David Levine

David Levine is a technology entrepreneur and systems architect, the founder of Kiduna Club, and the founder, chairman, and president of the Kinship Intelligence Institute. He is developing member-governed agentic organizations: communities whose software agents coordinate work, resources, and decisions around purposes defined by their members. His career spans early commercial web systems, financial marketplaces, multiplayer-game technology, and rooftop-solar modeling. His current work combines that experience with a concern for how people retain control over the systems they build together.

Early web ventures and shared worlds

Levine founded HuskyLabs in the early 1990s to develop public and enterprise web systems. He wrote Live Java: Database to Cyberspace, published by Academic Press in 1996, and subsequently founded Ultraprise, a marketplace for mortgage loans and loan portfolios, and Butterfly.net, a multiplayer-game technology company that became part of the business later known as Gamebryo. These ventures involved coordinating financial transactions and supporting shared digital environments. His historical professional biography covers these businesses and his later public-sector technology work.

An earlier shared world continues to inform his thinking. In November 1993, Levine joined LambdaMOO, the text-based virtual environment hosted at Xerox PARC. Participants could write programs, adopt one another’s player classes, and transform objects within a coherent world. He remembers this composability as central to its sense of community: participants could extend the environment together. In his talk on open-internet agent commerce, he argues that LambdaMOO’s governance, technology, funding, and culture reinforced one another. His criticism of advertising-driven platforms follows from that experience: optimizing engagement and extracting revenue, he argues, can displace the relationships that make a community worth joining.

Geospatial modeling and the economics of solar

After his game-technology venture, Levine worked in technology commercialization and geospatial modeling. He supported technology-based economic development in West Virginia and served as executive director of the National Technology Transfer Center. His geospatial work included natural-gas distribution modeling and wind-farm siting datasets at Sewall, airborne LiDAR at ImageTree, and satellite-based agricultural modeling at Lanworth. These experiences connected computing and simulation to decisions about physical infrastructure. (Historical career account)

In 2010, he founded Geostellar, assembling former collaborators to apply remote sensing and simulation to rooftop solar. The task was to determine how sunlight reaches an individual roof and connect that energy potential to an installation and financing plan. In his account of Geostellar’s beginnings, he credits Breighton Dawe with the solar-radiance algorithms, Butch Deal with the computing infrastructure, and Jeremy Dobrzanski with the integrated application. Levine brought those capabilities together in a marketplace that could help customers evaluate solar and act on the results.

Solar also drew him into policy. In 2015, he petitioned West Virginia’s Public Service Commission to investigate the costs and benefits of net metering, arguing that customers supplying electricity to the grid should receive compensation reflecting the benefits they provide. Accurate modeling was only part of the installation decision; utility rules also shaped its economics.

He subsequently founded Indeco, pursuing blockchain-based shared ownership to finance solar and other sustainability projects. Geostellar filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in January 2018, and Levine resigned from all positions with the company that April. His later work continues to address how people finance, govern, and benefit from collective activity through decentralized infrastructure.

Kiduna: coordinating agents under member governance

With Kiduna, Levine applies those organizational concerns to agentic AI. Kiduna Club develops and stewards the supporting technology; Kinship Duna is the member-governed association; and the Institute pursues research and public-interest applications. Within Kinship Duna, he describes himself as a catalyst assembling the foundations and initial participants, rather than an owner or executive above the membership.

His proposals connect technical capabilities to responsibility and governance:

• Cryptographic agent identity: Levine proposes JWT credentials containing claims about an agent’s permissions, expiration times, and blockchain address. Participants could validate those credentials before cooperating, connect an agent to a registered organization, and inspect an audit trail linking actions to the organization responsible for them. In his agent-commerce talk, he presents this as a response to the risks created when agents combine private-data access, untrusted content, and external actions. The mechanism is intended to support accountability and delegated permissions; credentials and audit trails alone do not establish protection against prompt injection.

• Organizations designed as software: An agent receives relevant knowledge, role instructions, connected accounts and tools, specific abilities, and a purpose. Organizational software would coordinate those agents’ work, including customer discovery, resource use, and reinvestment. Levine has chosen decentralized unincorporated nonprofit associations, or DUNAs, as the legal form for this model. His initial umbrella organization is intended to let builders affiliate agents without first creating separate organizations, then develop organizations for their own purposes. Sales, social-media, and legal agents are examples of the templates he invites builders to contribute. (Open-internet agent-commerce proposal)

• Decision markets: Levine proposes governance in which members introduce policies and participants trade pass and fail tokens. He argues that a financial stake in the outcome could improve deliberation by attaching consequences to participants’ judgments. Agents would bring members’ purposes, values, experiences, and aspirations into those competing judgments. This remains a proposed governance mechanism, with improved decision quality an intended outcome. (Decision-market proposal)

• Relational agency: His Genesis Nightpaper develops a design in which agents understand whose purpose they serve, where information came from, what permission applies, and who will experience the consequences of an action. It separates memory and authority for people, relationships, projects, and organizations. A project could retain shared decisions without absorbing every participant’s private knowledge, while an agent’s ability to use a tool would remain distinct from its authorization to act.

The Nightpaper’s watershed example makes that separation tangible: residents, researchers, and organizations could coordinate observations and restoration work while retaining control of their own knowledge and commitments. It illustrates Levine’s ambition to expand what participants can accomplish together while preserving their agency. (Watershed coordination example)

The Institute extends this agenda to applications whose social and ecological value may exceed their commercial appeal, including watershed stewardship and community resilience. Its approach to alignment asks whom an agent serves and how its actions affect others, extending responsibility beyond the person issuing a prompt to the communities and living systems touched by the work.