Most recently the founder of smart-headphones company Aivvy, Isaac Mao was described as the first blogger in China by The Guardian. He co-founded cnblogs.com in 2002 to evangelize grassroots publishing and sharing in China.
At the Social Brain Foundation, which Mao built up starting in 2005, he supported a series of initiatives in China to advocate and practice free access, free speech, and free thinking. He also brought the Creative Commons project into China.
In 2009, Isaac coined the term “Sharism,” to describe a new philosophy that explains how a fully connected world transforms its society and all human beings, and possibly relates to an emergent super intelligence. Sharism was acknowledged as an “Idea of the Future” at the Davos Communication Forum.
As a symbol of his strong stance against censorship in China, as well as around the world, his 2007 open letter to Google's co-founders called global attention to the responsibilities of multinational enterprises to support Internet freedom. Later, as a board member on the Tor Project and an adviser to Global Voices Online and GreatFire.org, Mao fostered more global collaborations to conquer censorship with both technical and social solutions.
Mao is regular speaker at the World Economic Forum, the Web 2.0 Summit, Wikimania, the Chinese Internet Research Conference, Ci'Num, PICNIC, and other global digital culture events. He also was a jury member at Prix Ars and Deutsche Welle's The Bobs awards.
