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About Reframe It
Reframe It lets you comment on the text of any website without the permission of the site.
Our Mission
Reframe It seeks to transform the nature of the public web by creating a virtual margin alongside any web page on which users can post comments to be shared with other users and read what others have written. Reframe It makes it possible for users to place any online material in a new light. It allows each user to benefit from the insights of other users who place specific online content in context and share their reactions in the form of online marginalia.
Reframe It is easy, accessible and empowering because it enables in-stream-of-thought commenting. It's useful for communities of people who interact around particular web content. Reframe It is the ideal tool for internal communications within communities and movements whose boundaries are vague, varied and constantly shifting. It naturally accommodates disparate levels of engagement and is particularly well-suited to small ad-hoc communities networking around the task of interpreting a paragraph. Users time-shift their community engagement so that it naturally flows around efficient moments of maximal shared interest— the moments when community members are looking at the same sentence and reacting to it. This lets them engage their friends and colleagues in the natural course of their process of learning and thinking about the world.
Currently, to discuss a specific idea or excerpt from a webpage, one must email the URL, identify the exact location of the point of interest and then explain why it's interesting. The person who receives such an email often misinterprets what the sender found important because the commentary within the email is out of the context of the specific, critical passage of text. Imagine that this first exchange of information and the subsequent discussions all taking place in a single, adjacent space. Reframe It creates this space and makes communication about external information easy and efficient.
Reframe It is a versatile technology that can create a secure private space in which employees of a corporation or members of an organization can privately discuss external websites of shared concern among themselves. It is a tool that businesses can use for private internal communications alongside the public web, a tool that movements and associations can use to deepen community engagement, and a technology consumers can benefit from and enjoy.
Reframe It's social mission is clear: offer the public a space right next to the web where newspapers, bloggers, companies, governments, non-profits and individuals are able to hold one another accountable for the information they convey and withhold from the public. This lets people with relevant expertise confirm good information and it lets them challenge information which is inaccurate, misleading and deceptive so that the broader community of users will not unwittingly fall victim to it. The internet needs this level of transparency if misinformation is to be countered without being censored. As both a technology and as a community Reframe It seeks to respond to this compelling need by becoming the transparency engine for the web.
Bobby Fishkin — Founder and CEO
Bobby came up with the idea for Reframe It while working on an academic project looking at marginalia in Shakespeare's work. Bobby is also a Special Advisor to Tomorrow's Europe, a project of the European Commission, & Special Advisor to the Center For Deliberative Democracy at Stanford University. He worked as a social entrepreneur and Fellow of the Richard Florida Creativity Group and Fellow of the Office of the Mayor of Baltimore, USA. He conceived and developed ACCESS Baltimore Arts Creating Community Energy and Social Solutions, a program which creates opportunities for at-risk youth and the mentors who work with them to attend cultural events together. He also conceived and developed the Books for Teachers program, which has created hundreds of classroom libraries in the state of Connecticut. A magna cum laude graduate of Yale College with a B.A. in Philosophy, Bobby is also a playwright who has been produced in London and New York. A documentary about the making of one of his plays is available at: Richard III.
Brian McKinney — Founder and CTO
Brian holds a BS in Electrical and Computer Engineering and a MS in Electrical Engineering from the University of Colorado at Boulder.
Prior to joining Reframe It, Brian worked at SkyeTek, a Colorado-based RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) startup, where he led their enterprise/online software team, designed hardware, and wrote firmware. Prior to that, he spent several years as a Systems Engineer at Advanced Micro Devices (AMD), and several summers working for Microsoft on Office Sharepoint. Brian has founded, worked at or consulted on numerous Internet startups including Abacus Media, SharperAgent, and SecMail.
Brian tries to balance work by enjoying the Colorado outdoors as often as possible.
Ben Taitelbaum — Founder and Lead Engineer
Ben has a BA in both Computer Science and Mathematics from Oberlin College, and a Master's of Computer Science from the University of Virginia
Before Reframe It, Ben was a Software Engineer at SAIC, working mostly on Java web services and their respective clients in both Java and C#. In grad school, Ben's research focused on safety-critical applications, and ways of simplifying the proof process behind the argument that a system is safe because it satisfies its requirements. Between undergad and grad school, Ben worked at the Vocal Arts Center at Oberlin Conservatory, developing visualization tools to help singers better understand the sound they produce.
When not playing around with Linux, or building a computer into a briefcase, Ben can often be found playing violin, cooking, or hiking in Shenandoah National Park.
Jason Murphy — Directory of User Experience
Jason Murphy has 18 years experience of bringing innovation to life in cutting-edge internet product development, branding, multidisciplinary design, and business strategy.
He created and guided the design teams of award winning web publishing tools and visual communications for broadcaster CTV and others, has served as Director of Operations for a private educational institution with revenues in-excess of M$25/yr and has delivered literally hundreds of lectures on internet and design related subjects.
Critical scope includes internet product development, creative team building, visual design, branding and communication, online community development, user experience design, creative and business process analysis and business strategy development and knowledge systems development.
David Kovsky
David Kovsky earned his BS in Computer Science from The University of Texas at Austin many years ago. He has since worked as a Software Engineer for many companies, from small start-ups to AT&T.
Maximilian Harmon
Maximilian Harmon is in complete agreement with Mark Twain on 'the coldest winter he ever spent was a summer in San Francisco,' being a transplant from Hawaii to the bay area. Max is currently enrolled in the University Of San Francisco as a Junior in the Business and Marketing Program and has been doing his best to follow Bobby Fishkin, Jeffrey Jenkins and the rest of the team throughout the amazing roller coaster ride that has become Reframe It.
David is especially excited to reframe those parts of the web that deal with such topics as politics, green solutions, and emerging online technologies. Offline, David enjoys kayaking, biking, learning to play the saxophone, and spending time with his wife and dogs.
Leslie Lipsick
Leslie is a proud Californian and a student at Brown University. When she is not Reframing the web, Leslie enjoys the outdoors, Arrested Development, Scrabble, and sushi.
Nancy Samahito
Nancy Samahito holds a B.A. in Communication with a minor in Education and Applied Psychology from the University of California, Santa Barbara. Her interest in Web 2.0 applications was sparked during her last year at UCSB where she conducted her own research project on Internet recommendation and reputation systems. She enjoys blogging, loves dogs, never leaves home without her flip cam, and enthusiastically encourages others to reframe the web to their own liking.
Howard Rheingold - Virtual Community Building, Working Advisory Board
I ventured further into the territory where minds meet technology, via the subject of computers as mind-amplifiers, and wrote Tools for Thought (1984) [New edition from MIT Press, April 2000]. Next, Virtual Reality (1991) chronicled my odyssey in the world of artificial experience, from simulated battlefields in Hawaii to robotics laboratories in Tokyo, garage inventors in Great Britain, and simulation engineers in the south of France.
In 1985, I became involved in the WELL, a computer conferencing system. I started writing about life in my virtual community and ended up with a book about the cultural and political implications of a new communications medium, The Virtual Community(1993 [New edition to be published by MIT Press in 2000]). I am credited with inventing the term "virtual community." I had the privilege of serving as the editor of The Whole Earth review and editor in chief of The Millennium Whole Earth Catalog (1994).
In 1994, I was one of the principal architects and the first Executive Editor of HotWired?. I quit after launch, because I wanted something more like a jam session than a magazine. In 1996, I founded and, with the help of a crew of 15, launched Electric Minds. Electric Minds was named one of the ten best web sites of 1996 by Time magazine and was acquired by Durand Communications in 1997. Since the late 1990s, I've cat-herded a consultancy for virtual community building.
My 2002 book, Smart Mobs, was widely acclaimed as a prescient forecast of the always-on era. The weblog associated with the book has become one of the top 200 of the 8 million blogs tracked by Technorati, and won Utne Magazine's Independent Press Award in 2003. In 2005, I taught a course at Stanford University on A Literacy of Cooperation, part of a long-term investigation of cooperation and collective action that I have undertaken in partnership with the Institute for the Future. The Cooperation Commons is the site of my ongoing investigation of cooperation and collective action. I teach Participatory Media/Collective Action at UC Berkeley's School of Information, Digital Journalism at Stanford University, am a non-resident Fellow of the Annenberg School for Communication, and am a visiting Professor at the Institute of Creative Technologies, De Montfort University in Leicester, UK.
Balázs László Szekfű - International Sales/Business Development
Laszlo is a serial entreprenur, runs his fifth company now, Darwin's Marketing Evolution ( www.darwins.hu ). He was a Yale World Fellow in 2006 (yale.edu/worldfellows). Before the fellowship he worked as an advisor to Hungary's Ministry of Economy and Transport, forming policies and programs that foster innovation throughout the Hungarian economy. His leadership has helped to ensure that knowledge-based industry initiatives are utilized in government policies. Mr. Szekfu, 35, is also one of Hungary's best-known Internet entrepreneurs ( www.carnationconsulting.com) and has been a key figure in Hungary's capitalization on information technology as the driving force for growth in its transitional economy. His current focus is building direct democracy and community based politics online.
Daniel Gohl - Education Working Advisory Board
Daniel Gohl is the President at Ontic Education LLC and an Associate Director for STEM Education at Teaching Institute for Excellence in Secondary School Transformation at the District Of Columbia Public School System. Previously Mr. Gohl in partnership with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation oversaw the transformation of Anacostia, Ballou, Bell Multicultural, Coolidge, Eastern, MM Washington, Roosevelt, Spingarn, and HD Woodson Senior High Schools and 19 middle schools. Daniel Gohl has served as principal of McKinley Technology High School and head of the Science Academy at Lyndon Baines Johnson High School. Dan Gohl was teacher of the year in 1993 at Travis High School in Austin, Texas and served as an Instructional Technology Coordinator for the Austin Independent School District.
Seth Brown
Seth A. Brown is a real estate investor and social entrepreneur dedicated to rethinking how America's cities, suburbs and rural areas work.
As a real estate investor, he focuses on residential development in New York City's growing neighborhoods, with a particular focus on Brooklyn, Queens, and the Bronx. He specializes in projects where financial, legal, and political issues intersect – for example, developing a contextual building in a historic neighborhood in Brooklyn, or developing a proprietary asset management model for a national firm's 13,000-unit rent-regulated apartment portfolio. He is also a strong proponent of green building, and incorporates green technologies into all Aspen Equities LLC projects.
In 2002, he co-founded The Next American City Inc., a not-for-profit organization that promotes socially and environmentally sustainable economic growth in America's cities. Described by The New York Times as a "subtle plan to change the world," the organization's quarterly magazine has examined everything from new ideas in affordable housing finance to the role religion has played in saving New York City's neighborhoods. Under Seth's leadership, the organization has grown from a volunteer-led startup into a not-for-profit with national impact.
Seth was born in Toronto and grew up in Denver, Colorado. He graduated from Yale College, where he studied history, and later received an MBA from the Yale School of Management, where he concentrated in finance.
Rod Frantz
Rod Frantz has demonstrated a creative record of excellence in interpersonal communications skill, marketing and branding in his thirty years of experience with public, private & not for profit organizations.
Using his strong entrepreneurial skills, Frantz was a key player in building & branding the Richard Florida Creativity Group; the first & most significant Creative Cities leadership organization worldwide.
Through his efforts the Creativity Group delivered a powerful set of economic development strategies to help public & private stakeholders around the world enhance their regional competitiveness.
Frantz worked for the Heinz Endowment & the RK Mellon Foundation to implement & brand the Riverlife Task Force, a two year study of the best uses for Pittsburgh's 37 miles of riverfront.
As Outreach Director he insured the unprecedented diversity of individuals, groups and organizations at over 100 public meetings & electrified the Pittsburgh region with an optimistic message of possibility.
Rod is also the founder of New Wave Strategies.
He is an acknowledged expert at identifying and promoting causes that fundamentally change people's lives and perspectives and a passionate advocate who connects with a broad audience. He thrives as a coalition builder and negotiator, and team player. He maintains a global network of key stakeholder relationships.
Henry Louis Gates, Jr.
Henry Louis Gates, Jr., is the Alphonse Fletcher University Professor and the Director of the W. E. B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research at Harvard University.
Professor Gates is Editor-in-Chief of the Oxford African American Studies Center, the first comprehensive scholarly online resource in the field of African American Studies and Africana Studies. He is co-editor with K. Anthony Appiah of the encyclopedia Encarta Africana published on CD-ROM by Microsoft (1999), and in book form by Basic Civitas Books under the title Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African and African American Experience (1999). Oxford University Press published an expanded five-volume edition of the encyclopedia in 2005. He is most recently the author of Finding Oprah's Roots, Finding Your Own (Crown, 2007), a meditation on genetics, genealogy, and race. His other recent books are America Behind the Color Line: Dialogues with African Americans (Warner Books, 2004), African American Lives, co-edited with Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham (Oxford, 2004), and The Annotated Uncle Tom's Cabin, edited with Hollis Robbins (W. W. Norton, 2006).
In 2006, Professor Gates wrote and produced the PBS documentary also called "African American Lives," the first documentary series to employ genealogy and science to provide an understanding of African American history. In 2007, a follow-up one-hour documentary, "Oprah's Roots: An African American Lives Special," aired on PBS, further examining the genealogical and genetic heritage of Oprah Winfrey, who had been featured in the original documentary. Professor Gates also wrote and produced the documentaries "Wonders of the African World" (2000) and "America Beyond the Color Line" (2004) for the BBC and PBS, and authored the companion volumes to both series. Professor Gates is currently at work on a four-hour sequel to "African American Lives," which is scheduled to air in February 2008.
Professor Gates is the author of several works of literary criticism, including Figures in Black: Words, Signs and the "Racial" Self (Oxford University Press, 1987); and The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of Afro-American Literary Criticism (Oxford, 1988), winner of the American Book Award in 1989. He authenticated and facilitated the publication, in 1983, of Our Nig, or, Sketches from the Life of a Free Black (1859), by Harriet Wilson, the first novel published by an African American woman. Two decades later, in 2002, Professor Gates authenticated and published The Bondwoman's Narrative by Hannah Crafts, dating from the early 1850s and now considered one of the first novels written by an African American woman. He is the co-author, with Cornel West, of The Future of the Race (Knopf, 1996), and the author of a memoir, Colored People (Knopf, 1994), that traces his childhood experiences in a small West Virginia town in the 1950s and 1960s. Among his other books are The Trials of Phillis Wheatley: America's First Black Poet and Her Encounters with the Founding Fathers (Basic Civitas Books, 2003); Thirteen Ways of Looking at A Black Man (Random House, 1997); and Loose Canons: Notes on the Culture Wars (Oxford 1992). He is completing a book on race and writing in the eighteenth century, entitled "Black Letters and the Enlightenment."
Professor Gates has edited several influential anthologies, including The Norton Anthology of African American Literature (W. W. Norton, 1996); and the Schomburg Library of Nineteenth Century Black Women Writers (Oxford, 1991). He is the editor of numerous essay collections, including Reading Black, Reading Feminist: A Critical Anthology (Meridian, 1990); "Race," Writing, and Difference (University of Chicago, 1986); and, with K. Anthony Appiah, volumes on the authors Toni Morrison, Zora Neale Hurston, Richard Wright, and Langston Hughes. In addition, Professor Gates is publisher of Transition magazine, an international review of African, Caribbean, and African American politics. An influential cultural critic, Professor Gates's publications include a 1994 cover story for Time magazine, numerous articles for the New Yorker, and in September 2004, a biweekly guest column in The New York Times.
Professor Gates earned his M.A. and Ph.D. in English literature from Clare College at the University of Cambridge, and his B.A. summa cum laude in History from Yale University, where he was a Scholar of the House, in 1973. He became a member of Phi Beta Kappa in his junior year at Yale. Before joining the faculty of Harvard in 1991, he taught at Yale, Cornell, and Duke. His honors and grants include a MacArthur? Foundation "genius grant" (1981), the George Polk Award for Social Commentary (1993), Time magazine's "25 Most Influential Americans" list (1997), a National Humanities Medal (1998), election to the American Academy of Arts and Letters (1999), the Jefferson Lecture (2002), a Visiting Fellowship at the School of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton (2003-2004), the Jay B. Hubbell Award for Lifetime Achievement in American Literary Studies from the Modern Language Association (2006), ), the Rave Award from Wired Magazine (2007), the Let's Do It Better Award from of the Columbia University School of Journalism for "African American Lives" (2007), and the Cultures of Peace Award from the City of the Cultures of Peace (2007). He has received nearly 50 honorary degrees, from institutions including the University of Pennsylvania, Dartmouth College, Harvard University, New York University, University of Massachusetts-Boston, Williams College, Emory University, Howard University, University of Toronto, and the University of Benin. In 2006, he was inducted into the Sons of the American Revolution, after he traced his lineage back to John Redman, a Free Negro who fought in the Revolutionary War.
Professor Gates served as Chair of the Department of African and African American Studies at Harvard from 1991 to 2006. He serves on the boards of the New York Public Library, the Whitney Museum, Lincoln Center Theater, Jazz at Lincoln Center, the Aspen Institute, the Brookings Institution, the Studio Museum of Harlem, the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, and the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford.
Mariana Danilovic
Ms. Danilovic is the Founder and Managing Director of Hollywood Portfolio, LLC, a developer, owner and operator of digital media companies. The Company focuses on cross-platform incubation and acceleration, assistance in securing funding from institutional investors, corporate and business development, content aggregation, branded entertainment, and revenue generating activities for digital media ventures. Through Hollywood Portfolio, Ms. Danilovic launched and helped develop several digital media companies and serves on the Advisory Board of Reframe It, Pixsy, VoiceIndigo, FitFiend, and CozmoMedia.
Ms. Danilovic was the EVP Business Development for a digital signage company, NTN Buzztime, Inc. (AMEX:NTN) and VP Business Development, Content Aggregation and Programming for MediaZone, broadband video company owned by NASPERS media conglomerate. She also founded and directed the Digital Media Incubator at KPMG LLP, which developed about two dozen digital media companies. The companies Ms. Danilovic helped develop received institutional funding from KPCB, Sequoia Capital, Hummer-Winblad, Constellation Partners, Softbank, North Star Ventures, HP, and Intel. At KPMG, Ms. Danilovic managed the digital media M&A transactions and facilitated the sale of the Well to the Salon prior to its initial public offering.
Prior to joining KPMG, Ms. Danilovic headed business development for Peter Guber’s Mandalay Entertainment. She also was part of the management team for the $60 million fund at Sony Pictures Entertainment that made investments in media companies worldwide. Ms. Danilovic also worked with Michael Milken’s Knowledge Exchange and at the Twentieth Century Fox International Television Group. Prior to attending business school, she worked in Product Management as well as Mergers and Acquisitions for Transamerica and SunAmerica. She previously served on the Board of Directors of Tim Draper’s Zone Club, the California Culture Net, VIC Network, and was a member of former Los Angeles Mayor Richard Riordan's Digital Coast Roundtable. Mariana earned a Masters in Business Administration from the Anderson Graduate School of Management at UCLA, and a Bachelor of Arts in Mathematics from University of California, San Diego.
Esther Dyson
Esther Dyson is a fanatic for disclosure and transparency. She began her formal career as a fact-checker for Forbes Magazine, where she learned to respect the role of free information in making markets work. Despite a BA in economics from Harvard (1972), it was also at Forbes that she learned to read a balance sheet – mostly by trying to understand the financial filings of Continental Illinois Realty Trust, a high-flier of its day. She then spent five years as a securities analyst, and got two-thirds of the way towards a CFA before leaving to join and ultimately purchase Release 1.0, the leading high-tech newsletter of its day. She wrote and edited Release 1.0 until 2007. Since selling her business to CNET in 2005 and leaving in early 2007, she has worked fulltime as an investor and board member for a variety of start-ups in information technology, health care/genetics and space travel. She does business as chairman of EDventure Holdings.
Dyson is also active in the non-profit world. She is a director of the Sunlight Foundation, devoted to transparency in government, and she is about to publish her full genome and all her health records online, as part of the Personal Genome Project. She also sits on the board of the National Endowment for Democracy.