries, non-governmental organizations, civil society in Africa, and budget matters of all sorts. I am also interested in Wikipedia as a theory of democratic governance. I have been fleshing out the section on public administration and related topics.

At present (2006), I am a graduate student (PhD candidate) in public administration and policy at Virginia Tech. My dissertation is on organizational theories of community foundations. My bachelors degree is from Johns Hopkins University where I mostly studied the History of Science and Technology. I was influenced there by J.G.A. Pocock and Stuart "Bill" Leslie--my advisor.

I have worked at Virginia Tech as a professional political geographer at the Center for Regional Strategies. I am affiliated with the Institute for Policy and Governance. My advisor now is Max Stephenson. My committee includes Gary Wamsley, Angie Eikenberry, and Joyce Rothschild. I also talk with Karen Hult as an advisor. I work for Minnis Ridenour, the former COO and EVP of Virginia Tech. We are developing, among other things, a certificate program in public finance.

Prior to being a mid-career graduate student, I was a entrepreneur who raised venture capital for a firm called Blue-Suit. We licensed the Star ATM brand name as a vehicle to provide financial services online through small banks. I was also a product manager at IBM and a computer consultant in various manifestations including working for Roger Schank as a Technical Director for a time in his Northwestern University artificial intelligence lab--Jorn Barger once worked for me! In another avatar, I helped automate the Johannesburg Stock Exchange in South Africa in 1996.

My research crosses boundaries and I am a pretty big fan of actor-network-theory. I read social sciences--anthropologists, social psychologists, food web ecologists, panarchists, polyarchists, and the like. My writings tend to construct organizational and social theories of post-Weberian (i.e. post-bureaucratic) organizations--like community foundations. I am also very interested in food webs and other ecological models as they are applied to organizations and social networks.

Sometimes I flyfish, read contemporary poets, and play around with power tools.

I have a family that includes my wife and two sons and myself.

email: rlanham@vt.edu