Kathy
Sierra is the author of the very popular blog “Creating Passionate Users”.
She has been interested in the brain and artificial intelligence since her days as a game developer (Virgin, Amblin’, MGM). She is the co-creator of the bestselling Head First series (finalist for a Jolt Software Development award in 2003, and named to the Amazon Top Ten Editors Choice Computer Books for 2003 and 2004). She is also the founder of one of the largest community web sites in the world, javaranch.com. Kathy’s passions are skiing, running, her Icelandic horse, gravity, and her latest favorite thing – Dance Dance Revolution.
Cory Doctorow is an activist, a
writer, a blogger, a public speaker, and a technology person.
He is on the mastheads at magazines like Wired, Popular Science and MAKE, and is co-editor of Boing Boing, a very popular weblog about technology, culture, and politics. From 2002-2006 he was the Director of European Affairs for the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), a technology advocacy nonprofit that works to upload liberty in technology law, policy and standards. He also writes science fiction novels, with three published to date (Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, 2003, Eastern Standard Tribe, 2004, Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town, 2005), and a short story collection (A Place So Foreign and Eight More, 2003).
Clay Shirky divides his time between
consulting, teaching, and writing on the social and economic effects of
Internet technologies.
His consulting practice is focused on the rise of decentralized technologies such as peer-to-peer, web services, and wireless networks that provide alternatives to the wired client/server infrastructure that characterizes the Web. Current clients include Nokia, GBN, the Library of Congress, the Highlands Forum, the Markle Foundation, and the BBC.
In addition to his consulting work, he is an adjunct professor in NYU’s graduate Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP), where he teaches courses on the interrelated effects of social and technological network topology – how our networks shape culture and vice-versa. His current course, Social Weather, examines the cues we use to understand group dynamics in online spaces and the possible ways of improving user interaction by redesigning our social software to better reflect the emergent properties of groups.