Esther Dyson

Esther Dyson is finishing a decade of work on Wellville, the 10-year, five-community project she founded and funded in 2013. It operates in five small US communities (Clatsop County OR, Muskegon County MI, Lake County CA, North Hartford CT, Spartanburg SC), with advisors who help community members to build their own sustainable organizations and weave their own social fabric. She is now getting ready to write her second book, “Don’t rent your (community’s) health from an absentee landlord.” Her first, “Release 2.0: A design for living in the digital age,” was an international best-seller in 1997.

With a background in journalism, finance, tech, health (vs. healthcare), policy and (yes!) space travel, Dyson’s mission is to help people see what they thought they already knew. Her current focus is to get the public to understand the importance of investing in (vs. spending on) the United States’ most important asset: its next generation. The best way to reduce healthcare costs, she argues, is to keep people healthy… Her most recent essay was published by The Information at https://www.theinformation.com/articles/dont-fuss-about-training-ais-train-our-kids.

She is currently on the boards of AvanleeCare, Charity Navigator, PressReader, ProofPilot and The Commons Project. Her past board seats include 23andMe, The Electronic Frontier Foundation, The Sunlight Foundation, WPP Group and Yandex. And oh yes : a Harvard BA in economics and a certificate of completion from the Yuri Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Institute.