Geert Lovink is a Dutch-Australian media theorist and critic and founding director of the
Institute of Network Cultures. He holds a PhD from the University of Melbourne in Australia
and was Post Doctorate Fellow at the Centre for Critical and Cultural Studies, University of
Queensland in 2003. In 2004 Geert Lovink was appointed Research Professor at the Amsterdam
University of Applied Sciences and Associate Professor at the University of Amsterdam.
He is the founder of Internet projects such as nettime and fibreculture. He authored the books
Dark Fiber (2002),
Uncanny Networks (2002) and
My First Recession (2003). In 2005–06
he was a fellow at the Wissenschaftskolleg Berlin Institute for Advanced Study, where he
finished his third volume on critical internet culture,
Zero Comments (2007).
Shunling Chen is a doctoral student at Harvard Law School. She is interested in on-line
collaboration such as free software projects. She seeks to on one hand develop a critique of copyright, and
on the other explore internal governance issues within such projects. She
has also been working extensively on indigenous rights, especially on the issues of selfgovernance
and natural resources management. She sees both kinds of community efforts
—digital and tribal—as attempts to provide alternative thinking of social relationships and
different models of resource distribution. She was the founding project co-lead of Creative Commons Taiwan. She has
worked as an in-house of a free software project, as well as a law
clerk at the Wikimedia Foundation.
Stuart Geiger is a researcher at Georgetown University’s Communication, Culture, and
Technology program, in Washington, D.C. He studies knowledge production in distributed
or decentralized organizations, paying close attention to the sociality of technologies that
sustain collaboration. Stuart's research specifically focuses on the production and maintenance of order in both Wikipedia and scientific research networks. He uses a variety of
qualitative and quantitative methods and is influenced by a number of disciplines, including
media and communication studies, science and technology studies, critical software studies,
and information studies.
Beatriz Martins is from the Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, and has
special intrest in authorship and authority.
Dipti Kulkarni is currently pursuing her PhD in Language and Communication at the
Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology Delhi. While
bein interested in questions of meaning as dealt within the Philosophy of Language, Communication, and Linguistics she is also interested in mediated communication and the effect
of these new technology contexts have on human language and communication. Dipti has a
Master in Communication Studies from the University of Pune and has worked for three years
as a communication researcher at the Centre for Media Studies, New Delhi.
Asha Achuthan is a PhD candidate at the Centre for the Study of Culture and Society,
Bangalore, India. Her research has to do with the intersection between feminism and Marxism.
Mark Graham is a Research Fellow at the Oxford Internet Institute. His work focuses on
the geographies of the Internet and uses of ICT for development. His research can be divided
into three categories: ICT for development (particuarly work focused on Thailand and East Africa)
(his published papers can be accessed at geospace.co.uk); hybrid urban spaces and the
politics of virtual globes (much of his work in this category is available on the floatingsheep.org blog); and non-proximate transparency and economic reorganisation (see for example the
wikichains.com project that he recently started.
Alok Nandi is active in media art and design, with a focus on interactive mise-en-scene
and narrative architecture, His background combines engineering, management and film studies. He is an invited professor and regular speaker in international conference and a jury
mamber in film and media festivals. His previous professional experiences include i.e. advertising (P&G), film production, exhibition design and publishing (Casterman, groupe Flammarion).
Dror Kamir worked mainly in the fields of Natural Language Processing and translation.
He became active in the Hebrew Wikipedia in April 2005, then became active also in the
Arabic and English Wikipedias, but is currently in a long ‘Wiki vacation’ from all three, and
focusing on promoting free-content policy in Israel as a board member of Wikimedia Israel,
of which he was one of the founders, and as a volunteer of the Wikimedia Foundation. In
Wikimania 2008 in Alexandria, Egypt, he delivered the presentation “Cross-Cultural Dialog
through Wikipedia”.
Sunil Abraham is the Executive Director at the Centre for Internet and Society (CIS),
India. The CIS (cis-india.org) aims to critically engage with concerns of digital pluralism,
public accountability and pedagogic practices, in the field of internet and society with
particular emphasis on South-South dialogue and exchange. Sunil is a social entrepreneur
and Free Software advocate. He founded Mahiti (mahiti.org) in 1998 which aims to reduce the
cost and complexity of information and communication technology for the voluntary sector
by using Free Software. He was elected an Ashoka fellow in 1999 to ‘explore the democratic
potential of the Internet’. He was granted a Sarai FLOSS fellow in 2003. Between June 2004
and June 2007, Sunil also managed the International Open Source Network (iosn.net) a
project of United Nations serving 42 countries in the Asia-Pacific region.
Linda Gross is a Stipendiary at the DFG Research Training Group ‘Entering the Knowledge
Society: Science in Applied and Advisory Contexts’ at the Institute for Science and
Technology Studies, University of Bielefeld, Germany.
Heather Ford is a South African social entrepreneur, researcher and writer who is
currently enrolled as a Masters student at the UC Berkeley iSchool where she is researching
collaboration and the governance of global online communities. She is a former Wikimedia
Foundation Advisory Board member and the former Executive Director of iCommons—an international
organisation started by Creative Commons to connect the open education, access
to knowledge, free software, open access publishing and free culture communities around
the world. She was a co-founder of Creative Commons South Africa and of the South African
non-profit, The African Commons Project as well as a community building initiative called the
GeekRetreat—bringing together South Africa’s top Web thinkers to talk about how to make
the local Internet better.
Elad Wieder is an Israeli lawyer and Creative Commons activist with special interests
in communities vs. markets. He also works as Coordinator at the Haifa Center of Law & Technology
at the University of Haifa, Israel.
Nathaniel Tkacz is a PhD candidate at the University of Melbourne and is also employed
as a Research Fellow at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology. His research
lies at the intersection of network theory, software studies and politics.
Nishant Shah is Director-Research, at the Bangalore based Centre for Internet and
Society. His doctoral and post-doctoral work raises questions about digital identities, cultural productions and new pedagogies in the emerging field of Internet and Society. His work cuts
across different parts of Asia and seeks to articulate new vocabularies, frameworks and
methods of research and intervention in the region. He is currently engaged in working on a
project on Digital Natives and potentials for socio-political transformation and mobilisation.
Usha Raman, PhD Communications Consultant, L V Prasad Eye Institute visiting
Professor, Department of Communication, University of Hyderabad. He has special intrest in
the social impact of technology and learning styles, and their relationship with the production
and validation of knowledge.
Noopur Raval is currently in the third year of a B.A. in Media Studies, Literature and
Psychology at Christ University, Bangalore. He worked as an intern at the Times of India and
Radio Mirchi in Ahmedabad, India. His interests are Philosophy, Web design, Culture Studies,
Learning languages, Sociolinguistics, Studies of cyberspace, etc.
Srikiet Tadepalli is currently pursuing the 3rd year (5th Semester) of a Bachelor of Arts
in Communicative (Functional) English from the Dept. of Media Studies, Christ University,
Bangalore since June '07. Course majors are Communicative English, Literature and Psychology. He is administrator (since July ’06) and Editor (since January ’06) on the English
Wikipedia and member of the Wikimedia’s OTRS (Open Ticket Resource System) committee, which is responsible for answering queries directed to the Wikimedia Foundation. He
conducted the session ‘Wikipedia Editing for Beginners’ as a speaker at Barcamp Bangalore
7, a tech conference at IIM Bangalore (September ’08).
Amie Parry teaches American Literature in the Foreign Languages and Literatures Department
of Chiao Tung University, Hsinchu. Her book on modernist poetics and countermodernities
is forthcoming from Duke University Press.
William Buetler is an Innovation Manager at NMS and an active member of the Wikipedia
community. He has written for the Washington Monthly and Weekly Standard, and has
appeared on Bloggingheads.tv, ‘The Radio Factor’ with Bill O’Reilly and NPR’s ‘Wait, Wait,
Don’t Tell Me!’. Beutler received a degree in English from the University of Oregon, where he
spent two years as editor-in-chief of the student-run Oregon Commentator.
Ilya Eric Lee is an Internet cultural activist, independent researcher, coordinator/
project manager and sociology PhD student based in Taipei and Hsinchu, Taiwan. He has devoted the last decade to open-source and open-culture related projects, and has worked
at TELDAP, Taiwan (The e-Learning and Digital Archives Program) since 2004. His personal
interest is in strategic planning, participatory knowledge management and narrative architecture.
He currently represents TELDAP on the Culturemondo International Steering Committee, Ilya is also co-Chair of APAN (Asian-Pacific Advance Network) eCulture working group,
one of the co-founders of OSGeo, Taiwan, one of the supervisory board members of the
Software Liberty Association of Taiwan, and a member of staff at the Social Brain Foundation:
All roles which converge on the everyday practices of our information society. He enjoys interdisciplinary practices and hybridity experiments, theoretical dialogues and methodological
adventures. Right now connecting back to the tradition of Science Technology Studies and
contextualizing Japanese agriculture innovations are his favorite subjects of study.
Zona Yi-Ping Tsou is a graduate student at the National Central University, Chungli,
Taiwan. Since she has written her thesis on an avant-garde poet in Taiwan who utilizes Internet technology to make a trasnparent poetry volume, she has become interested in questions
of user generated technologies and subcultural representations.
Zainab Bawa is a PhD student at the Centre for the Study of Culture and Society, Bangalore,
India. She studies urban spaces.
Johanna Niesyto is a PhD student in political sciences. She works as a research fellow
in the project "Changing Protest and Media Cultures" at the collaborative research centre
“Media Upheavals” (University of Siegen, Germany). Her key interests cover globalisation,
public spaces, democracy, political campaigns, contentious politics, political consumerism,
cyberculture, and social web. In her thesis she looks at Wikipedia as a translingual public
space of political knowledge production. Johanna is co-editor/author of “Politik mit dem
Einkaufswagen” (Politics with the shopping trolley; Bielefeld 2007, together with S. Baringhorst,
V. Kneip and A Maerz), "Political Campaigning on the Web" (Bielefeld 2009, together with S. Baringhorst and V. Kneip),
"Protest Online/Offline" (Wiesbaden 2010, together with S. Baringhorst, V. Kneip and A Maerz).
Eric Zimmerman is a game designer, academic, and writer who has been working in
the game industry for more than 16 years. He has created dozens and dozens of games of
all kinds, from massively multiplayer online games to physical games designed for galleries
and musems to card and board games. Making games is his life’s passion. He has taught at
schools like MIT, NYU, and Parsons School of Design. Teaching has helped him understand
what games are and how to create meaningful experiences for players. He has written about
game design in books like Rules of Play, co-authored with Katie Salen, considered a standard
textbook for game design. Zimmerman is also the co-founder of Gamelab, a NYC-based
game development studio that was in operation for nine years with a peak staff of 30. Since
Gamelab closed last year, he has been teaching, consulting, and working on a wide range of
independent projects.
Stian Haklev is a Toronto-based activist for open access to research and open education,
and one of the founders of P2PU.
Han-teng Liao is a doctoral candidate at the Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford,
Oxford, U.K., and a doctoral fellow at the Institute of Sociology, Academia Sinica, Taipei,
Taiwan. As a student of various disciplines, his research reconsiders the role of keywords (sociolinguistics)
and hyperlinks (webometrics) in shaping groups (governance) as bearers of ideas
(political communication). He proposes the theory of keyword economy and corresponding
geo-linguistic analysis, with his PhD project on a comparative study of two major user-contributed Chinese encyclopedias, Chinese Wikipedia and Baidu Baike. He holds an MSc in Computer
Science and Information Engineering, an MA in Journalism, a BSc in Electrical Engineering and
a BA in Foreign Languages and Literatures, all from the National Taiwan University.
Namita Malhotra is a researcher of the Alternative Law Forum in Bangalore, and works
on an interdisciplinary project on law and media. She is interested in exploring the intersections of law, culture, and new technologies. She has recently created two comic rescensions
on copyright and trademark, and has compiled a database on queer readings of popular
culture.
Scott Kildall
is a cross-disciplinary artist working with video, installation, print, sculpture and performance. He gathers material from the public realm as the crux of his artwork in the form of interventions into various concepts of space. He holds a Bachelor of Arts degree in Political Philosophy from Brown University and a Master of Fine Arts degree from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago through the Art and Technology Studies Department. He exhibits his work internationally in galleries and museums. Scott Kildall has received fellowships and awards from organizations including the Kala Art Institute, the Banff Centre for the Arts, turbulence.org and the Eyebeam Art and Technology Center.
Nathaniel Stern is an American-born interdisciplinary artist who works in a variety of
media, including interactive art, public art interventions, installation, video art, net.art and
printmaking. He is currently working as an Assistant Professor of Art at the University of
Wisconsin–Milwaukee. Stern graduated with a degree in Textiles and Apparel Design from
Cornell University in Ithaca, New York in 1999, and went on to study at the Interactive Telecommunications
Program at New York University, graduating in 2001. He later taught digital art at
the University of the Witwatersrand, while also practicing as an artist, in Johannesburg, South
Africa from 20012006. He holds a PhD from Trinity College in Dublin, Ireland, where he wrote a
dissertation on interactive art and embodiment.
Rut Jesus is a PhD student based in Copenhagen. She is studying cooperation and
distributed cognition in Wikiarticles. She studied Physics and Philosophy at Harvard University,
worked for Learning Lab Denmark at the Center for Learning Games and ran different
workshops in the interface of gaming/reflection/play, with themes as diverse as sexual identity
or ontology, for activists and academics.
Anne Goldenberg is a PhD student based in Montreal. She just completed her thesis
in sociology and communication in which she studied negotiations of contributions in public
wikis. She is also a wiki and free software researcher and practitioner. She directed the
Wikigraphe project, sponsored by the CIAM. She also co-organized the RococoCamp/
RecentchangesCamp who was held in Montreal 2006. She taught free software and wiki
principles to several classes (UQAM, UPAM), research groups (labCMO, Computer society),
community groups (Studio XX, Koumbit) and Unions (Studio XX, Koumbit, CCCP). She is also
specialized in the organization of OpenSpace (Rocococamp, UPAM, SAT Code Forum). [Our
Coll(nn)ective Mind] is her second artistic exploration of the wiki principle. She had set up a first version of the project
at the Artivistic Festival in October 2009, Montreal, before the Bangalore installation.
