Advisory Board

The Advisory Board of the Wikimedia Foundation was approved in 2006, and formed at the start of 2007.

The Advisory Board is an international network of experts who have agreed to give the Wikimedia Foundation meaningful help on a regular basis in many different areas, including law, organizational development, technology, policy, and outreach. Their abilities, experience, and knowledge were selected for how they complement a particular Wikimedia Foundation project, or the organization as a whole.

The Advisory Board advises the Board of Trustees in its strategic decision-making process and the staff in its day-to-day work. Sometimes questions will be posed to the whole group, sometimes individual members will be consulted.

Ward Cunningham
Ward is the inventor of the term 'wiki' and creator of the first wiki website. He is currently the Chief Technology Officer of AboutUs.org, a company hosting the communities formed by organizations and their constituents. Ward co-founded the consultancy Cunningham & Cunningham, Inc., and was a Director of the Eclipse Foundation. He has been an Architect in Microsoft's Patterns & Practices Group, as Director of R&D at Wyatt Software and as Principle Engineer in the Tektronix Computer Research Laboratory.

Ward is well known for his contributions to the practice of object-oriented programming, the variation called Extreme Programming, and the software development style of agile programming. Ward hosts the Agile Manifesto website. He is a founder of the Hillside Group and there created the Pattern Languages of Programs conferences which continue to be held all over the world. The communities supported by his WikiWikiWeb site were strongly influenced by his thinking about social and software patterns, and contributed many philosophers and wiki-enthusiasts to the early years of Wikipedia.


 * Ward's personal web page

Florence Devouard
Florence Devouard served as one of the elected representatives to the Board starting June 2004, and was the Chair of the Board from October 21, 2006 until July 16th, 2008. Florence was born in Versailles (France). She grew up in Grenoble, and has been living since then in several French cities, as well as Antwerpen in Belgium and Tempe in Arizona. She holds two masters: a 5-year degree in agronomical engineering (Diplome d'Ingénieur Grande Ecole) from ENSAIA; and a postgraduate degree (DEA) in Genetics and Biotechnologies from [http://www.inpl-nancy.fr/index.htm INPL.

Florence has been working in public research, first in flower plant genetic improvement, and second in microbiology to study the feasibility of polluted soil bioremediation. She was employed until 2005 in a French company, to conceive decision-making tools in sustainable agriculture. She is now a Consultant in Collaborative Media. She joined the Wikipedia adventure in February 2002 and is known as a contributor under the pseudonym Anthere. Florence lives in Clermont Ferrand with her husband Bertrand and her three children, Anne-Gaëlle, William, and Thomas.

Melissa Hagemann
Melissa manages the Open Access Initiative within the Information Program of the Open Society Institute (OSI)/Soros foundations. Since convening the meeting in December 2001 which led to the development of the Budapest Open Access Initiative, she has been active within the Open Access movement which advocates for the free online availability of peer-reviewed literature.

Melissa also works with the eIFL (electronic Information for Libraries) network to manage the eIFL Open Access Program that aims to spread the benefits of Open Access among eIFL’s members in 50 developing and transition countries. She has held several positions within OSI including managing OSI’s Regional Library Program from 1995-1997 based in Budapest as well as the Science Journals Donation Program from 1998-2001.

She was profiled as a SPARC Innovator in December 2006 for her work within the Open Access movement. Melissa has served on the Member of Experts' Group of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation’s Global Library Initiative.

Matt Halprin


Matt Halprin is a native of Menlo Park, California in the United States. He has lived in Evanston, Illinois, Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Tokyo, Japan. He is married and the father of four children. Halprin graduated with High Distinction as a Baker Scholar from Harvard Business School and holds a BS in mechanical engineering from Stanford University.

He has more than 25 years of business experience and has served on an array of boards of directors, both non-profit and for-profit. He currently serves on the board of Management Leadership for Tomorrow (which supports the next generation of minority leaders in the United States) and on the Advisory Board of Stanford's Institute for Research in the Social Sciences (iRiSS).

Professionally, Halprin was a Partner and Vice President at the Boston Consulting Group, where he worked with technology clients on issues of strategy and corporate development. Subsequently, he spent six years as Vice President, Global Trust and Safety at eBay, where he led a team of 90 statisticians, policy managers, and product managers. Halprin was also Partner at Omidyar Network, the founder of eBay's philanthropic investment firm. There he led the firm's investments in technology platform organizations in Social Media, Marketplaces, and Government Transparency. After Omidyar Network, Halprin returned to an operating role leading Strategy, Corporate Development and Analytics at Ning, which was sold to Glam Media in late 2011. Currently, he leads Business Operations and Analytics at Yelp (NYSE).

Halprin was appointed to the WMF Board in August 2009 and was re-appointed twice.

Halprin worked on the board to promote effective Board Governance and served of Chair of the Board Governance Committee for more than two years. In this capacity, he helped introduce a Trustee peer evaluation process, effective Board Committee processes and transparency in board voting. In addition, he attempted to champion a more independent board and greater user choice via an opt-in image filter to help parents and educators. His term expired in December 2012.

Benjamin Mako Hill
Benjamin Mako Hill is a Debian hacker and author of the Debian GNU/Linux 3.1 Bible and "The Official Ubuntu Book". He works in the Computing Culture group of the MIT Media Lab, and is on the boards of Software Freedom International, the Free Software Foundation, and the Ubuntu Foundation. Mako was on the board of Software in the Public Interest from March 2003 until July 2006, serving as the organisation's vice-president from August 2004.


 * Personal website

Mimi Ito
Mimi Ito is a cultural anthropologist examining children and youth’s changing relationships to media and communications. She is an Associate Researcher with the University of California Humanities Research Institute with appointments in the Department of Anthropology and the Department of Informatics at the University of California. Her research in Japan focuses on use of mobile technologies, and she recently completed a multi-year project on digital kids and informal learning. She has authored and edited three books on kids' use of technology, and most recently, she has led a three-year collaborative ethnographic study, funded by the MacArthur Foundation, examining youth new media practices in the US, focused on gaming, digital media production, and Internet use. She has worked at the University of Southern California's Annenberg Center, the Institute for Research on Learning, Xerox PARC, and Apple Computer. She has a PhD in Education and a PhD in Anthropology, both from Stanford University in Palo Alto, California.


 * Official website

Mitch Kapor
A long-time tech entrepreneur, software designer, investor, and activist, Mitch is known equally for accomplishments in those fields. He founded or co-founded the Lotus Development Corporation, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the Mitchell Kapor Foundation, and the Open Source Applications Foundation. His previous board roles include Chair of Linden Labs (Second Life), and former Chair of the Mozilla Foundation, best known for the Firefox web browser. Mitch is currently an Adjunct Professor in the School of Information at the University of California.

He says he is interested in "past, present, and future patterns of disruptive technology based on radical openness, in hybrid enterprises which integrate sustainable business methods and a social mission, and in democratic reform in a era of globalization."


 * Official website

Veronique Kessler
Véronique Kessler was the Chief Financial and Operating Officer of the Wikimedia Foundation from February 2008 to July 2011.

She has 15 years of managerial and financial experience working with a range of organizations, including the non-profit Jewish Community Center of San Francisco, Stanford University, Charles Schwab, and Berkeley International Capital Corporation.

Véronique is a CPA (certified public accountant), with a B.A. in Economics from the University of California at Santa Cruz. She has worked with groups in Hong Kong, China, Indonesia, Taiwan and Singapore, and speaks fluent French.

Neeru Khosla
Neeru Khosla is a firm believer in the power of education. She wants the rigor and accountability of for profit models to apply to non-profits. Neeru is a member of the Board at The Nueva School in Hillsborough, California, where she has served since 1997. She is also on the Advisory Board of the American India Foundation, a leading international development organization charged with accelerating social and economic change in India. She previously served as a trustee of the Pacific Vascular Research Foundation and Connexions, a Rice University open-source project. She is also on the National Advisory Board for DonorsChoose, one of the founding members of the K-12 Initiative of the D-School (Hasso Plattner Institute of Design) at Stanford University and a member of the committee to expand that program.

Neeru is currently Co-Founder and Executive Director of CK-12 Foundation, launched in 2006 to reduce the cost of textbook materials for the K-12 market both in the US and worldwide.

She holds a Bachelors degree from Delhi University/San Jose State, a Masters degree in Molecular Biology from San Jose State, and a Masters in Education from Stanford University.

Teemu Leinonen


Teemu is a professor in New Media Design and Learning at the Media Lab Helsinki, Aalto University.

In the Media Lab Helsinki he leads the Learning Environments research group. The group is involved in research, design and development of New Media tools, as well as their use and application, in the field of learning. The research group has coordinated research and development projects funded by The European Commission (IST), National Technology Agency of Finland (TEKES), the Nordic Council of Ministers and the UNESCO. The group is internationally recognized from its open source virtual learning environment called Fle3, MobilED audio wiki platform, and LeMill web community for finding, authoring and sharing learning resources.

Teemu holds over a decade of experience in the field of research and development of web-based learning, computer supported collaborative learning (CSCL), online cooperation, educational planning and educational politics. With his family Teemu has lived in Tanzania, Afghanistan and Kenya. At least once a year he visits his "compañera's" family in Colombia.

Nhlanhla Mabaso
Nhlanhla Mabaso worked as Chief Information Officer in the Department of Public Service and Administration and later the Department of Home Affairs for South Africa. Trained as a software engineer and systems analyst, he ran the Open Source Initiative at the Meraka Institute of the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR), and served as coordinator of the Free Software and Open Source Foundation for Africa (FOSSFA).

Currently, Nhlanhla is part of the Senior Management team at the University of the Witwatersrand and heads Computer and Network Services within the Knowledge and Information Management portfolio. He serves on the boards of the .ZA Domain Name Authority, Free to Innovate South Africa and The African Commons Project.

He holds a Bachelors Degree in Computer Science and Applied Maths and a Masters in Business Administration from the University of the Witwatersrand.

Rebecca MacKinnon
Rebecca MacKinnon is currently an Assistant Professor at the University of Hong Kong's Journalism and Media Studies Centre, where she teaches "new media", examining the intersection between the Internet and journalism.

Starting at the bottom of CNN's Beijing bureau, she became a correspondent for the news channel, and later Bureau Chief from 1998-2001. She served as the Tokyo Bureau Chief from 2001-03.

MacKinnon started a fellowship at the Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government in January 2004. Her research focus was on blogs and participatory online media, especially as relates to international news. Three months in, she resigned from CNN, and was invited to stay at Harvard as a Research Fellow at Harvard Law School's Berkman Center for Internet and Society. There she and fellow Wikimedia advisor Ethan Zuckerman co-founded Global Voices Online, an award-winning international citizen media community, with which she remains involved in management.

Her ongoing research interests are the future of media in the Internet age, freedom of speech online, and the Internet in China. She serves on the Board of Directors for Tor, which aims to improve safety and security on the Internet, and served on the US Advisory Board for FON in 2006.


 * Rebecca MacKinnon's blog &middot; Global Voices Online

Wayne Mackintosh
Wayne is the founding Director of the International Centre for Open Education based at Otago Polytechnic, New Zealand and member of the Board of Directors of the Open Education Resource (OER) Foundation. He was previously Education Specialist for eLearning and ICT Policy at the Commonwealth of Learning based in Vancouver, and before that Associate Professor and founding Director of the Centre for Flexible and Distance Learning (CFDL) at the University of Auckland, New Zealand.

Wayne is an unashamed advocate of free software for education, subscribes to free cultural works licensing and founded the WikiEducator project -- an international community of educators from the formal sector, collaborating, sharing and creating OER. He also has had the privilege of leading a government-funded project called the eLearning XHTML editor (eXe). This is a small open source software project working on a simple authoring tool for web content for teachers.


 * Bio on wikieducator.org &middot; eLearning XHTML editor (eXe)

Roger McNamee
Roger is Managing Director and Co-Founder of Elevation Partners, which invests in media and consumer technology companies. He is a long-term San Francisco Bay Area resident, a professional musician, and a prominent Wikipedia supporter.

Roger McNamee began his career in 1982 at T. Rowe Price, where he managed the top-ranked Science & Technology Fund. In 1991, he launched Integral Capital Partners, the first crossover fund (combining later stage venture capital with public market investments), in partnership with Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. In 1999, Roger co-founded Silver Lake Partners, the first private equity fund focused on technology businesses. In 2004, Roger and his partners launched Elevation Partners, an investment partnership focused on the intersection of media and entertainment content and consumer technology.

Roger is the author of The New Normal, published in 2004 by the Portfolio imprint of Penguin Books. He is a frequent speaker at industry and investor conferences and a commentator on CNBC.

Roger serves on board of directors of Forbes Media, Palm, and Move. He also serves on the Board of Trustees of Bryn Mawr College and the Board of Overseers of the Amos Tuck School of Business Administration at Dartmouth College. He holds a B.A. from Yale University and an M.B.A. from Tuck. He plays guitar and bass in the band Moonalice.

Domas Mituzas
Domas Mituzas served on Wikimedia's Board of Trustees between January 2008 and July 2009. He has been involved with Wikimedia's core site technology and operations since 2004.

Until recently Domas worked for the Sun Microsystems database group (MySQL), after practicing on Wikipedia's early MySQL clusters. He is now working in operations at Facebook.

Trevor Neilson
Trevor Neilson is a Partner in the Global Philanthropy Group, a company that advises philanthropists on the development and implementation of philanthropic strategies.

He formed DATA (Debt, AIDS, Trade, Africa) with Bill Gates, Bono and George Soros, served as a founding board member, and stays involved as a member of DATA's policy board. Neilson also served as Vice-Chairman of Saflink, an early stage technology company focused on biometric authentication solutions for government agencies in the United States.

He served in the Clinton White House, for the Office of Scheduling and Advance and the White House Travel Office. He then became the Director of Public Affairs and Director of Special Projects at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the largest transparently operated charitable foundation in the world. There he was responsible for politically sensitive or high profile grant-making, government relations and public affairs. He also and managed the foundations relationships with the United Nations, governments, corporations and NGOs.

He served as Executive Vice President of the Casey Family Programs, the largest operating foundation in the United States, created by United Parcel Service founder Jim Casey. He also served as Executive Director of the Global Business Coalition on HIV/AIDS (GBC) which was initially created with investments from Bill Gates, George Soros and Ted Turner. GBC represents over 200 multinational companies who have interests related to AIDS and healthcare. He recruited over 100 companies to join, and opened and managed offices in New York, Paris, Beijing, Geneva, Nairobi and Johannesburg along with partnerships in 20 countries around the world.


 * Global Philanthropy Group &middot; GBC
 * Saflink &middot; DATA &middot; Casey Family Programs

Craig Newmark
Craig Newmark is the founder of craigslist.org, a site where users connect to find and exchange goods and services, including housing and jobs. He currently works as a customer service representative for the site. Over the past 30 years, Newmark has worked in the technology industry with companies such as IBM, GM, Charles Schwab & Co, and Bank of America.

Barry Newstead
Barry Newstead is currently a General Manager at Australia Post. He led Bridgespan's year-long partnerships with the Wikimedia Foundation in support of the strategic planning process, culminating in the Wikimedia Movement Strategic Plan Summary. He worked for the Wikimedia Foundation from 2010-2012. Before that he was a Partner with the Bridgespan Group, a nonprofit consulting organization, and worked for the Boston Consulting Group in Asia, Europe and North America.

Achal Prabhala
Achal Prabhala is a researcher and writer in Bangalore. He works on critical investigations of intellectual property in connection to medicines and knowledge. Between 2004 and 2006 he coordinated a campaign for access to learning materials in South Africa.

Clay Shirky
Clay Shirky is on the faculty at the Interactive Telecommunications Program, an interdisciplinary grad program at New York University, where he works on the intersection of social and technological networks&mdash;the way communications technologies help shape the society that uses them, and the way society shapes those tools.

His interests relevant to Wikimedia are social software generally, and in particular governance problems; what changes in coordination costs for groups do to the economics of information production; and the design of federated networks.

Shirky chaired the Technical Working Group of the Library of Congress's digital preservation initiative (NDIIPP), and he currently chairs the Technical Sub-committee of Connecting for Health, a non-profit designing a nationwide health information network.

Michael Snow


Michael was Chair of the Wikimedia Board from July 2008 until July 2010. He joined the Board in February 2008, after participating in Wikimedia projects since 2003. One of his contributions was the creation of The Wikipedia Signpost, a community newspaper for the English-language Wikipedia. Born in Pfullendorf, Germany, he now lives in the Seattle area. Michael is an attorney and earned his J.D. degree from the University of Washington.

Jing Wang
Jing Wang is an author and editor of seven books, Professor of Chinese Cultural Studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and founder and organizer of MIT’s New Media Action Lab. She is also an affiliated faculty with MIT's Comparative Media Studies. In spring 2009, Professor Wang launched an NGO 2.0 project in collaboration with two Chinese universities and three Chinese NGOs, and three corporate partners including Ogilvy& Mather China and Frog Design. The project, funded by Ford Foundation in Beijing, is designed to enhance the digital literacy of grassroots NGOs in the underdeveloped regions of China and will deliver an interactive platform complete with Web 2.0 training courses and a Chinese field guide to best practices and software of social media for nonprofits.

She started working with Creative Commons in 2006 and serves as the Chair of the International Advisory Board of Creative Commons Mainland China. She also worked as the co-organizer of the Policy Culture Research Project with Anthony Saich at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University.

Jessamyn West
Jessamyn West is an author, technology librarian, and a community manager at MetaFilter. She lives in rural central Vermont, teaching basic computer skills. She also travels nationally and internationally speaking on library and technology topics. Her first book, Without a Net: Librarians Bridging the Digital Divide, was published in 2011 and aims to assist librarians in understanding and helping people overcome the digital divide. She maintains an online presence at jessamyn.com and librarian.net and has been editing Wikipedia since 2004.

Ethan Zuckerman
Ethan is the director of MIT's Center for Civic Media, and co-founder of Global Voices (globalvoicesonline.org) along with fellow advisory board member Rebecca MacKinnon. He is an affiliate at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School, where his work focuses on technology in the developing world. Ethan also works with Open Society Institute's Information Program, along with Melissa Hagemann.

Prior to working with the Berkman Center, he was one of the founders of Geekcorps, a technology volunteering corps that brought geeks to the developing world to support and build IT businesses. Before that, he helped found Tripod.com, a popular community site on the early Web.

Heather Ford
Heather Ford is a co-founder of the African Commons Project - a South African non-profit organisation that seeks to mobilise communities through active participation in collaborative technology.

Heather graduated from Rhodes University with a Bachelor of Journalism degree and has a certificate in Telecommunications Policy, Law and Management from the University of the Witwatersrand Link Centre. After working in the United Kingdom for Greennet and Privacy International, she went on to Stanford University in 2003 where she worked as a fellow in the Reuters Digital Vision Fellowship Program. She went back to South Africa in 2004 to start Creative Commons South Africa and a programme entitled ‘Commons-sense: Towards an African Digital Information Commons’ at the Wits University Link Centre. From 2006-2008, she was the Executive Director of iCommons.

Heather is now working on building collaborative systems for digital innovation in South Africa.


 * Heather Ford's blog
 * The African Commons Project website
 * Wikipedia article

Debbie Garside
Appointed to the Wikimedia Foundation Advisory Board in 2007, Debbie Garside is the Project Leader, Editor and Head of Research for ISO 639-6. She is also Managing Director of GeoLang Ltd; the organisation that will become the Registration Authority (RA) for ISO-639-6 as soon as it is published. Debbie is Chief Executive Officer of the World Language Documentation Centre (WLDC); a non-profit making organisation made up of 25 international linguists and standardization professionals from industry and academia alike that has a remit that is wide and far reaching with regard to facilitating linguistic communities.

Debbie has been involved in language standards for over 6 years and is Convenor of ISO TC37/SC2/WG1/TG2 the committee responsible for ISO 639-6 Codes for the Representation of Names of Languages - Alpha4 Code for comprehensive coverage of language variants as well as the mirror committee within BSI in the UK; TS/1/-1.

Debbie is also Liaison to BSI (British Standards Institute) IDT/2/11, and has represented BSI, as UK expert, during TC46/WG2 meetings with regard to country codes. Appointed by BSI as project leader for a new standard for the Internationalization of Country Codes in March 2007, she is an observer to the ccNSO-GAC IDN Joint WG; a committee that is charged by ICANN with investigating solutions for the Internationalization of ccTLDs. Debbie is also active within ICANN's GA.

A named contributor to RFC4647, the Internet Engineering Task Force standard for Language Tag Matching, Debbie is an active member in the IETF-language forum as well as the IETF LTRU forum.

Debbie's interests span many fields but primary to this is her interest in facilitating a multi-lingual internet and multi-lingual thesauri.

Based in Wales, UK, Debbie is Managing Director and Chief Executive Officer of three other companies, one offering translations, marketing and market research another offering entrepreneurship and ICT training as part of a European funded project as well being a Director of a newly established family estate agency.

Danny Hillis
Danny Hillis is an engineer, author and inventor with a broad range of interests. He earned a B.S. in mathematics and a PhD. in computer science at MIT. While at MIT, Hillis began to study the physical limitations of computation and the possibility of building highly parallel computers. This work led in 1985 with the design and construction of a massively parallel computer with 64,000 processors, called the Connection Machine.

Hillis then co-founded Thinking Machines Corp., which was the leading innovator in massive parallel supercomputers and RAID disk arrays. Hillis' other inventions over the years have included tendon-control robot arms, touch-sensitive robot skin, a computer built from Tinkertoys that plays tic tac toe, and a 10,000-year mechanical clock. He founded the Long Now Foundation, which sponsors projects encouraging long-term thinking and responsibility.

Currently the Co-Founder and Co-Chairman at Applied Minds, Inc., Hillis is also Founder and Chairman of Metaweb Technologies, Inc., which was formed recently to build a better infrastructure for the Web.

Prior to Applied Minds, Hillis was Vice President, Research and Development at Walt Disney Imagineering, and a Disney Fellow. At Disney, he developed new technologies and business strategies and designed new theme park rides, a full-sized walking robot dinosaur and various micro mechanical devices. Hillis has also consulted with various companies in developing new technologies and related business strategies, serves on several company and not-for-profit boards, including the Long Now Foundation and the Hertz Foundation. He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a Fellow of the Association of Computing Machinery, a Fellow in the International Leadership Forum, and a member of the National Academy of Engineering. He lives with his wife Pati and his children Asa, Noah and India in Los Angeles, California.


 * Wikipedia article

Joris Komen
Joris Komen says he was lured into the information and communication technologies by the computerisation of museum collections, while the curator of birds at the National Museum of Namibia. He has spent considerable time and energy promoting the relevance of the Internet and other technologies to African museums and schools within and around Nambia. He is a champion of incentive-reward mechanisms to provide ICTs to schools in Namibia by way of a biodiversity-oriented school competition called Insect@thon.

Komen played a critical role in launching and driving SchoolNet Namibia, a civil society organisation which is committed to providing sustainable internet access, free/libre and open source software, and open educational content to all schools in Namibia. Komen is presently SchoolNet Namibia’s executive director. The organization has proved to be a model for the sustainable introduction of ICTs across the education sector, and has been recognised by the Namibian government's National Development Plans as a key actor.

Born in the Congo, Komen was raised and variously educated in Burundi, Holland, Nigeria and South Africa.


 * SchoolNet Nambia
 * Insect@thon
 * Official blog

Erin McKean
Erin McKean likes to call herself a "Dictionary Evangelist". Erin was formerly Chief Consulting Editor, American Dictionaries, for Oxford University Press, and the editor of VERBATIM: The Language Quarterly. She was the editor in chief of the The New Oxford American Dictionary, 2e. Her other books about words include Weird and Wonderful Words, More Weird and Wonderful Words, Totally Weird and Wonderful Words, and That's Amore.

Previously, she was the editorial manager for the Thorndike-Barnhart Dictionaries at ScottForesman, a Pearson company. She has served on the board of the Dictionary Society of North America and on the editorial board for its journal, Dictionaries, as well as on the editorial board for the journal of the American Dialect Society, American Speech.

McKean lives in Chicago, maintains a blog about dresses, and describes herself as being "really bad at Scrabble", despite credentials to suggest otherwise.


 * A Dress A Day, her blog
 * Wikipedia article

Jay Rosen
Jay Rosen teaches journalism at New York University, and has written extensively on civic journalism on his blog founded in 2003, the book What Are Journalists For?, and in numerous periodicals.

Jay Rosen teaches journalism at New York University, where he has been on the faculty since 1986. From 1999 to 2005 he was chair of the Department. His work is mainly about what democracy requires from the press, a term which he believes includes journalists, citizens who are self published, and "the media." His blog "PressThink" is about the industry, and its discontents in the digital age. It talks to traditional journalists, bloggers, journalism students and new media people. He also write at the Huffington Post and Comment is Free, the Guardian's group blog.

He founded NewAssignment.net in July 2006, an experimental site for pro-am, open source reporting projects. The concept was to have teams aid investigative journalism that would be hard for a single reporter or even a team of pros to do unaided.

His 1999 book What Are Journalists For? (Yale University Press) is about the rise of the civic journalism movement, also called public journalism. It was a pre-Web effort to get a professionalized press to recognize the widening disconnect between itself and the citizenry. The book was developed over a ten-year period, 1989-99.

As a press critic and reviewer, he has written for The Nation, Columbia Journalism Review, the Chronicle of Higher Education, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, Salon.com, TomPaine.com and many others.

He has a Ph.D. from NYU in media studies.


 * NewAssignment.net
 * PressThink blog
 * Wikipedia article

Peter Suber
Peter Suber has been working full-time on open access to research literature since 2003. Before that, Suber was a professor of philosophy at Earlham College for 21 years. He retains a non-teaching position at Earlham, but gave up his tenure and salary to work on open access.

Suber writes a blog called Open Access News (updated daily) and the SPARC Open Access Newsletter (published monthly). All of his work these days is in research, writing, consulting, and advocacy for open access (OA).

He was the principal drafter of the Budapest Open Access Initiative and serve on boards of several other organizations that deal with OA issues, such as the Scientific Information Working Group of the UN WSIS, Science Commons, Academic Commons, the Open Humanities Press, and the Open Knowledge Foundation. For more, see my home page.


 * Wikipedia article

Raoul Weiler
Raoul Weiler is located in Belgium in Antwerp. During the past few years, his activities have primarily focused on sustainability issues as a planetary challenge, the use of low-cost ICT in schools and communities as a contribution to the eradication of illiteracy and bridging the digital gap, and facilitating the access of all to the oncoming worldwide information and knowledge societies, as well as on sustainable economy questions. At present, Weiler founded and chairs the Brussels-EU Chapter of the Club of Rome (CoR-EU) and is a member of the Executive Committee of the International Club of Rome (CoR). Weiler is a Fellow of the World Academy of Art and Science (WAAS), member of Scientific Advisory Board of European Papers in the New Welfare, a member of the Board of Greenfacts and the president of the new created DigitalWorld. He participated as a NGO participant at the World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg (WSSD, 2002) and the World Summit on the Information Society in Geneva and Tunis (WSIS, 2003 & 2005) as well as at the World Social Forum in Porte Alegre (WSF, 2005).

Weiler's academic background is in engineering with a degree of engineering and Ph. D. in chemistry both at the University of Leuven (KUL), Belgium and he spent several years as Post-doc in the U.S. and France. His industrial career started in a chemical multinational in the Department of Applied Physics and ended, until retirement (1996), as manager of the ICT department. Weiler has held teaching positions at different universities, in particular at the University of Leuven in the Faculty of Bio-engineering Sciences (KUL), and has given lectures about the relationship between technology and society, especially about the problem of sustainability and ethics. He is the co-author and editor of four books on sustainability, global change and philosophy and ethics of technology. Recent publications: Ethic Aspects of the Convention on Climate Change (2005) and the Proceedings of the joint World Conference of the Club of Rome and UNESCO on ICTs for Capacity-Building: Critical Success Factors (2005).


 * Wikipedia article