Parker is a serial social entrepreneur who, as a Stanford professor in the 1960s, developed on-line information retrieval software that led to US university libraries supplementing and later replacing their card catalogs with on-line searches. That project also led to the first North American website on the Internet. In the early 1970s he led an Alaska telemedicine research project that has been in continuous service since because he worked the politics, technology and economics to get telephone and television service to remote Alaska villages. Starting in the late 1970s he co-founded and managed a Silicon Valley company that was the first to use small communication satellite earth stations to create affordable data networking services in the US, China and India. After moving to Oregon in 1989 as an independent consultant he was successful in helping rural Oregon get improved telecommunication services. He is known as the “father of Oregon Health Network," a project that connected rural hospitals and clinics to major urban health centers in a high quality video and data network. Before going to graduate school he was a staff reporter for the Vancouver Sun and later became head of the public information office for the University of British Columbia.