Mr. Joseph Firmage has served as chairman of four organizations: Intend Change, OneCosmos Network, the International Space Sciences Organization, and the California Institute for Physics and Astrophysics. Earlier he wrote a book presenting a highly positive view of extraterrestrial intelligence and its importance to humanity. He has sponsored two high-level workshops to study eight contact scenarios and how to prepare for them. He was the founder and CEO of USWeb, "the world's largest Internet engineering and communications services firm," but left in 1999 at age 28 in order to pursue his new interests.