Dr. Sanger is Executive Director of the Knowledge Standards Foundation. His Internet career has been inspired by the thought that we can massively benefit humanity by coming together to share knowledge—we need only discover the best way to do so. He is also very much concerned about preserving freedom of speech and the digital autonomy and democracy that defined the early days of the Internet.
A self-styled “online knowledge organizer,” Dr. Sanger grew up in Seattle and Anchorage and began his career by earning B.A. (Reed College) as well as M.A. and Ph.D. (Ohio State), all in philosophy. His professional specializations were early modern philosophy and epistemology (the theory of knowledge). But instead of becoming a professor, he became co-founder of Nupedia and then its successor, Wikipedia. He then went through a long series of mostly nonprofit projects, including a stint of teaching at Ohio State, theorizing for the Digital Universe Foundation (leading to the Encyclopedia of Earth), designing and co-founding the educational projects WatchKnowLearn and ReadingBear, both widely used by teachers and parents. He spent some time on a for-profit news summary project, Infobitt, advising the encyclopedia of American politics, Ballotpedia, and from late 2017 until September 2019, as CIO of Everipedia, the blockchain encyclopedia.
Dr. Sanger is invited to speak around the world on a variety of Internet-related topics, and his writing has appeared on TheNextWeb, Wired, and other outlets, but especially the LarrySanger.org blog, where he talks about topics ranging from Internet theory, to pure philosophy, to education.
The Sangers are homeschoolers. Larry taught his two boys to read at a very early age and made them many educational PowerPoints (later made into videos). Larry is also an avid fiddle player in the Irish traditional style.
You can follow him on Twitter.