Jaap van Till was the Internet Infrastructure professor at the HAN University of Applied Sciences in Arnhem (NL). Before that he was professor for Corporate Networks at the Delft University (NL) and visiting prof at the University of Technology Kaunas (Lithuania). He frequently teaches at post-graduate courses and business schools, like the Institut Theseus in Nice (France) and at the Universities of Amsterdam (UvA) and Leuven. And he lectured at Master courses (MSTM) in Arnhem (NL), Bandung, Jakarta (Indonesia) and Kumasi (Ghana).
He learned from his projects as a “Network Architect” in the corporate, laboratory and factory networks of Akzo Nobel all over Europe. Later he helped to design large corporate computer networks for businesses, government ministries, the NL NREN (national research and education network) SURFnet and the Netherlight lambda fiber optic network. He was one of the three people who launched the idea for a Internet2 testbed project for the Netherlands, now running as the GigaPort Project funded by the NL government.
His work ranges from telecom legislation and government IT policy to Internet and intranet and extranet implementations. In 1988 he was part of the team that wrote the Tele-communication Law (Wet op de Telecommunicatievoorzieningen) that replaced the Telecom Law of 1904. He is chief scientist at Tildro Research B.V. in Rhenen, NL and writes columns and blogs in TelecomMagazine, Netkwesties.nl, and ScienceGuide.nl.
He is most known for his original ideas in synthecracy, which he describes as using tele-networks to interconnect and synthesise knowledge without hierarchies to get things working and solve complex problems in the general interest. The advantage of sythecracy is shown in Van Till’s Synthecracy Network Law: V ~ N ! where V is values, and N is number of networked participants. This law gives us a much higher for V for any large value of N than either Metcalfe's law or Reed's law, resulting in herd or hive like thinking, problem solving, and decision making.