NextNowNextNowClaudia Welss of Berkeley, California is founder/executive director of NextNow Collaboratory, a "collaboration laboratory" that matches needs with resources to benefit social projects--primarily those that emphasize collaboration- and information-visualization technologies (see NNC Digital Earth ISDE5 project for an example). Her main focus is on using these technologies to create immediate, empowering shifts in awareness (think, "AHA!" moments) in the global population about the nature of social and environmental systems in ways that enable collective action. She's the founder of the Digital Earth/Digital Mind initiative which debuted at ISDE5; is a founding director of Fig Leaf Technologies, innovating a one–handed typing device for mobile computing; is on the board of ARTIS Foundation with Danny Glover, creating and distributing educational media to schools; is an external research faculty member of the Institute of Noetic Sciences contributing to consciousness research; is on the steering committee of the Global Coherence Initiative, a project to raise personal, social, and planetary systems out of chaos and into coherence, and 2009 State of the World Forum, a gathering to catalyze innovative ideas, action oriented people, and enabling technologies required to shape constructive change; and is a graduate student in Conscious Evolution in San Francisco.
Previously, Claudia was executive director of the Center for Executive Development at the Haas School of Business, University of California Berkeley, responsible for the development and delivery of strategic learning programs for client corporations worldwide and working with executives from over 30 countries in more than a dozen industries. At Berkeley from 1993-1999, she received the Dean's Distinguished Service Award for programmatic innovations that led to exponential growth and a number-one rating for the Center's flagship program. "My passion was to help usher in a new paradigm of business as catalyst of positive social change and environmental restoration, and my favorite opportunity to create this kind of awareness was in our 4-week program exploring strategy at the nexus of business, economics, technology, politics, and the natural and socio-cultural environments using a scenario-planning process with Peter Schwartz (Global Business Network) and Paul Schoemaker (Wharton). This process allowed for testing usually untested assumptions about the business of wealth-creation, and raised awareness of the implications for business and the society and environment on which business depends. I brought into the university environment emerging concepts from external sources, such as new global reference currencies, heart-brain entrainment, and the Cultural Creatives subculture, as potential harbingers of the reality in which corporate leaders would be asked to lead their organizations, and tools such as Natural Logic and the Natural Step as examples of support already available to them--all of these efforts are really blossoming today! My goal was to transform industry by creating educational opportunities to explicitly consider the role of business as social innovator, encouraging holistic views and practices promoting both commercial success and restored personal, social and environmental vitality." At the same time, Claudia was part of a 5–year international inquiry committee sponsored by the Fetzer Institute for the United Nations reporting on the peace–building potential of global business. Prior to Berkeley she worked with Business for Social Responsiblity in San Francisco.