Berkman Center, the 1999 commission — and a witness in the room in 2008
Parts of this entry are out of date. It is published anyway, because an incomplete record that invites correction is more useful than no record at all.
Director of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard at the time of the 2008 transition, and the person who introduced Jonathan Hare to Reed Hundt.
A decade earlier, editing The Biology of Business, he had asked Hare for the unifying chapter — the general account of adaptive systems rather than one more domain application. Offered the choice between describing an application and describing the general case, Hare took the general case. What he wrote became Adaptive Systems Analysis.
Hare's directive of August 2026 marks Clippinger for a fuller page: beyond the Berkman Center and the 2008 room, his public career — digital identity and trust frameworks, the MIT Media Lab, the Institute for Data Driven Design — sits squarely on this record's subject matter, and the Marie Charles thread (he was seeing her when she nominated Hare for the Aspen Institute's Henry Crown Fellowship in 2007) runs through him. The fuller account is Hare's to dictate; the scaffolding is now marked.
Each entry below carries its own provenance — the source, and how it was processed. That is the condition on which this graph can be extended by anyone without degrading.
The trail exists so that people who were there can reconstruct their own memories, recognize what they helped incubate, and add to or correct the record — or forward the few pages that belong to someone they know.
The 1999 commission produced the document in which Wilson's consilience thesis was independently formulated, before Hare had read Wilson. The 2008 introduction put the same argument in front of the people assembling the response to the financial crisis.
Two interventions, nine years apart, both of which pushed the work toward the general case rather than the application.
He did not only make the introduction to Reed Hundt. He was in the room when Hare presented on regulatory infrastructure and when the Goldman participants asked where their margins would go.
He is living and reachable, and his account of that meeting would be the single most valuable correction or confirmation anyone could add to this record.
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Regulatory Infrastructure for the 21st Century — presented while the meltdown was still happening
Open →introduced Hare to himFCC chairman, then transition lead for the money agencies
Open →Everything above is a distillation. The primary source is published in full, so that any claim on this page can be walked back to what was actually said — and where the two differ, the source governs.
The account this page was distilled from, preserved as dictated.
Read the source →Primary source · S-045The account this page was distilled from, preserved as dictated.
Read the source →Primary source · S-117The account this page was distilled from, preserved as dictated.
Read the source →Primary source · S-122The account this page was distilled from, preserved as dictated.
Read the source →This entry is deliberately incomplete. The gaps below are the things only certain people can settle — and settling one is a contribution like any other: recorded, timestamped and attributed to whoever made it.
Correct anything wrong, add what only you know, or claim this entry as your own. Write to evidence@qpncatalyst.io and Jonathan directly (both are on the button) — a timestamped confirmation comes back with your submission attached, as your own independent record. No account, no permission, no institutional standing required.
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