Mark Surman

Mark Surman is in the business of connecting things: people, ideas, everything. A community technology activist for almost 20 years, Mark is currently the executive director of the Mozilla Foundation, with a focus on inventing new ways to promote openness and opportunity on the Internet. On the side, Mark convenes conversations about ‘open everything‘ in his home town of Toronto and around the world.

Before joining Mozilla, Mark was an open philanthropy fellow at the Shuttleworth Foundation in South Africa, he invented new ways to apply open source thinking to social innovation. Earlier, he was the founding director of telecentre.org, a $26 million effort to network community technology activists in countries around the world. Mark has also served as president of the Commons Group, Director of Content and Community at Web Networks and senior advisor to the Volunteer @ction Online grants program team. Mark’s first real job was training social activists to make their own documentaries in the early 1990s.

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James Whatley

James Whatley is Director of Engagement Strategy for 1000heads. Having spent the summer of 2009 representing Lucozade as their Social Media Reporter throughout the Lucozade Energy Challenges, he currently spends his days advising the biggest brands on how to maximise the use of Word Of Mouth to engage with consumers in brand new ways. Founder of the Mobile Geeks of London, Co-founder of The Really Mobile Project and key advisor to mobile web twitter service Dabr, James lives and breathes mobile in every way, shape and form.

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Pete Barr-Watson

Pete Barr-Watson is now working as CTO of Storyplanet Inc, and is an interactive design industry veteran, his background planted firmly in the world of digital creativity. As a founding director (and COO) of one of the UK’s most prestigious new media agencies his award-winning work includes such diversities as a 10 episode cartoon series for TV (still being aired in Europe) and co-authoring technical/creative books such as ‘New Masters of Flash 2002′ (pub: Friends of Ed).

He has worked extensively as interim CTO/COO and technology consultant for several internet startups on behalf of their VC companies and has been a two-time jury member at the prestigious Prix Ars Electronica arts festival in Austria. Most recently Pete worked for Microsoft in Seattle for two years as a Senior Business Development Manager on the Silverlight group of products. Prior to joining Microsoft, he worked as the Director of Business Development at Creative Commons in San Francisco.

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Thomas Vander Wal

Thomas Vander Wal is a Social Interaction Designer with a focus on helping to get more value out of social web services & tools. He focusses on companies building tools and services for public web use as well as inside the firewall. He has a strong background in information interaction and building for use and reuse of that information. He runs his own consultancy at InfoCloud Solutions where he works with large companies down to start-ups helping them optimize their offerings.

Thomas’ passion is easing the flow and use of information and digital social interaction through reducing friction.

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Brian Suda

Brian Suda is an informatician currently residing in Reykjavík, Iceland. He has spent a good portion of each day connected to Internet after discovering it back in 1996. Most recently, he has been working closely on the Microformats project writing code, gardening the wiki, and hammering out FAQs and specifications. His own little patch of Internet can be found at suda.co.uk where many of his past projects and crazy ideas can be found.

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Josh Russell

Josh Russell has a diverse background in creating businesses, and doing strategy for small startups and large organisations on a range of projects. Most notably for Comic Relief on the Live 8 and Make Poverty History campaigns, where scale, pressure and innovation are really tested, and at Microsoft as a user experience evangelist taking technologies to new audiences.

In 2003 he created one of the first networks of free wifi hotspots, to support the emerging community of nomadic technologists. This evolved into Metranet, an independent and robust next generation wireless infrastructure company, currently shaking up the telco industry with Wimax, or 4G mobile networks.

His passion is in making things work, from the ground up, with strong and sustainable business models, and clear understanding of industry trends and opportunities.

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