ContactCon List of Participants

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Confirmed Participants August 2011 (please add your profile if you're definitely coming)

Confirmed Participants so far:

Michel Bauwens.png
Michel Bauwens.png

Michel Bauwens is a Belgian national working out of Thailand, focusing on a book about P2P Theory which adequately describes and explains current trends, to propose, in dialog with others, sustainable strategies for political and social change, i.e. to achieve a 'commons-based society' that can operate within a reformed market and state.

His past includes creation of two internet start-ups, the intranet/extranet company E-Com (sold to Alcatel) and the interactive marketing company Kyberco (sold to Tagora holding). He was European Mgr. of Thought Leadership for MarchFIRST, and ebusiness strategy director for Belgacom, Belgium’s leading telco (1999-2002).

He started his career as information analyst and reference librarian for the United States Information Agency (1983-2000), worked as information manager for British Petroleum (1990-1993) (where he created one of the first virtual information centers and is credited for coining the concept of cybrarian), and is former editor-in-chief of the first European digital convergence magazine, the Dutch language Wave.

twitter: @mbauwens


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Marcie_Hull.jpg

Marcie Hull is the Technology Coordinator, fine arts teacher and technology teacher for the Science Leadership Academy (SLA), in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. She received her fine arts training along with obtaining her K-12 art teaching certificate and art history minor at Temple’s, Tyler School of Art. A year spent in Italy after college gained her more experience with paint and paining techniques. Marcie returned home and began working for the School District of Philadelphia in 2000. She quickly became a Technology Teacher Leader and developed a reputation as a proponent for technology development in her school for teachers and students. She was able to finish her masters for Technology in Education at Rosemont College in a year and a half. During this time Marcie also obtained a K-12 Pennsylvania Business Technology certification. She went on to become an adjunct professor for Rosemont College, in their Technology in Education Department. Spring of 2006 Marcie was hired and became part of the founding staff of SLA. Spring of 2008 Marcie became a Keystone teacher. She currently writes a blog located at BlogSpot where she reflects upon the development of SLA and posts her thoughts and opinions about trends in education.
@ercam3


GeorgePor.jpg
GeorgePor.jpg

George Pór is an evolutionary thinker/activist and strategic learning partner to visionary leaders in business, government and civil society, in matters of communities of practice and innovation-boosting, multi-stakeholder global events and processes. He is a pioneer of virtual communities, knowledge ecology, and collective intelligence research, and a seasoned practitioner of Theory U, World Café and the Art of Hosting.

George is passionate about co-creating a world in which the full development of everyone is the goal of the whole. Work as creative self-expression is ceased to be the privilege of the few, and recognized as birthright of the multitude; a world, where all social institutions are designed to increase aliveness, joy, and prosperity for all. He is working for that by designing/advising projects that amplify collective intelligence and wisdom in organizations and social ecosystems. His methodology, the Innovation Architecture, combines social, cognitive, and electronic technologies for resilience, innovation, and regeneration.

His academic teaching and research posts included: Université de Paris, UC Berkeley, California Institute for Integral Studies, INSEAD, London School of Economics, and Universiteit van Amsterdam. George lives in London and speaks English, French, Hungarian and Russian.

blog: Blog of Collective Intelligence twitter: @Technoshaman


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ThomasBenjamin crop.jpg

Thomas Heydt-Benjamin researches security and privacy properties of ubiquitous and pervasive computing systems. Thomas brings with him to this work his prior experience in both attacks on and defenses of pervasive computing systems. In 2007 he participated in investigation of new contactless smart credit cards used in the United States, in which the team discovered serious flaws. In 2008 he and colleagues examined security and privacy properties of pacemakers and implantable cardiac defibrillators, determining that some aspects of existing designs may present dangerous security vulnerabilities. As a member of the security and cryptography team at IBM Zurich Research Laboratory from 2008 to 2009, Thomas worked with ZRL's famous anonymous credentials systems, inventing several extensions to anonymous credentials. Thomas is currently focused on novel solutions to real world security problems in resource constrained devices similar to the credit cards and pacemakers he has previously studied. Thomas started hacking and exploring computer security systems at age 6 when first exposed to assembler programming on the IBM PC. This early interest lead to formal study of computer science during high school through the Science Honors Program at Columbia University. He then earned a Bachelor of Science in computer science from Yale University, and a Master of Science in computer science from the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

twitter: @tordaemon


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Marc Cantor.JPG

Marc Canter is CEO of Broadband Mechanics, which produces People Aggregator, a social networking tool with source available (but not under an open source license). Previously, he was a founder of the company that became Macromedia.

His blog, Marc's Voice, frequently critiques other Internet luminaries and competitors, such as Mark Zuckerberg.

Canter is also a contributor to many open standards efforts and advocates for end-user controlled digital identities and content - being a co-founder of the "Identity Gang", and a co-signer of the Social Web Users' Bill of Rights.

He has consulted with global corporations including PCCW and Intel and has written on the multimedia industry, micro-content publishing and social networking.

Canter is developing software in the Greater Cleveland area and teaching classes at Case Western Reserve University

twitter: @marccanter4real


Suresh cropped.jpg
Suresh cropped.jpg

Suresh Fernando's primary current project is the development of ProM, a 'dating site' for the climate action movement. The ProM concept is described here. The current status of the project is described here. As a part of this project, Suresh and the rest of the ProM team are developing the architecture and processes for scalable open projects.

During the last several years Suresh has been focused on developing innovative solutions and strategies in both the open collaboration and social finance space. He is the co-founder of OpenKollab, a virtual think tank exploring ways of leveraging recent developments in open collaboration processes, peer-to-peer culture, technology infrastructure, interoperability protocols etc. in service of massive social and systemic change. He is also a senior consultant for Cognitive Policy Works. Suresh is a social innovator who marries innovative strategies and models by fusing a deep understanding of collaboration processes and tools, community building platforms and processes and social finance models. He is also currently providing enterprise cross-boundary collaboration services; assisting organizations to identify the appropriate technology infrastructure and processes to effectively work together across organizational boundaries.

twitter: [@sureshf]



Adam Fisk cropped.jpg
Adam Fisk cropped.jpg

Adam Fisk is a P2P bit twiddler who was the lead engineer at LimeWire before founding Little Shoot and Brave New Software. Adam is continuing to work on LittleShoot as well as Brave New Software's first project, the P2P censorship circumvention tool "Lantern." Lantern uses the LittleShoot P2P platform, a decentralized, encrypted, open source and standards-based platform for an Internet with fewer points of control.





twitter: @adamfisk



Sebastiano Scrofina
Sebastiano Scrofina

Inventor of Ecoroma, Italy's first alternative currency, 9 years experience in studying complementary and alternative currency systems. Self-taught programmer, he worked for established software companies and startups. Dedicated his own life to fix the debt-money issue. Considered one of the biggest (and youngest) alternative currency experts in Italy. He's now the cofounder with Leonardo Dario Perna of Kakigarden, that aims to be first p2p, efficient, resilient, economic system for a post-scarcity age.




twitter: @riggasconi quora: Sebastiano Scrofina



Juraj Bednar
Juraj Bednar

does not like to be described in a paragraph, but he is an entrepreneur since he was 18 and is interested in changing the world for the better, freedom, microworlds and the different around us, artificial intelligence (which he studied at the university), esp. bridging bio and AI worlds in fields like rule based systems (I believe that's how DNA works) and evolution. Recent more specific interests are Bitcoin (peer to peer currency), bridging virtual and physical spaces and a hackerspace Progressbar he co-founded in Bratislava. He also wrote two books and his working on his third, all of them unreadable to all but a small club of Slovak-speaking humanoids.

I am attending Contact to meet people. I am a part of kyberia.sk, an active 'underground' community which was originally inspired by a book written by a well known Contact conference organizer :). For me, I expect inspiring people and I hope I can contribute something. If you happen to be in New York before conference, I would love to meet before, one day is not enough!

twitter: @jurbed soup: jooray.soup.io



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Paul b Hartzog.JPG

Paul B. Hartzog, one of the coiners of the word "panarchy," is an independent scholar and hacker, and has taught at the University of Michigan's School of Information.

Cofounder of The Future Forward Institute, and recipient of an NSF IGERT to study complex systems, he has a Masters in Globalization and Environmental Politics from the University of Utah, and a Masters in Political Theory from the University of Michigan.

His work on panarchy hybridizes political philosophy/economy, network culture, complex systems, and critical social theory. His interests include Complexity Theory, Cooperation, International Relations, Environmental Politics, Information Society and Economy, Information Technologies, Sustainable Development, Network Culture, and Ethics.

twitter: @PaulBHartzog


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Scott Heiferman.JPG

Scott Heiferman is CEO and a co-founder of Meetup, a service that helps people use the internet to organize local community groups with local offline meetings. Meetup originally gained notoriety as the grassroots backbone of the Howard Dean presidential campaign in 2004.

As of April 2008, five million people have registered on Meetup. Meetup's investors include eBay, Omidyar Network, Draper Fisher Jurvetson, Esther Dyson, and others.

Heiferman also co-founded Fotolog and i-traffic.

Prior to founding i-traffic, Heiferman was employed by Sony with the title "Interactive Marketing Frontiersman." In 2005, Scott received the Jane Addams Award from the National Conference on Citizenship.

In 2004 M.I.T. Technology Review awarded Scott "Innovator of the Year" for his work with Meetup. He graduated from The University of Iowa in 1994 and has posted a photo on his personal Fotolog for every day since 2001.

twitter: @heif


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AaronHuslage crop.jpg

Aaron Huslage has been hacking on Internet technologies since 1987, and been a thought leader in the Internet industry since 1993. His greatest talent lies in communicating highly technical information to those who aren’t highly technical.

He constantly researches new and emerging technologies and the latest system management techniques with an emphasis on very large-scale, low-cost, simple mobile, wireless and public interest communications. Aaron is a member of the organizing committee for O’Reilly’s Emerging Telephony Conference. He is intimately familiar with Sun Microsystems offerings, and heavily committed to the concept of Open Everything including OpenBTS.

blog [2]

twitter [3]





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Steven Johnson.JPG

Steve Johnson is an expert on product management in technology products, using an outside-in, market-driven approach that creates successful products that people want to buy.

Author, Where Good Ideas Come From

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blog: stevenberlinjohnson.com

twitter: @stevenbjohnson

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Venessa Miemis2.jpg
Venessa Miemis2.jpg

Venessa Miemis is a futurist and digital ethnographer, researching the impacts of social technologies on society and culture and designing systems to facilitate innovation and the evolution of consciousness.

She earned a Masters in Media Studies at the New School in NYC.

She is the founder and editor of Emergent by Design, and a principal organizer with Doug Rushkoff of the CONTACT conference.

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blog: Emergent by Design

twitter: @venessamiemis

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Richard Metzger.JPG

Richard Metzger (born October 25, 1965 in Wheeling, West Virginia) is a television host and author.

He was the host of the TV show Disinformation (United Kingdom Channel 4, 2000-01), The Disinformation Company and its website, Disinfo.com.

He is currently the host of the online talk show Dangerous Minds.

He is the author of two books, Disinformation: The Interviews (2002) which feature unedited interviews with several of the characters and thinkers who were guests on the series and Book of Lies: The Disinformation Guide To Magick & The Occult (2004) an anthology of occult essays.

twitter: @RichardMetzger





Barbara.jpg
Barbara.jpg

Barbara Pantuso is the co-founder of Hey, Neighbor! which brings neighbors together for collaboration and trusted connections. It uses the power of proximity and P2P (or neighbor-to-neighbor, N2N) interactions to meet local needs and strengthen communities.

Barbara has worked in the creative businesses of pastries, restaurants, interactive design, and product design. Most recently at Frog Design, she led the team that developed a hugely successful next-generation jukebox. Prior to that, Barbara built two successful interactive agencies.

She leads the Women Entrepreneurs Festival Meetup group in NYC and is a member of 85 Broads and Astia.

twitter: @barbarapantuso





Gen Castle.JPG
Gen Castle.JPG

Genesis Breyer P-Orridge (born Neil Andrew Megson 22 February 1950) is an English singer-songwriter, musician, writer and artist.

His early confrontational performance work in COUM Transmissions in the late 1960s and early 1970s along with the industrial band Throbbing Gristle, which dealt with subjects such as prostitution, pornography, serial killers, occultism and his own exploration of gender issues, generated controversy.

Later musical work with Psychic TV received wider exposure, including some chart-topping singles.

P-Orridge is credited on over 200 releases.



Eli Pariser.jpg
Eli Pariser.jpg

Eli Pariser (born December 17, 1980 in Lincolnville, Maine) is the former Executive Director of MoveOn.org, and the organization's current Board President.

Pariser's rise to prominence as a political activist began when he and college student David H. Pickering launched an online petition calling for a nonmilitary response to the attacks of September 11th. (At the time, he was working as a program assistant for the national nonprofit More Than Money.)

In less than a month, half a million people had signed the petition and in November of that year, Moveon.org founders Wes Boyd and Joan Blades asked Pariser to join their organization.

During the 2004 US Presidential Election, Pariser co-created the Bush in 30 Seconds ad contest and raised over $30 million from small donors to run ads and back Democratic and progressive candidates.

twitter: @elipariser





Mark Pesce crop.JPG
Mark Pesce crop.JPG

Mark Pesce is an inventor, author and educator, best known for work that fused the World Wide Web with real-time 3D computer graphics; the result, known as VRML (for Virtual Reality Modeling Language) has become an international standard.

The author of numerous articles on science, technology, media and the arts, Pesce has also written five books, including The Playful World: How Technology is Transforming Our Imagination (Random House, 2000) which presented a roadmap of key 21st century technologies.

Pesce contends we are entering an ‘era of hyperdistribution’ that will radically change our media ecosystem. Central to this shift is the take-up of p2p filesharing software like BitTorrent that provides the first truly efficient digital media distribution platform based on the principles of swarming.

More recently Pesce has discussed the importance of articulated social networks as a means to socially filter increasing informational pressure and sort quality material based on recommendations from trusted sources.

twitter: @mpesce


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Andrew Rasiej.JPG

Andrew Rasiej is a futurist, social entrepreneur, and Founder of Personal Democracy Forum, an annual conference and website about the intersection of politics and technology.

He is also the co-Founder of techPresident.com, an award winning blog that covers how the Obama administration is using the web, and how technology is empowering new levels of citizen engagement throughout the United States.

He is also the Founder a not for profit organization called MOUSE.org focused on 21st century public education, Co-Founder of Mideastwire.com, which translates Arabic and Farsi news and opinion pieces into English, and serves as Senior Technology Advisor to the Sunlight Foundation a Washington DC focused on using technology to help make government more transparent.

He is also the Chairman of the NY Tech Meetup, a 15,000 member organization of technologists, venture funders, marketers in New York City.

twitter: @rasiej



Sam rose crop.jpg
Sam rose crop.jpg

Samuel Rose founded a commons-based business model consultancy that builds theory and practice in the open, helping communities and social enterprises create and usefully deploy open source software, open licensed hardware, and open education resources.

He is interested in effective knowledge synthesis, and in exploring and developing the concepts of open knowledge, open design, and open business.

He is involved in a growing list of blogs, wikis, social software experiments and developings, including CoummunityWiki, Meatball Wiki, Cooperation Commons Weblog, Smartmobs Weblog. Sam Rose is also a partner and principle technologist in http://hollymeadcapital.com

Past clients have included Howard Rheingold, MacArthur Foundation, MIT Press, Stanford University, USDA, David Korten and People Centered Development Forum, and the Cooperation Commons and Social Media Classroom community.

twitter: @SamRose




Rachel Rosenfelt.JPG
Rachel Rosenfelt.JPG

Rachel Rosenfelt is the founder and Editor-in-Chief of The New Inquiry.

She is also a new media and marketing consultant based in New York. Prior to The New Inquiry she worked at the World Wide Workshop Foundation, rising to Program Manager.

She holds her degree from Barnard College in the field of Women’s Studies, where online activism and organization for women’s issues sparked her interest in the transformational power of new media.

twitter: @rachelrosenfelt





Doug Rushkoff.JPG
Doug Rushkoff.JPG

Douglas Rushkoff is an American media theorist, writer, columnist, lecturer, graphic novelist and documentarian.

He is best known for his association with the early cyberpunk culture, and his advocacy of open source solutions to social problems.

Rushkoff is most frequently regarded as a media theorist, and known for coining terms and concepts including viral media (or media virus), digital native, and social currency.

He has written ten books on media, technology, and culture. He wrote the first syndicated column on cyberculture for The New York Times Syndicate, as well as regular columns for The Guardian of London, Arthur, Discover and the online magazines Daily Beast,[4] TheFeature.com and meeting industry magazine One+.

Rushkoff currently teaches in the Media Studies department at The New School University in Manhattan.

twitter: @rushkoff



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Micah Sifry.JPG

Micah Sifry is a co-founder and editor of the Personal Democracy Forum, a daily website and annual conference on how technology is changing politics.

He is also the editor of PdF’s new group blog TechPresident, which focuses on how the campaigns are using the web and how the web is using them. Along with his partner Andrew Rasiej, he consults on how political organizations, campaigns, non-profits and media entities can adapt to and thrive in a networked world.

He is the author or editor of four books, the most recent being Is That a Politician in Your Pocket? (John Wiley & Sons, 2004), written with Nancy Watzman.

He is also an adjunct professor at the Political Science Department of the City University of New York/Graduate Center, where he teaches a course called “Writing Politics.”

twitter: @Mlsif





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Nikos-NYC1.jpg

Nikos Salingaros is Professor of Mathematics at the University of Texas at San Antonio, and is an innovative urbanist and philosopher. The author of several books on urbanism and architectural theory, he is one of the pioneers who are defining "P2P Urbanism" (a free online book). Along with a group of associates, he is creating a bottom-up approach to architecture and urban design based upon shared evidence-based rules, opposing mysticism and the myth of false scarcity of the "architect as creative genius".

His work on the "networked city" was incorporated into the "New Charter of Athens" (European Council of Town Planners, 2003). He collaborated with Christopher Alexander in editing the four-volume "The Nature of Order" and has made fundamental contributions to using Patterns in design. His career began in mathematical physics, working on field theory and thermonuclear fusion before turning his attention to architecture and urbanism. He is a member and on the Committee of Honor of INTBAU, and was voted 11th among the most important urbanists of all time in a 2009 Planetizen poll.

Trying to explain society's head-long rush towards extinction requires a novel understanding of thought manipulation and media collusion in spreading unhealthy image-based architectural and urban typologies. He introduced the meme explanation for the persistence of anti-patterns in architecture and urbanism, touching upon the controversial relationship between architectural memes, cult mentality, and substitute religions.

HOME: [4]





Dave Winer.JPG
Dave Winer.JPG

Dave Winer in Brooklyn, New York City) is an American software developer, entrepreneur and writer in New York City.

Winer is noted for his contributions to outliners, scripting, content management, and web services, as well as blogging and podcasting.

He is the founder of the software companies Living Videotext and Userland Software, a former contributing editor for the Web magazine HotWired, the author of the Scripting News weblog, a former research fellow at Harvard Law School, and current visiting scholar at New York University's Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute.

twitter: @davewiner





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Nathan Solomon co-founded superfluid with Branimir Vasilic. This initiative grows from their shared obsession with getting shit done, and was conceived to help humans build and coordinate socially-enabled teams for execution of the projects that matter to them, and sometimes to others, without recourse to $. In addition to bringing together the broader superfluid membership, this system facilitates existing communities forming discrete areas within superfluid.

Nathan created the first digital distribution of AAA game titles, the first wireless in-store distribution of games in the US, has held roles with national ad agencies as Chief Technologist and Executive Producer, and was a cinematography fellow of the American Film Instute. Thoughout his career, he has worked to provide coherent contexts empowering creative and technical execution. His hobby is VeloBase.org

twitter: @thesuperfluid quora: [5]




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Mickki_Langston_2011.jpg

Recognizing the need to reclaim our power to create community wealth, Mickki Langston co-founded the Mile High Business Alliance in 2007. Currently serving as Executive Director, Mickki combines her passion for social and environmental sustainability with her experience as a small business owner and entrepreneur. Her work with MHBA focuses on organizing local business owners to build a more connected, resilient and healthy economy. The Mile High Business Alliance is the largest business organization in Denver focused on the local economy and produces lots of innovative, meaningful stuff.

Mickki is also a doula, gardener and current fellow in the BoldLeaders Professional Fellows in Food Security program, which connects East African and American fellows to build more resilient local food systems. You'll find her puttering around her backyard garden in Denver or discussing what makes for a real, healthy economy on MHBA's youtube channel.  

twitter: @mickki


Steven D. BREWER
Steven D. BREWER

Steven Brewer is the Director of the Biology Computer Resource Center at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where he is a consultant to faculty on the implementation of technology in support of education. He advocates for technology that empowers students to engage in authentic, collaborative, learner-centered activity that applies science in the real world. BREWER is equal parts scientist, technologist, and educator: whether in the field catching mongooses or tardigrades; with 20 terminal windows open hacking php in a drupal module; or exhorting students to take control of their own education and embrace transformation. He is also is a fluent speaker and teacher of the Esperanto language and a published author of essays, fiction, and haiku in Esperanto.

twitter: @limako blog: blog





Rob Peters
Rob Peters

Rob Peters is a recognized thought leader, speaker and writer, for the capture, measurement and utilization of Relationship Capital (“RC”). He has played a significant role in the creation of industry standards and best practices for the capture of RC. Rob was co-chair of the DePaul University School of Digital Media's I.T. Executive Leadership Lab from 2002 through 2006. He was certified by the Relationship Networking Industry Association[6] in January 2010. Rob has been a trusted resource with 25 years of relationship management experience at Computer Sciences Corporation (CSC), Capgemini Financial Services, Headstrong, Keane, Romac International and IBM. Rob’s experience resulted in a passion: helping leaders and companies build, maintain, and validate their online reputations. He founded Standard of Trust in 2010 to deliver on this passion. Relationship Capital (RC) is a score based on promises made and kept by people and enterprises, and on people's opinions and feelings concerning those that make the promises. The score is not made public automatically. Owners decide who can see their RC accounts, and how much they can see. Standard of Trust helps clients capture RC and apply it to leverage their good reputations online.

twitter: @standardoftrust blog: [7]



Isaac Wilder
Isaac Wilder

Isaac Wilder founded the Free Network Movement in September 2010. Since that time, he has been an active participant in the global conversation regarding next network initiatives. In his role as leader of the FNM, Isaac served as lead architect of a public mesh network called grinnellMIND, currently serving the town of Grinnell, IA. After finishing his second year at Grinnell College in May of 2011, Isaac plans to leave school and pursue free network advocacy full-time. He is also a developer and contributor to the Diaspora project.

As part of the struggle for network freedom, Isaac is interested in sustainable agriculture, freeganism, alternative currencies, and living in domes. He believes very strongly in the potential of a free network to topple entrenched civilizational hierarchies of power.


The Sarapis Foundation believes that access to technology is a human right and that the only way we can secure this right is by creating an entire ecosystem of free/libre/opensource (FLO) technologies people can use to create wealth and wellness for themselves and their communities.

We're active in the Northeastern, US - especially NYC and North Eastern Pennsylvania. If you work on FLO projects and need food, shelter and some friends in the NYC area, please reach out to thefolks[at]sarapisfoundation.org.











The Doctor (less formally known as Bryce) was loomed with a 1200bps modem in one hand and a soldering iron in the other. Life started getting interesting when he gave a presentation in defense of Kevin Mitnick for a high school english class, and somehow wound up explaining what PGP was, how it worked, and why it was important. Through his career he's been an IT consultant, a security analyst, a system administrator, a VoIP engineer, a security contractor, a penetration tester, a security researcher, and a professional head scratcher and "Hmm.. that's interesting.."'er. In his spare time the Doctor has taught seminars on practical privacy and anonymity techniques, Tor, wireless security, penetration testing, information security, and open source intelligence gathering.

The Doctor is one of the developers of Project Byzantium, a rapidly deployable, improvisable mesh network which people can use to communicate and collaborate during times when the telecommunication infrastructure is unavailable or has been compromised. Project Byzantium aims to help solve the Egypt Problem (telecommunications are unavailable or heavily filtered, as in the case of Egypt in January 2011) as well as the Katrina Problem (a natural disaster such as a hurricane or blizzard knocks out large portions of the infrastructure). Byzantium will implement a mesh network which requires minimal effort to configure which any wireless enabled device can make use of. Byzantium nodes are based upon a F/OSS software stack that turns them into mesh routers which are also capable of making collaboration services available (including but not limited to microblogs, wikis, chat servers, streaming media servers, and gateways to the Internet in the event that not all connectivity is knocked out), along with the necessary support software to make deployment as fast and simple as possible (including DHCP, DNS, and service announcement and cateloging). Initially, Byzantium will be implemented as a live distribution of Linux; later, easily installable and mirrorable metapackages will be made available for a number of Linux distributions. Full documentation for setting up and configuring a Byzantium node will be freely published, as will step-by-step instructions for recommended improvised communications devices. Development sprints are held monthly at HacDC.

JSB.jpeg
JSB.jpeg





Jonathan Salem Baskin - Histories of Social Media

Jonathan is a marketer working to develop a new model for brands in the age of P2P conversation. He has led communications for Nissan, Limited Brands, and Blockbuster, and served on the executive marketing committee Apple's launch of the first iMac. Jonathan has published three books (the fourth, on truth in marketing, is scheduled for release in the spring of 2012), writes on leadership for Advertising Age, and blogs about marketing at Dim Bulb (http://www.dimbulb.net) and historical examples of social experience at Histories of Social Media.

He is a senior fellow at the Society for New Communications Research, a member of the Advisory Board at Social Media Today, and was recently named a Senior Scholar at the Smithsonian National Museum of American History.



Nancy.jpg
Nancy.jpg

Nancy B. Roof, PhD Kosmos Journal Twitter: KosmosJournal Nancy Roof, Ph.D. is the founder of the award-winning Kosmos Journal: The Journal for Global Citizens Creating Planetary Civilization and World Community, which is based on evolving interior development and cultural values as they impact globalization and world community. Kosmos Associates, Inc. is also actively involved in the founding of the Global Commons movement with James B. Quilligan of the Global Commons Trust. Nancy won the 2009 Images and Voices of Hope award for journalism as a tool to inform, inspire and engage individual and collective participation in a global shift to higher-level thinking. In 2004, Kosmos was nominated by Utne for excellence. Her testimony on the human dimension of the United Nations was distributed to the US President and Congress. As a founder of Transpersonal Psychology (late 70s), she served as a spiritual guide to individuals for 20 years. In the late 80s, she began to define the field of global transformation at the United Nations, where she successfully lobbied for elevated global standards in international treaties and co-founded the Values Caucus (1994) and the Spiritual Caucus (2000). Working with 78 international organizations in war zones for over two years, she recognized the traumatic effect of war, not only on military personnel, but on their families, communities and service providers. She then designed the first global training programs and workbook on secondary traumatic stress, implemented initially during the Balkan wars and now used internationally. She is a founding member of the Global Commons Initiative, World Wisdom Council, Creating the New Civilization Initiative, 2020 Climate Leadership Campaign, WorldShift 2012 (Ervin Laszlo), Global Alliance for Transformational Entertainment, a Board member of Integral Review and Living Earth TV and a speaker at Mikhail Gorbachev's World Political Forum.





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TiberiusB.jpg

Tiberius Brastaviceanu

Founder of Multitude Project and of SENSORICA (the open enterprise)

Co-founder of Sensorica. Architect of open, decentralized, and self organizing value networks (See Value Network page). Building new economical institutions adapted for the emerging world. Working on the infrastructure of the new economy. Providing alternative economical solutions for individuals to break free form the system.

Google Profile

@TiberiusB

Facebook

LinkedIn





Richard Smith

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IMG 5341.JPG

Director of the Masters of Digital Media program at Vancouver's Great Northern Way Campus (a joint venture of four universities: UBC, SFU, Emily Carr, and BCIT), Richard Smith has a long-standing interest issues relating to technology and society, particularly surveillance in public spaces and use of internet technologies to enable more effective participation by rural and remote communities. His twitter handle is @smith, and he is also a member of Google+ and Facebook.











Greg Belvedere

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Greg_Belvedere_Contact.jpg

Greg Belvedere is a librarian, information architect, and writer based in Brooklyn. By day he works at a branch of the Brooklyn Public Library where he has served on the library's reference committee and worked to promote the library's electronic resources. He has recently started working as a freelance information architect in his off hours.

He plans to present an idea for p2p ebook lending software at Contact. The software will make ebooks easy to share, without cheating authors and enraging publishers. Yet, it will do this without using the highly proprietary files favored by most device makers.

Greg writes about libraries, media, technology, culture, religion, and politics at Never Speak in Absolutes







I'm president of Openworld, a nonprofit group whose founders have worked on grassroots alternatives to zero-sum politics in 50+ countries. Areas of main current project interest/activity: virtual games for actual change, challenge offers by donors to spread local resilience, "crowdmoves" to intentional communities, microscholarship initiatives to spread skills in struggling areas, students as co-owners of entrepreneurial schools, and personal currencies to fund re-skilling. I'm considering a pilot launch of personal currencies using Augmented Reality on cell phones, and am active in Dayton, Virginia nonprofit groups to improve the local business climate and attract creative ventures to the area. Earlier in my career, I was publisher and managing editor of Reason magazine, and cofounder of the Local Government Center, springboard for Reason Foundation's privatization practice. I'm a graduate of Harvard University and a past Visiting Fellow of the Lehrman Institute, where I researched ways that communities can enable neighborhood associations to take on municipal service responsibilities. I love reading, drawing/architectural design, hiking, flying, square foot gardening, and archery. My Twitter feeds are at @openworld and @peerlearning.





Cameron_cundiff.jpg
Cameron_cundiff.jpg

Cameron Cundiff

I like to make things, usually in the form of web and mobile applications. I'm coming to Contact seeking to learn ways to make small communities more resilient to infrastructure disruptions. In particular, I'm interested in commerce, food production, and communications networks at a neighborhood level.

In the past I cofounded and built BeeMe, a loyalty punchcard for mobile devices, specifically tailored for small businesses.

Twitter: @ckundo



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KSD-0238hres.jpeg

Karen Schulman Dupuis
Cultivator of Relationships. Community Engager & Builder. Professional Elephant Hunter. Intrapreneur. Social Media Strategist. Renaissance woman. Lover of all things creative, expressive and engaging. It's all about the dialogue, which is why I love building events & opportunities in my hometown of Stratford, Ontario to support that dialogue (Ignite, TEDx, SocialMediaBreakfasts). I've always been a geek of the curious kind which has most recently translated into my love, embrace and work in social media. I have worked in ICT for the last 12 years in sales, education, operations and program management and am currently a Business Consultant with a national telecommunications carrier in Canada.
About me
Twitter








Keenan.jpg
Keenan.jpg

Keenan Dakota - Village Votes
Keenan is developing Village Votes, a web site where people can propose policy, edit policy, and vote on their favorite policies. The goal of this site is to improve governance by bringing the best minds to the development of policy and to speed up the rate at which policy gets adopted and implemented. Keenan believes in Isocracy, or government by equally empowered people. He has lived for the past 28 years in Twin Oaks, a worker-owned cooperative that runs several successful businesses and is run along the principles of Isocracy. Twin Oaks has developed a model of Isocratic governance that allows for all members to set a yearly budget, to expand businesses, to draft policy and to rotate positions of leadership. For over 44 years Twin Oaks has grown and thrived without developing a core of leaders or any sort of power elite by expecting responsibility and empowerment from every member (including children!).



Mark.png
Mark.png

Twitter: @mbelinsky Mark is the Co-Founder and President of Digital Democracy, a non-profit empowering marginalized groups through innovative technology solutions. His family fled the Soviet Union as refugees and their experience informs and inspires his work training grassroots groups around the world to in protecting their human rights. Mark has lectured at Harvard, Columbia, NYU and presented at conferences worldwide on the use of social media and technology to connect local voices and address crisis. He is also a founder of New Words Media, a strategic media firm based in New York and a founder and board-member of Bem, a youth action center in Armenia that uses art and technology to support emerging civil society. He has produced media strategies and directed documentary films in the post-Soviet, USA and Asia.





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Flemwhite5 200x185.png

Flemming, aka Ming, was the founder of the New Civilization Network, an early (1995) social network of world changers.
Web developer, coach, communicator. Writes about philosophical and futuristic topics. Seems to be pretty good at bringing big picture complex stuff down to earth. Evolutionary agent, helping collective intelligence emerge. Interests: collaborative tools, new currencies, self-organization, freedom.
Blog: Ming the Mechanic
Google+: http://gplus.to/ming
Twitter: http://twitter.com/ffunch






Man meets hexagon. Hexagon wins.

New economy cartographer, social entrepreneur, digital artist, innovation junkie
Jay is the co-founder of The Hub Seattle, a soon-to-be coworking, event space and community of social innovators. Part of the global network of Hubs:
He co-founded a media project on the new economy called Symbionomics with Alan Rosenblith (director of The Money Fix).
He has been a part of The Metacurrency Project since 2009.
He is starting an MBA in whole-systems sustainability at Bainbridge Graduate Institute and is excited to pollinate ideas and people from Contact into the BGI curriculum.
Blog
Google+
Twitter
Art & Design Portfolio





Ellen_Dudley.png
Ellen_Dudley.png

I'm passionate about creating high definition experiences, like conversations, between people so we don't end up like the people on Wall-E.

Bio:
Ellen is on a mission to live an interesting life. Initially pursuing a career in Biomedical Engineering, she left her job in 2009 to design and organize events that would spark amazing connections between people. She is a strategic thinker and a self taught coder and designer and has spoken about her passion for emotional design, and the re-engineering of face-to-face interactions using social gaming at conferences from Boston to Berlin.

She is the co-founder of CrowdScanner, an Irish startup based in New York, experimenting with technology to stimulate discussions between people in gatherings. Their psychological mobile games and visual design installations, like PeopleHunt, provoke people to hunt for what they have in common with others, and start conversations in fun and interactive ways.

Twitter: meetforeal






Andrew Hazlett

I want to learn more about the power of networked individuals to shape our society and culture.

Bio:
Andrew Hazlett is Innovation Community Manager at the Greater Baltimore Technology Council. His job is to work as a catalyst and bridge-builder within and around Baltimore’s bustling scene of start-ups, developers, designers, social entrepreneurs, cultural connectors, and space makers.

A writer and online media maker, Andrew co-founded the CreateBaltimore artists-and-techies unconference. He is also currently the producer of the TummelVision podcast. Before joining the GBTC, Andrew worked in government, non-profits, publishing, and journalism. He was a writer and researcher for the NewsTrust Baltimore project, and served for seven years as a senior Bush administration appointee at the National Endowment for the Humanities. Previously, Andrew directed the book program at the Manhattan Institute in New York, NY.

Twitter: BmoreNexus & AndrewHazlett
Work Blog: Baltimore Nexus
Personal: AndrewHazlett.com
Other: Google+ | Plancast






Monika Hardy

monika gets to work with a district InnovationLab in Loveland, Colorado, where students have crafted, and just completed year one, of a four-year plan of disruption to redefine school. Based on findings that learning at its best is voluntary, per passion/choice, and self-directed, they are working towards "community as school." They are experimenting with personalization both within and outside the system, a connected adjacency , so that all benefit. website: htttp://labconnections.blogspot.com twitter: @monk51295











Hans Schoenburg

Hans Schoenburg is the co-founder of GiftFlow.org, a non-profit online gift economy. His curiosity extends to all efforts to foster economic cooperation using the web instead of money. He is a big fan of circular reciprocity based systems, such as CouchSurfing.com but loves to learn about currency based approaches as well.

He also co-founded the New Haven Free Store. A short-lived but wildly popular experiment in community organizing and the redistribution of goods.
GiftFlow
New Haven Free Store
@hschoenburg






Samer Hassan

Samer Hassan is a Spanish/Lebanese activist, researcher and university lecturer based in Beirut and Madrid.

He is the co-founder of Comunes, a nonprofit dedicated to enhancing the Commons by providing free/libre web-tools and resources to collectives and activists. Ultimately, Comunes attempts to facilitate the work of social movements by addressing their needs of connection and collaboration. It is an umbrella for several web-tools it has launched, such as Kune and Move Commons. Kune is a decentralized collaborative platform and social network for collectives. It allows real-time collaborative edition of contents, publishing in the web, and social network communication... everything from a free culture approach and focusing on usability for non-techies. Move Commons is a simple web-tool for initiatives and organizations to declare the core principles they are committed to. It uses the semantic web to facilitate discovery of alternatives, connection of groups, reaching critical mass and encouragement of certain principles.

As a researcher, he has a background in Computer Science and Social Sciences, and he is specialized in Artificial Intelligence, Social Simulation and Social Networks. He is currently based in the American University of Science & Technology (Lebanon) and the Universidad Complutense de Madrid (Spain).

Personal Twitter Comunes Twitter




Eric Harris-Braun

Eric Harris-Braun designs and builds software infrastructure for the new economy. He is a co-founder of the MetaCurrency project, which is creating a platform for communities of all scales to design and deploy their own currencies. He works closely with The Collective Intelligence Research Institute a research and development group dedicated to understanding and developing new forms of collective intelligence, where he is the lead developer of the Flowplace. He is a board member at the New Economics Institute, is the co-founder of Glass Bead Software, a provider of peer-to-peer networking applications, and of Harris-Braun Enterprises, a free-lance software development shop, which has created, among other things, complex data-collection web-sites for the health-care industry, an Android application for catch-monitoring for the fishing industry, and which built and operates the Online Writers Workshop. In 1994, he published the Internet Directory, with Fawcett Columbine which sold over 100,000 copies, and which went on to a second edition in 1996 before being made obsolete by Google. Eric received a B.S. in Computer Science from Yale University.  Currently he lives in rural New York where he is part of a Quaker Intentional community, plays with his two boys, tends a vineyard and is building a straw-bale house.
blog | MetaCurrency | @zippy314

Arthur Brock

Arthur Brock builds targeted currencies that are at the core of the emerging post-industrial economy. He has created more than a hundred designs for multi-currency systems and his software company has built and deployed dozens of those systems.

Initially, Arthur put his degree in Artificial Intelligence to use at GM, Chrysler & Hughes, but he soon realized he was committed to bringing intelligence to social architectures rather than to computers. He started student-run schools and award-winning, employee-run businesses and discovered that the self-managing feedback loops needed to operate these types of organizations were built on particular patterns of incentives and measurement. He began to unlock the social DNA by which groups operate and uncover the critical role of currencies as carriers of that social DNA.

Arthur’s designs include currency systems for: collaborative scientific research, sustainable fishery management, corporate compensation plans, employee stock options, community-based economic development, business barter and exchange, triple-bottom-line trade credits, open source software development, customer loyalty programs, water rights, recirculating gift certificates, community service, employee performance management, arts & culture development, efficient resource sharing & management, and community & environmental impact assessment.
blog | MetaCurrency | @ artbrock



Scott Nelson

Scott Nelson is a technology strategist specializing in the implementation of open source and p2p technology for non-profits and progressive initiatives. His present obsessions include Bitcoin, a p2p virtual currency, and the e-democracy initiative, PartyX, for which he is technology development lead.


blog | profile | Party X | @obinine












Orion Trist

BIO: Orion is an activist who has led peace marches in Marin County, California, he loves to gather community into creative spaces and mobilize them to work for positive cultural change. Orion is a proponent of alternative energies like biofuels and waste vegetable oil conversions, with in-depth knowledge of sustainability issues. He is a permaculturist and sits on the board of directors for the Oakland food justice non-profit Planting Justice. He holds a bachelors degree in Environmental Studies and Geography from the University of Oregon, in Eugene. He is an advocate for Bioregionalism; sustainability based on stewardship of the land and keeping it local. In this vein of minimizing his carbon footprint, he rides his bike to work @eraser1320













Leander Bindewald

Leander Bindewald is an independent co-nsultant (or co-something) on complementary currency with Time For the World in Madison-WI, The Hub Brussels in Belgium, Coinstatt in Germany, co-host of Fairventure 2012, writing for the Community Currency Magazine, looking forward to meet you in NYC... @CriteriCal









Daniel Sieradski

I am a cause media entrepreneur with over a decade's experience in social innovation and cause marketing. I am known best for my work in the Jewish communal sector, employing disruptive technologies to shift the balance of power away from oligarchic establishment Jewish institutions towards autonomous Jewish individuals and communities.

I am presently Director of the Self Agency, a jack-of-all-trades sole proprietorship specializing in digital media and cause marketing; Director of Jew It Yourself, an organization which develops content and technologies that enhance self-directed Jewish learning, living and practice; Director of Open Source Judaism, an advocacy organization that promotes the open exchange and collaborative development of Jewish ideas, information technology and new media resources that was founded originally by Douglas Rushkoff; Director of the NYC Jewish Tech Meetup, a monthly gathering of Jewish technology professionals; and Director of Digital Strategy for Repair the World, an organization that promotes service and volunteering as a Jewish value.

I am also the founder and former publisher of Jewschool.com, a pioneering Jewish issues weblog, now in its 10th year of publication. I was the co-creator, with Douglas Rushkoff, of OpenSourceHaggadah.com, a website which allows users to create their own Passover haggadah by assembling texts from throughout the spectrum of Jewish belief. And I am the creator of ShulShopper.com, which is essentially Yelp for synagogues and independent Jewish congregations.

I have been called "a major figure of the Jewish Internet world and a cultural trailblazer" by the Jewish Daily Forward and "an innovator in Jewish new media" by Editor & Publisher. I was numbered among the 2010 "Forward 50" and the New York Jewish Week's inaugural "36 Under 36."

I have also webmastered for Douglas Rushkoff, R.U. Sirius, Genesis P-Orridge, and the High Times Cannabis Cup Reggae All-Star Band, in addition to working on a several years-long research project about the relationship between Jews and entheogens.

Homepage: danielsieradski.com | Twitter: @mobius1ski | Flickr: jewschool


Stephanie Rearick

Based in Madison, Wisconsin, Stephanie Rearick is a musician, small business co-owner (Mother Fool's Coffeehouse), founder and Director of Dane County TimeBank and Project Coordinator of Time For the World. She's currently working on finding lots of collaborators to restructure our economy so we can live good lives doing the work we're passionate about. She's doing this through promoting timebanking and other kinds of mutual credit and is on the road doing both music and timebanking stuff, and working on building bridges between the two – creative pursuits and fair, inclusive, do-it-yourself economies (which themselves are creative pursuits, of course).
It's a fun job but someone's gotta do it..

twitter: @stephanierearic





Ville Miettinen

Wili is a serial entrepreneur and investor from Finland. The last couple of years he's been particularly interested in crowdsourcing, cloud labor, and human computation -- disruptive technologies that are transforming the way people work all over the world.

A hacker at heart, Wili has spent way too many years banging out code in assembler, C, and other languages used by real cowboys. He's got a long background in computer graphics, and he was one of the founders of Hybrid Graphics, a pioneer in real-time 3D graphics technologies. Hybrid created some of the very first commercial 3D engines back in mid-90's, and licensed them to games studios. Later on, Hybrid created the first implementations of OpenGL ES, OpenVG, JSR-184 and other mobile graphics standards, and licensed them to hundreds of millions of mobile phones. Hybrid was acquired by NVIDIA (http://www.nvidia.com) in 2006. Some parts of Hybrid were spun off and exist nowadays as Fake Graphics - the leading CGI house in Finland, and Umbra Software - a middleware company creating products for the games industry.

Wili is the CEO and founder of Microtask, a company commercializing technology for distributing digital labor. He is also a partner at Lots, a Nordic boutique VC and accelerator in the field of media technology. Wili is also an investor and a board member in several high-tech, social media, and games companies in Finland and Silicon Valley. He also coaches startups at Aalto Venture Garage and the early-stage venture fund HackFwd.

In his free time, Wili travels around the planet (so far he has visited 70 countries on all seven continents), and has become a semi-professional photographer. Twitter







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Curtis.jpg

Curtis is a hacker revolutionary dilettante. A college dropout turned commodities trader turned serial entrepreneur, he is never satisfied with the status quo. And always looking for ways to improve. His current interest is working on the worlds first Social Cloud Operating System.

Curtis likes people, working with them, helping them, playing with them, laughing with them, drinking good wine with them.

Curtis believes the future can be very bright and that we need to step back and forget about our current reality to look at the world as we could make it if we did not consider the current reality at all. Then and only then, after having looked at what could be, should we examine our current reality and find the paths to get to our better future. Without a map or compass, we will find it too difficult to pull together towards our common goals of a better world.

Of the Potential Discussion Topics at Contact, Curtis is especially interested in Building an Economic Ecosystem for New Business Models and Ideas, Bottom-Up Emergent Organization and Decision Making and Common Global Software Infrastructure for an Open P2P World. If you are also interested in these topics, feel free to contact me directly ahead of Contact.

email: curtis (followed by at) worldhouse (followed by dot) org.

twitter: @inflector









Christine
Christine

Christine Egger Web [http://twitter.com/cdegger Twitter}

Christine Egger serves as a network weaver and amplifier for far-reaching social change initiatives and the people who create them. She recently served as Co-Director of Social Actions, developer of collaborative and open source technologies for the global online giving sector (acquired in April 2011 by GuideStar USA), and currently provides freelance support to several social/tech/enterprise/data projects. Christine holds a master’s in International Development from Michigan State University. Her research explored how holding the possibility of an underlying wholeness in equal measure with apparently separate phenomena might influence development and sustainability practices. Thesis.






Hayden Mills
Hayden Mills

Hayden Mills - Artist That Likes To Think Things To Like

Hayden Mills is someone that doesn't sound nearly as awesome as everyone here. After graduating high school within the top 10 GPA of their class and successfully covering every acceptable inch of tests and homework with doodles, Hayden went to and graduated from CSU Fullerton with a degree in Entertainment Art and an animation emphasis.

In college developed a passion for philosophy, technology and cultural mythology and spent way too much time thinking expansively and processing information. Cathartically wrote a ~100 page thesis on how things probably definitely work but had no real outlet or audience... so now regularly updates a blog with mesmerizing music, pockets of pictures and thoughts with themes surrounding society, symbolism and stuff.

Regarding Potential Discussion Topics at Contact, Hayden is bringing to the tables their passionate intention to bring together a team that will help design and build a variable-time strategy game which leverages key concepts of gamification to make something fun to play and participate within in order to develop real-life sustainable community blueprints and strategies via virtual trial and error with market-supported-and-advertised guesstimates for construction/maintenance costs by geographic location. Hayden was told by concerned friends, family members and faculty that the previous sentence was too long and had obfuscatory amounts of ideas but they were all ignored.

Today, Hayden loves his fiancee lots, works as an animator on Brad Neely's latest animated offering, China, IL (currently airing Sunday-Monday midnights on Adult Swim) and is mildly concerned that spare time has ceased to exist.

twitter: @7thdrxn blog: 7thDRXN


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Jchris-irma-couchdb.jpg

Chris Anderson is a cofounder of Couchbase, and leads the Mobile strategy. His background is web technologies, music production, and analytic philosophy (Reed College). He's a committer to the Apache CouchDB open-source distributed database, a platform for building distributed systems and a counterpoint to today's ever more centralized software. With millions of deployments and a strong commercial ecosystem, CouchDB is bringing the power of the web to the edge of the network. Chris co-authored O'Reilly's CouchDB: The Definitive Guide, an open-source book. Chris is fascinated with distributed economics, ready to learn more.

twitter: @jchris










  • Jason Liszkiewicz


Resides in Brooklyn, NY (seeking employment). Currently self employed (part-time) for an experimental "civics for the 21st century" project focused on Ohio. Contributor to the book Collective Intelligence: Creating a Prosperous World at Peace, creator & co-Founder of Grripz.com which helps people carry various bags in comfort for which the NYPD arrested me for selling these in-person in Union Square. Yes, people can get arrested for selling products that help New Yorkers. OccupyWallStreet any1? :) The arresting officer said if there would have been a peace symbol on the product, he would not have arrested me! He also said "It's the NYPD who defines what art is" (no joke).

Aside from generating ideas, I explore a wide variety of issues, projects, and organizations, connecting information towards defragmenting knowledge in order to discover insight.

ContactCon Discussion Issues: Occupy Wall Street ("developing the network"), Electoral Reform, "KnowNY" collective mapping of all NYC knowledge, Design for the Other 90% + “Micro-Giving” Global Needs Index to Connect Rich to Poor/Fullfill Global-to-Local Requests, "SensorSMS" ('environmental' health data received via txt msg), Gov + corporate activities to become aware of (IARPA, IBM, etc), discovering the complimentary connections between projects presented at ContactCon.
True Cost t-shirt project: "True Cost of One Cotton T-Shirt"
Drupal site: Re-Configure.org
Twitter: @earthintelnet
Contributor: Public Intelligence Blog
You Tube Non-Profit Channel: youtube.com/earthintelnet


Scott Grimmwise
Scott Grimmwise

I'm the founder of Protoplanet, a 'world' of social contexts and conceptual tools children and young adults can employ to design and evolve self-organized projects. I consider myself a folk designer—inspired by things like complexity theory, indigenous knowledge systems, and linguistics—working to help young people absorb and take control of the magic of emerging communication technologies.

I have a BA in Anthropology (University of Nebraska, 1998) but have accumulated most of my education from independent research and taking in the world at large. A decade in the making, Protoplanet will be my first public project.

Twitter: @muskox








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DHSaker.jpg

hassen saker is a writer, interdisciplinary artist and sustainable entrepreneur who recently served on the Board of the Sustainable Business Network of Greater Philadelphia. In addition to creative writing/art projects and writing an eco-advice blog, she produces and directs short video projects at Winged Things Productions, which features inspiring movers & shakers. hassen also co-founded and directs the indie-action networking site, VolkLibre!. Her interest at the Contact Conference is in sharing ideas and joining with others for intelligent, sustainable & exciting social change.

hassen's current project is writing a meta-game that mixes virtual and real-world gaming to engage people in great eco- & community consciousness. Heavy with anti-megacorp underpinnings it incorporates progressive, grassroots, hacker/maker heroics mixed with sci-fi, shadow/nature web, mytho-crypto ecoliteracy, chaos theory, & disruptive, darker yet comical elements. The hybrid genre allows players to utilize various skills in strategy, cooperation, intuition, puzzle-solving and knowledge of things ranging from nature and homesteading to crafting and making/hacking. And, by the way, she's looking for a fun, brilliant development team.


twitter: @hassen


  • Scott Sylvester
Scott Sylvester
Scott Sylvester







twitter: @celestial0ne



Mandy Hixson

Mandy is interested in how technology facilitates dialogue between people and groups that was not previously possible. She is dedicated to working with various organizations to help them to create new exchanges and markets. She enjoys clarifying and articulating ideas, and happens to be rather good at getting shit done.

Mandy is currently working as the Organization Organizer at NewallStreet, an open source startup accelerator in Silicon Valley. NewallStreet is an online and in-person accelerator that offers start-ups co-working options, alternative funding palettes, and a diverse team of over 100 experts.


Mostly recently, Mandy was a fellow at Jaaga Creative Common Grounds, an arts, technology and incubator space located in Bangalore, India. Previously she has worked with couchsurfing.org - a hospitality exchange network and worldfoodgarden.org - an sustainable gardening community.


Mandy is a technomad who has lived and worked from locations in Turkey, New Zealand, Costa Rica, Germany, England, Mexico, and India. Though, she is currently living and working in her hometown of San Francisco.
@mandyhixson




Gordoncook.jpg
Gordoncook.jpg

Editor and publisher of the Cook Report on Internet Protocol for the last 20 years. Self-employed from near Trenton New Jersey. Before that policy analyst at OTA, before that Supercomputer Center science editor and before that Russian historian. Went online in June of 1980.


In addition to my newsletter for almost 8 years I have run a mail list called the Architecture and Economics of IP Networks. It is a mix of technologists, lawyers, consultants, entrepreneurs etc that began primarily with a focus on infrastructure has migrated to fiber, Internet as basic infrastructure, optical networks and e-science. But, as the months pass and the telcos refused to die, while Wall Street becomes more successful in killing Main street, I am beginning to think that we must take the conversation begun by occupy Wall Street to the local level and try to find as many like-minded people as we can in our local community.


A question that I would like to try to work on on Thursday is how can we take the tools like Hey Neighbor and Digital Cities and many others that participants are in the midst of developing and use them for community formation locally. My project would be Mercer County New Jersey ranging all the way from Trenton to Princeton. I know that there are pieces of the puzzle here but I have lived too much of the last 30 years on the line and have poor local contacts. So how to explore the use of tools to find new like-minded people? I have a platform in arch con that is a small global community but how to encourage that community in exploring local roots?


[email [email protected]]






David Friedman

David Friedman

David is a founder of Collaborating Minds a platform that aims to enable people who don’t know each other well to problem-solve together and build relationships with each other at the same time. David has long been interested in how consciously building relationships can enhance groups’ creativity and productivity. He also works with consultants and other professionals at Bridgewell Partners where he applies the same relationship focus to helping them work better with their clients.

Blog: Positive Structures
Twitter: @bridgewell












Jim McGee

Jim McGee

Jim is a founder of Collaborating Minds a platform that aims to enable people who don’t know each other well to problem-solve together and build relationships with each other at the same time. For over 30 years, Jim has been helping organizations become more effective by making better use of information and communications technology. He’s attacked these problems as an entrepreneur, senior executive, professor, author, blogger, speaker, systems developer, designer, and consultant. Today, he works with senior executives in organizations to formulate, structure, and solve problems in the effective use of information technology in complex knowledge work settings. Among other activities, he is currently teaching a course on Organizational Change at DePaul University's School for New Learning.

Blog: McGee's Musings
Twitter: @jmcgee












Caroline Smalley

Caroline Smalley

Building solutions for connecting 'the other 90%', Caroline is co-founder and creative strategist behind The Citizens Media®.

The Citizens Media® is software for building a scalable network of sites that connects the unconnected world, unites projects and releases skills by means of monetizing contributions to Community Media®.

Integrating tools that help bridge the digital divide, their mission is to provide end-to-end communication and technology solutions for connecting the 3 billion marketplace of the developing world. Working in partnership with IDE, their goal is to help create authentic markets through equal opportunity online.

Built for initiatives seeking to reduce the wealth gap by empowering financial independence and helping to amplify local voice, The Citizens Media® gives people everywhere online tools and strategies to help each other help themselves.

Website: The Citizens Media®
Twitter: @citizensmedia





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butwait_by_dmcordell.jpg

Shelley Krause is an academic matchmaker who works primarily with young people to support their efforts to find their tribes as learners.

She thinks out loud at Relax. No, Really, has presented at both Chris Lehmann's EduCon and Jeff Pulver's 140edu Con, and tries to empower purposeful networks wherever she goes.

Her areas of continuing interest include eportfolios, the edcamp movement, learning graphs and badges, networked learning, haiku, and non-American dark chocolate, not necessarily in that order.

Krause goes home most nights to Princeton, NJ, where she and her partner are raising one heck of a kid. (Don't get her started.)

twitter: @butwait



Gordon Mohr

Gordon Mohr builds technology for the web. Past projects include the Heritrix archival web crawler, used by the Internet Archive and libraries around the world; the Bitzi/Bitcollder collaborative catalog of digital media files; the early peer-to-peer instant-messenger Activerse Ding; and ParcPlace VisualWave, one of the very first web application IDEs.

Gordon's current project is code-named 'Infinithree' and seeks to update the wiki reference model, as pioneered by Wikipedia, to better cover broader and deeper subjects. Read more at http://infinithree.org and follow @infinithree for updates.

Gordon blogs at http://memesteading.com and tweets at @gojomo.


I’m Fee Plumley, a media artist, creative producer, technoevangelist and recently a funder of digital culture through the Australia Council for the Arts artsdigitalera.com.

My latest project reallybigroadtrip aims to document the breadth & diversity of creative digital culture currently taking place all over the world, you could call it a 'global digital culture audit' if you wanted to get all fancy about it.

Come find me at the Bazaar to share your creative digital culture stories, contact me via the blog http://reallybigroadtrip.com or tweet me via @bigtripco.