Berlin, last change in 2012-06
lynX is active in the Pirate Parties of Berlin and Rome.
When Carlo joined the Piratenpartei in 2009, there was already this vision in the air.. Pirates speaking of Liquid Democracy. The next year it got introduced and Carlo was among the first to use the technology in writing a participatory election programme. It made the Pirates different from any other political party: All had contributed, all were authors, not just sympathisers. This gave them a whole different kind of boost. Each one competent in every detail and boasting with motivation. This led to 8,9 percent of the Berlin vote, 15 seats in parliament, 13% in polls for upcoming national elections. In a survey Berliner Pirates said Liquid Democracy was the number one ingredient to their success. Since then, Carlo has been touring Italy; promoting, deploying and explaining the Liquid Feedback technology in the Italian Pirate Party and other interested groups. He's also promoting a European Liquid Feedback where Pirates of the entire continent can collaborate on a common programme for 2014.
Fascinated by Internet chat, Carlo contributed to IRC. Realizing it had reached its technical and political limits, he embarked on a journey to find the holy grail of communication protocols.
Around 1995, Internet business took off. Carlo developed content management systems and content delivery networks for sites such as stern.de, zeit.de, spiegel.de. Contemporaneously he published the drafts for a federated protocol called PSYC.
Making money using PSYC turned out much easier then getting the attention of the Open Source community, so the release was delayed and a software named Jabber won the race. Back then servers were safe and sniffing other people's messages was unethical. Today Carlo has aimed for a better holy grail.
Carlo also makes music. He keeps it on the servers of friends. If you invite him for a paper presentation, make sure to also give him a slot for a DJ set at the after party. ;-)
Carlo von lynX is an expert on harmonic analysis, that is the comprehension of the psycho-emotional effects of chord progressions, to put it in slightly simpler words. It's a technique hardly any musician has ever heard of and even school teachers barely know about.
Even Wikipedia has no page on this topic. You can look at some examples of harmony analysis at El Sapo Sabio. It is usually applied to Jazz. Carlo likes to do this kind of analysis on pop music, since the Beatles, the 70's and 80's provided for a lot of interesting material, but in recent years commercial pop music has become so plain, there's hardly anything worth analysing.
In the 2000s, Carlo has been producing dance music and deejaying in the Berlin electro, techno and disco underground. He found out, when it comes to making people dance, completely different metrics apply. But again, he found predictable rules of thumb that determine if a production is likely to fill the dancefloor or not, and he developed the skills to sense the mood of the audience and develop the dramaturgy of track selection.
"But ultimately," lynX says, "in music you can never replace creativity and a sense of good taste. Analysis only helps you understand why something works and something else doesn't."
P.S. Why lynX? Well, Carlo wasn't a very unique nickname, so I chose lynX because I liked the animal. Later some Canadians made a web browser by the same name. I respect that, it's their national mascot.