Optimocracy is the creation of Wes Kussmaul.
In 1981, working with friends at the MIT Joint Computer Facility, Wes launched the world’s first online encyclopedia, which quickly morphed into the Delphi social network and which, according to author Michael Wolff, was a main factor in the popularization of the internet. At the time it was sold to Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation in 1993, Delphi had been profitable for years and was among the four largest social networks, along with AOL, CompuServe and Prodigy.
In 1986, while CEO of Delphi, Wes launched a spinoff, Global Villages, Inc. to serve magazine publishers and business clients with their own private-label social networks. In 1987 he turned his full time attention to Global Villages while retaining the chairmanship of Delphi’s board. For the eleven years that followed, Global provided business planning, design, engineering, hosting, management and promotion services for social networks offered by Digital Equipment Corporation, William F. Buckley's National Review, BioTechniques, Hardcopy, International Business, Business Digest, and other companies and magazines.
During that time, and in response to the support needs of licensees of a regionally-oriented version of Delphi called Delphi Argentina, Wes launched a business unit called Local Villages, Inc. Together, Global Villages and Local Villages became known as The Village Group.
In 1998 the Global Villages bespoke social media business was merged with a web development firm and sold to NTT Verio.
In 1990 the online services business was disrupted when the U.S. National Science Foundation discontinued its prohibition on the use of the Internet for commerce. While the Internet provided scalability and other benefits over the traditional asynchronous and X.25 online services platforms, the accountability provided by reliable identities of users was now gone. The famous Peter Steiner New Yorker cartoon summed up the problem: "On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog."
After the sale of Global Villages to NTT Verio, Wes began to focus on the identity reliability and accountability challenge. When his daughter Sara asked “Isn’t that the problem PKI solves?” he responded with a list of reasons why PKI had failed to live up to his promise. Subsequently, however, he realized that those reasons had nothing to do with PKI but rather with the incomplete way it had been deployed.
Wes began collecting source material for a book about a hypothetical world public key infrastructure, built upon digital certificates representing measurably reliable identities, that would bring authenticity to online interactions and privacy to individuals. The book, entitled Quiet Enjoyment, published in 2004 with a second edition in 2014, was followed by Wes’s other titles including Don’t Get Norteled in 2013, Escape The Plantation in 2014, and The Future Needs You in 2021.
As the book began to take shape Wes was introduced to a group at the International Telecommunication Union that was attempting to implement a world PKI that was similar to the one he envisioned. In 2002 The Village Group became a charter signatory to the International Telecommunication Union's World e-Trust Initiative and became a Sector Member of the ITU. Wes was subsequently appointed to the High Level Experts Group at the ITU's Global Cybersecurity Agenda.
For political reasons the ITU ended its work on the World e-Trust Initiative in 2005 and transferred the project to Wes’s new company, The Authenticity Institute, Inc. On March 7, 2005 the City of Osmio, an online municipality that serves as the certification authority for TAI’s Authenticity Infrastructure, was chartered at the ITU’s Geneva headquarters.
In an address in 2008 to the United Nations World Summit on Information Society in Geneva, Wes introduced the City of Osmio to its members. Osmio applies global duly constituted public authority to the process of identity certification and to other digital certificates.
Inspired by the business model of Wes’s late friend George Hatsopoulos, The Authenticity Institute was conceived as a licensing business, providing the Authenticity Infrastructure global PKI platform, along with enrollment services, to entrepreneurs who combine their experience in their particular industry or vertical market with the measurably reliable identity certificates of the Authenticity Infrastructure to solve inauthenticity problems in those markets.
In 2021 The Authenticity Institute introduced its PKIDR Wallet, which keeps its owner’s PENs (private keys) securely in their phone, and enables the use of those PENs in signing, authentication, and symmetric encryption key management when a fingerprint is applied.
Wes received his BS in physics in 1971 from the University of Central Missouri while serving at nearby Whiteman Air Force Base. Upon graduation and discharge he became a systems analyst at Liberty Mutual Insurance Company, developing mainframe database applications for the next three years. Subsequent positions in sales and sales management at Gould Incorporated, Benson SA, and Tektronix, Inc. brought him in contact with the pioneers of the pre-Web internet, who inspired his development of the Kussmaul Encyclopedia.
Wes is rated twelfth in the 2023 Thinkers 360 list of Top 50 Global Thought Leaders On Security.
Wes serves on the boards of Transit X, Inc. and Boston Baroque, Inc. and lives with his wife Maria Lewis Kussmaul, in Boston’s Back Bay. He has five children and three four! grandchildren.