About Ebono
Ebono helps organisations make decisions they can stand behind. When a problem is wicked, or AI is part of the decision, we reveal the assumptions and extract the evidence, so the people responsible can be accountable with confidence.
We are small on purpose. We take on a small number of engagements at a time, and the person you speak to first is the person who does the work.
Dr Geoff Ebbs
Geoff has spent thirty years where technology meets people.
He started as a technology journalist, editing PC User (1991–92) and PC Week (1992–94). In 1994 he wrote The Australian Internet Book (published March 1995), one of the first guides to the internet for Australians. He used the proceeds to build early web content and document-management systems (Proton, 1996–2001), on a semantic query language of his own design (Metadex, from 1995). Its ideas still sit at the heart of the systems he writes today. The lesson has run through all his work since: the data structure decides what the system can tell you.
As general manager of two water and wastewater engineering firms, Simmonds & Bristow (2010–12), which ran a water-testing laboratory and a registered training organisation for plant operators, and then Sustainable Solutions International (to 2015), he watched well-funded clients with good intentions fail to change their environmental outcomes. At 57 he went back to university to find out why. His PhD (Griffith University, 2020–2025), Normative dissonance, examined what sustainability transitions theory can learn from the lived experience of sustainable urban food practitioners in South East Queensland. Alongside it runs the strategy method he has refined since 1999, which he uses with organisations, councils and community groups.
Today he writes and briefs on the question his whole career has circled: how people stay accountable for decisions made with tools they can’t see inside.
He is the author of Your Life Your Planet (2022), the editor and publisher of Steve Posselt’s river journeys Cry Me a River (2008) and Tough Is Not Enough (2019), and a long-time broadcaster on community radio.
How Ebono works
We practise what we brief. Ebono is a small organisation run with AI in defined roles. Every decision is recorded with who made it and on what basis, and every irreversible step waits for a person to sign it off. It is slower than letting the machines run, and that is the point.
A short history
Geoff founded Ebono Institute in 2005. It has been a publisher, a web studio and a sustainability research practice. From 2019 to 2020 it traded as Great Notion, reporting on Brisbane’s circular-economy and social-enterprise scene and coaching small-business owners. Today Ebono is a consulting and research practice, bringing those threads together.
Writing and books
- Articles: on LinkedIn and Geoff’s blog at geoffebbs.com
- Books: Your Life Your Planet and others, at ebono.au/books
- Your Life Your Planet: practical sustainability, at ylyp.au
The company
Ebono is the trading name of Ebono Intelligence Pty Ltd (ABN 71 699 020 392). Ebono Institute is a registered business name of Ebono Intelligence Pty Ltd.
Talk to us
Tell us about the decision. We’ll come to you anywhere in South East Queensland, or meet online.