Advisory & Engagements
The problems worth working on sit at the intersection of things most practitioners treat separately.
Governance that cannot survive cultural contact is brittle. Identity infrastructure that ignores legal capacity encodes the wrong assumptions. Cultural work without structural architecture dissolves. The organisations and systems being built now — across decentralised networks, human rights institutions, and civic environments — need practitioners who can hold all three together under pressure.
That is what I do.
Areas of engagement
Governance Architecture
For institutions, coalitions, and rights-based organisations restructuring how decisions are made, accountability is held, and participation is encoded — especially where decentralised technology is part of the answer.
This includes: governance model design, participation frameworks, delegation and accountability structures, token architecture for social impact, and the translation of governance theory into systems that work with real communities rather than despite them.
Reference work: Amnesty International Aotearoa New Zealand – Human Rights DAO, governance architecture, and Human Rights Token model for a 10-million person global movement. Currently in live pilot testing. Manifest - civic infrastructure for memory capture and remix.
Identity & Delegation Design
For protocols, DAOs, AI-adjacent systems, and institutions where the question of authority, consent, and delegation needs to be legally coherent — not just technically functional.
This includes: identity-layer specification, principal and mandate modelling, consent architecture, AI agent delegation frameworks, and semantic constraints that keep human agency intact as autonomous systems begin to participate in civic and economic life.
Reference work: SILT – Self-Actualised Identity Layer Tool. A spec-first identity infrastructure initiative addressing lawful capacity, delegation semantics, and AI-aware ontology. siltcore.org
Cultural Strategy & Activation
For institutions entering new publics, needing to build trust across difference, or activating participation in contexts where it cannot be assumed. This is governance made legible through lived experience — where policy and community actually meet.
This includes: intercultural programme design, public activation, participatory format development, community consultation design, and cultural infrastructure for civic and rights-based initiatives.
Reference work: People In Your Neighbourhood – NZ Human Rights Commission Diversity in Action Award 2009. Khuja Lounge – five-year intercultural venue ecosystem, Auckland. British Council Active Citizens programme. Te Karanga ā Hape – Matariki hub, wānanga and public activation, Karangahape Road.
How I work
I work as an embedded collaborator, not an external consultant who delivers a report and disappears. That means I listen before I design, test assumptions in real contexts, and stay with the work through iteration.
My strongest contribution is at the conceptual architecture stage – where the foundational decisions are made that determine whether a system can hold under pressure, scale without losing its values, or earn legitimacy from the communities it serves. I can also move through to execution, facilitation, and public activation where that is what the work requires.
Engagements typically take one of three forms:
Advisory retainer – ongoing strategic input, usually monthly, for organisations navigating complex governance or identity questions over time.
Project mandate – a defined scope with clear deliverables: a governance model, an identity layer specification, a cultural programme architecture, a white paper or research output.
Workshop or facilitated process – a structured encounter designed to surface assumptions, stress-test frameworks, and build shared understanding within a team or across a coalition.
I work across Aotearoa New Zealand and internationally. Remote engagement is standard; in-person is available for the right mandates.
Who I work with
Organisations I am most useful to tend to share certain characteristics: they are working on problems that sit at the intersection of law, technology, and culture; they have moved past the stage where simple solutions are adequate; and they are serious about building things that hold under scrutiny and across difference.
This includes: human rights organisations and coalitions, protocol foundations and DAO governance teams, civic technology initiatives, development agencies and foundations, cultural institutions in civic transition, and AI companies grappling with the governance of autonomous systems.
Let's work together
If what you are building requires thinking that crosses governance, identity, and cultural production — and you want a collaborator who has built stages as well as systems — I would like to hear from you.
Tell me what you are working on, where you are stuck, and what success needs to look like.