Open Commercial Media Ecosystem

August 19, 2025 projectsidentitybusiness

I’m the Executive Director of the Open Commercial Media Ecosystem (OCME), a 501(c)(6) member-governed nonprofit rebuilding the creator economy on top of cryptographically secure, tamper-evident identity.

I went full-time on August 20, 2025. OCME is the operational expression of my first mission — bringing self-sovereign identity (SSI) technology to 100 million people by 2034 — and the engine of my second — restoring economic agency to creators and professionals through alternatives to gatekeeper-controlled platforms.

Why OCME exists

The platforms that distribute creative work today own the audience, the data, the discovery surface, and the rules. Creators rent everything. When the algorithm shifts or the contract changes, value built over years can evaporate in a quarter — see The First Warning Shot.

OCME flips the model. Creators, curators, and industry members are members of the ecosystem. Identity, content, plays, and payments are all anchored to decentralized identifiers (DIDs) the creators control. The infrastructure is open-by-default; the governance is industry-led, not platform-led.

Where we are

Metric	Value (as of June 2026)
Members	896
Content pieces	5,798
Total DIDs in registry	19,108

Live progress against the 2034 master goal: 2034.

What I do day-to-day

Governance — Lead the Industry Advisory Council. Drive the Governance Framework. Build the Showrunner / Creator / Broadcaster role model that scales the ecosystem without centralizing it.
Partnerships — Active tracks with Guild Together, Gato, Soulscape, Frank Capo’s sponsorship network, and the Trust Over IP ecosystem.
Product ownership — Specs, roadmap, definition-of-done across the engineering team. Recent shipped surface: payment engine, Cubicube creator sites, Newsletter SOP verification system, autonomous nightly QA.
Communication — The OCME newsletter (37+ issues), AMAs, public-facing decks, and the case for open creator infrastructure.
Operating principles — Servant leadership. Open-by-default. Members-as-owners. The ecosystem outlasts the operator.

How this connects to the rest of the work

The Shifting Current — My newsletter and writing document the macro transition OCME exists to navigate. OCME is the hands-on bet that the transition is real.
Personal mission alignment — OCME is the operational expression of M1 and M2. The site you’re reading is M3.