Rome Viharo is the co-founder of Big Mother, the founder and creator of Conversational Game Theory, the proud parent of a young man now in college, and a retired cyber-elf.
Viharo has multiple domain-vertical expertise in the intersections of media and technology, including strategic development, consensus design, discussion engineering, content distribution, and marketing––being the designer and architect for PiP, Aiki Wiki, CopyCake, BAE, and Studio Novitá.
In 2003, Viharo began to explore online discussions as a new form of media and launched one of the first “signal jamming” campaigns, innovating a tactic to battle online disinformation about the existence of WMD in Iraq–– and over the course of 20 years developed what is now known as Conversational Game Theory, the foundation for Aiki Wiki, an online platform for consensus building. Conversational Game Theory reflects the multi disciplinary approach to Viharo’s designs.
Since 2013 Viharo has been funded to design and build solutions engineering projects in various media/technology marketplaces, with a focus on audience acquisition and distribution. His core focus is online consensus building and conflict resolution as a protocol.
Beginning his career pathway in the 1990s as a GenX entrepreneur, Viharo began as a music producer, composer and digital filmmaker in Hollywood, CA. Both an EMI recording artist as well as an award winning filmmaker and Slam Dance alumni––Viharo left the life of music and storytelling and began developing and innovating new digital media in 2005 with Anonymous Content–– by 2007 was innovating the new field of “viral marketing“.
By 2010, Viharo was running some of the largest early social, viral, and digital media campaigns in the world, including over five Super Bowl campaigns, and developed media strategy for some of the largest agencies in the world including GroupM, Publicis, Chiat/DAY, Audi, Ford, Visa, Google. He sold his first company, MediaSocial, in 2011. In 2012 he acted as a whistle-blower, exposing and helping expose many ad-fraud networks to journalists including the Economist.
In 2011, Viharo along with partner Maf Lewis hosted a TEDx talk about the “meme” Google Consciousness, exploring the creation of a popular and influential meme Viharo created as a device to introduce viral and social media as a new type of online governance system, a pre-cursor to Conversational Game Theory––”Google Consciousness” was number 1 most popular TEDx Talk in the world for over six months.
Consuming years of research, Viharo began a case study into Wikipedia’s governance system in 2013 while intentionally participating in two “wiki wars” on the encyclopedia which detail how the breakdown in Wiki governance occurs. Viharo was doxxed within three days of initiating his case study on Wikipedia, with some of these Wikipedia editors initiating an attack campaign against Viharo on RationalWiki.
There is disinformation published about Viharo on RationalWiki.
Disinformation about Viharo and his case study has been published on RationalWiki since 2014, directly in response to Viharo’s case study on Wikipedia’s governance and the troll farms that operate on MediaWikis.
RationalWiki, along with Wikipedia and various MediaWiki platforms, was discovered to be hosting a “troll farm” of over five hundred editing accounts operated by a team of Wikipedia editors and in response, Wikipedia editors began to publish attack articles on Viharo on the RationalWiki platform in attempts to discredit the study.
This troll farm comprised of Wikipedia editors doxxed Viharo on Wikipedia and threatend to continue to impersonate Viharo on the internet, prompting Viharo to file a report with the FBI.
Viharo detailed each historical instance of targeted harassment and detailed his interactions with these troll farms in his blog, Wikipedia, We Have a Problem, from 2013-2019.
The RationalWiki article on Viharo acts as an historical relic which demonstrates how easily MediaWiki’s are abused, gamed and leveraged in the little known phenomenon of “Wiki Wars” occurring on Wikipedia.