Aaron is Canadian by birth, American by descent, North American by experience et Montréalais au fond. He usually just tells people he is from the Internet.
Aaron is currently Head of Internet Typing at the San Francisco International Airport Museum which is exactly what it sounds like.
Prior to that Aaron was Editor at Large at Mapzen and the creator of the Who's On First gazetteer project, which continues to this day.
Between 2012 and 2015 he was Head of Engineering at the Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum, responsible for the architecture, implementation and general table-pounding of the museum's digital infrastructure as well as the creation and delivery of The Pen.
And before all of that, Aaron was Senior Engineer at Flickr focusing on all things geo, machinetag and galleries related between 2004 and 2009. From 2009 to 2011 he was Design Technologist and Director of Inappropriate Project Names at Stamen Design, where he created the prettymaps and map=yes projects.
Aaron has spent a lot of time thinking about archiving social software and looking glass
archives, in the form the Parallel Flickr and Privatesquare projects. Previously a member of the Near Future Laboratory, he has also served on the advisory board to the Built Works Registry as well as Co-Director of Revolutionary Technologies for the Spinny Bar History Society since 2010.
Once upon a time he was still a painter. Aaron's work has been exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art, the Harvard Graduate School of Design, the NACIS Atlas of Design and 20x200.
He is a frequent speaker at the Museum Computer Network (MCN) and Museums and the Web conferences and has been a keynote speaker at the Future of Arts, Culture and Technology, New Zealand National Digital Forum and Access library technology conferences. He does not know how to explain the weird Rorschach circus that erupted following The New Aesthetic panel at SXSW 2012 but is proud to have been one of the speakers.
Aaron blogs at thisisaaronland, does not normally speak in the third person and is happiest in the presence of olive oil.