Rick Frank is the President and founder of Dufferin Research Inc. He has a Master’s Degree from the University of Toronto and has been employed in the Market Research industry for over 25 years. A early advocate for internet data collection on the Linux platform, he started Dufferin Research in 2000 from a small operation in Dufferin County, Ontario moving to Ottawa in 2002.
His current research interests include climate and environmental topics, sustainable living and business practices, sustainability reporting standards (he supports GRI), travel and tourism, as well a technical issues related to doing business in a totally connected environment. Rick has been an environmentalist since the mid 1980's when he designed and built an R2000 home, researched materials, energy sources, recycling and sustainable land use. He has planted many thousands of trees. As well he sat on a regional waste management board planning for a new landfill site (never approved) for a year during this time. He currently lives on 26 acres of mostly forested land in rural west Ottawa in a log house. He has chainsaws and axes and knows how to use them. Rick and his family live as sustainably as possible, they manage a large garden, surrounded by chickens, ducks, turkeys, dogs and cats. He has more eggs in the fridge than would seem reasonable, but you know, chickens. Rick has been very active on social media platforms since 2007. Rick has traveled extensively (25+ countries) and recently lived for a couple of years in Europe exploring the cultural differences in life styles, food, and work place norms. He would be happy to discuss this over beer or coffee anytime. And finally he tries to keep up-to-date on internet security issues, and hacks away on his own network to improve processes, user experiences and secure data.