About the Owner, John Freeman

Owner, Smart Community

John enjoyed the art, social, and technical worlds since childhood. He studied music continually from 1st to 12th grades, began writing music at 15 for one piano, two pianos, trumpet, violin, and voice. He wrote his wedding song, played piano and sang for high school chorus, played trumpet for the school band for several years, and performed piano for several churches.

Out of a sense of duty to help those horribly afflicted by dictators and world leaders with self-serving agendas, he chose to go into the least technical profession in the Army in 1980, the Infantry. He actually found the MOS (Military Occupational Specialty) 11B (Infantry) to be as technical as any soldier was willing to discover. During the voluntary joining process, he tried to join either Special Forces or Rangers. The recruiter explained that there were no openings and said that John could join the 101st Airborne and later transfer to Special Forces. Apparently, the recruiter had his own agenda called 'quota'.

While in basic training, recruiters from The Old Guard in Washington, D.C., tried to recruit John into the President's Escort. Through some additional 'agenda-swervery', John agreed to change his contract to join the Old Guard. Three of his four years in the Army were spent in the Presidential Escort unit in Washington, D. C., the Official Ceremonial Unit and Escort to the President. After a lot of requests to transfer into a unit with a greater emphasis on using soldiers as soldiers, he was transferred for the remainder of his four year enlistment in the Army to Fort Hood, Texas, to be in the 1st Cavalry Division.

After the Army, he went to school to major in physics.  After earning an associate's degree and after having made plans to continue into the junior year, he fell victim to the recession that had hit the country so hard near the end of the 80's. During that time, positions requiring physics or math skills grew scarce and colleges had insufficient enrollment for physics majors to have evening courses for them; to avoid future career-chases, he vowed he would learn the computer skills he would need to have secure employment.

From the late 80's, John taught himself programming and wrote mostly graphics and statistical programs at home and then voluntarily for his place of employment.   He took additional courses at Anne Arundel Community College to study Visual Basic, UNIX scripting, C, C++, and Networking in various environments, before finally getting his BS in Information Technology. 

While working in Research and Development at a plastics company, he found that one of the testing and reporting standards in the ASTM had a flaw. In trying to make sense of one of the tests, he invented a new statistical calculation that allows its users to quickly fit a curve to systems of consumption that are based on non-heterogeneous causes. It took two years to finally determine the formula before copyrighting the formula and how to apply it in 1992.

After developing software mostly at home and voluntarily for his places of employment, John still had a resume that was difficult to market him into the development and software world. Against these odds, he was able to obtain an agreement that included both his developing a graphics-intense catalogue publishing program and an MS Access database and user interface for MET Laboratories (Baltimore, Maryland) in 1996. All the graphics in this catalogue were produced by code from scratch. The catalogue software automated a table of contents and thorough index.

After a year of professional programming experience, John began to realize that the status quo of development planning was that of a sweat shop. In other words, programmers typically produced code with only the current task in mind and produced code as quickly as possible with the least amount of planning and structure possible. After a couple years, John's coworkers would use his code to accomplish common tasks for which they had painstakingly written code or simply avoided in the past.  They were pleasantly impressed to find that his code was quickly and easily incorporated into and accessed by their code.

In 2000, John was a consultant for Verizon for several months. From October, 2000, to May, 2002, he provided consulting services for Lockheed Martin and the Social Security Administration for several projects. For the last project, John was the point person for a large project for the Social Security Administration. The project was the post 9/11 physical security upgrade for the entire Administration, including its 1400+ satellite offices. John was the sole analyst for this project for the first month and a half, meeting with and interviewing the managers and subordinates of departments Suitability Determinations, Access Control, Badge Control, Guard Operations, Parking Control, Site Surveys, and Property Control. John provided potential solution diagrams from the data obtained from his analysis that would incorporate data exchanges among all of the five Social Security Headquarters buildings and the 1400+ satellite offices nationwide. John was on that project for the first two phases (Analysis, and Recommendation and Solution Selection).

Having the skills for seeing "the big picture," John became very aware of how people could help each other through the Internet in many ways not possible to date. Soon, he realized that the "big picture" organization of helpful data exchanges between people with similar needs and interests did not exist to any degree close to the way he imagined it could be. Such is the ultimate goal of Smart Community.

"May our lives improve by an ever-increasing spirit, ability, and action to help each other!" -John G. Freeman