More About the Participants

By his own description, Buzz is "a geek wanna be, ActiveWords evangelist, and small town Minnesota boy." He's going to speak about ActiveWords, how they market it, how word-of-mouth has been important, his experiences at DEMO, and more. He's also kindly arranging for a free copy of ActiveWords for all attendees at the conference.

Tessa's debut feature film, Five Wives, Three Secretaries and Me, a documentary which examines the rarefied world of her multiply-married, oil-tycoon father, opened to rave reviews at the Quad Theater in New York in October 1999 and has since gone on to play art houses across the country. It was selected by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences for the 2001 Outstanding Contemporary Documentary series, and ran for a year on the Showtime cable networks. It was released on DVD in December, 2002.

Asset Pictures, the company she founded in 1994, has produced theater and film projects in New York and Los Angeles. Her new documentary, Project A.L.S., is a film about an activist organization created to combat Lou Gehrig's Disease, a fatal and rapacious affliction for which there is neither treatment nor cure. The short feature won both the Media That Matters award at the Human Rights Film Festival and the audience award at the Nantucket Film Festival.

She recently served as Chairman of the Board for the noted New York theater company, Naked Angels, where she founded the Naked Angels School.

Tessa is a graduate of Choate Rosemary Hall and a Morehead Scholar at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

As co-author of the non-fiction bestseller, 13th Gen: Abort, Retry, Ignore, Fail (Random House), Next: Young American Writers on the New Generation (W.W. Norton), and author of the fictional novel, Quickening, Ian spent some time as spokesperson for his generation. His writing career began as an undergrad at Chapel Hill where Ian penned "Wednesday's Child," the hilarious weekly column for The Daily Tar Heel. He has written cover stories for The Washington Post Magazine, and his work has been featured in The New York Times, Newsweek, and The Atlantic Monthly. He has shared the sofa on The Oprah Winfrey Show and was profiled on CNN.

His short film, The Rescue of Autumn, which Ian wrote and directed, has been acquired by Atom-bomb.com and is an official selection of the Flicker Film Festival. More recently, Ian has been writing the movie trailers that visit your local multiplex. His work includes trailers for such box office hits as Double Jeopardy, Stuart Little, the comedies Mystery Men and Superstar, and those cool "Heads Will Roll" commercials for Sleepy Hollow. Ian lives in New York and is currently working on his next book, entitled "Dork."

• Ian Williams' weblog

Lisa Sloniowski is the information literacy coordinator for the University of Windsor's Leddy Library. Her research interests include the role of libraries in relation to social justice issues, with a particular focus on information literacy and the use of Internet resources to develop critical thinking skills and connect activist communities. Lisa holds two Master's degees, in English Literature and Information Studies, and has published and presented at various conferences on issues relating to the research behaviour of undergraduate students, web search strategies and the role of information literacy in librarianship.

• Voices of Dissent: Finding Alternative Press On-Line
• Canadian Geographic Bio

Ever since stumbling upon Ted Nelson's Computer Lib/Dream Machines in the Sarnia Public Library, Mita Sen-Roy has held a facination for words, computers, and where they intersect.

She has worked in government, public, corporate and academic libraries. Presently, Mita is the science librarian at the Leddy Library at the University of Windsor. With Lisa Sloniowski, she is responsible for Iraq 2003: Sources of News.

• University of Windsor Bio
• Mita's weblog

Steven Garrity is currently creative director at silverorange, and formerly the guitar player for the ill fated band horton's choice. He is also an avid weblogger at Acts of Volition.

Peter Rukavina is principle of Reinvented Inc., a small systems design and consulting company based in Prince Edward Island, Canada. Before founding Reinvented Inc., Peter worked for 15 years as a freelance computer programmer and graphic designer for clients including the Royal Ontario Museum, Canadian Tire, and the University of Toronto and for a wide variety of small business and not-for-profit clients.

Art is the Systems Librarian at the Leddy Library at the University of Windsor and holds an adjunct appointment at the Queen Elizabeth II Library at Memorial University of Newfoundland. He is keenly interested in solving the problems of information retrieval and digital libraries. He spends much of his time pondering the Internet.

Stephen Regoczei is a designer and a conceptual analyst. Recently, he decided to save the world, thinking that he is just about as highly qualified as anyone else is. He lives with a permanent coffeehouse mentality, and loves to talk about interesting things such as administrative systems. By cultural background he is Hungarian, but married into a solid British clan. For Canadian content, he bicycled across the Maritimes, dug for dinosaurs in Alberta, and thought that Expo67 was really great. He has worked as a sleeping car porter, a mathematician, a tobacco picker, and a salesman.

He has encyclopaedic interests, with a certain modest amount of encyclopaedic knowledge that flows from such interests. In particular, he collects books, and publishes scholarly papers on conceptual analysis and computational linguistics. He derives his livelihood from Trent University where he has formed the Department of Interesting Things (and Stuff), The Systems Group (TSG), and the Trent Multimedia Laboratory (TMmL).

His undergraduate student years were spent in Hart House, at the University of Toronto, where he played cards, chess, and go. He loves reading old editions of the Whole Earth Catalog, while listening to Stan Rogers and Georges Brassens. He is humbly grateful to his wife Jennifer, and daughter Claire, age 11, who tell him what is going on in the outside world.

John Muir continues to be passionately devoted to the oral/aural tradition. It's through this discipline that he has gained skills and thirty years experience as a broadcaster, administrator & technician. John's formal experience began as a chorister in Ottawa and continued in England where he learned something of the art of campanology at a village church, and radio communications with the British Army. While still in England, he apprenticed as a recording technician/tea maker at an electronic music studio while gaining experience working as a as a rigger for music concerts.

John is one of the founding directors of Trent Radio, and has acted in numerous technical and administrative roles for a variety of other visual and performance arts organisations, as well as a freelance producer and concert engineer.

Dave grew up on PEI, moved away 15 years ago, and moved back last year. He has schooled, lived, worked in Toronto, Boston, Bahrain and Dubai (Middle East), Memphis, and San Francisco (twice). He worked many years for FedEx and also did the "San Francisco dot-com thing." His interests include weblogs, communities, music, and digital media. Dave is currently heading T4G's hospitality and tourism division located in Prince Edward Island.

Dan James is currently CEO and one of several founders of silverorange. He has occasionally been known to speak publicly about topics ranging from the death of his dog to the value of leadership.

Rob Paterson is an organizational architect. His practice, The Renewal Consulting Group, based on PEI, specializes in designing organizations and processes that use the principles of partnership and the Knowledge Economy. Prior to attending Oxford, Rob was a diamond prospector for De Beers in Botswana. At one time or another, Rob has lived in England, Spain, West Africa and several cities in Canada.

Heather is an experienced graphic designer in Charlottetown PEI. She has worked in both digital and print media. Currently she's Assistant, Communications & Education, at the Medical Society of PEI.

Will Pate is a web designer, university student, weblogger, and man about town. He works as the President of Pate Web Consulting.

Daniel is an interface designer, international traveler, disc golfer, and one of the co-founders of silverorange.

Isaac is a programmer, lover of gadgets, amateur digital photographer, and one of the co-founders of silverorange.

Iain is a Linux hardware designer (Engineer) in Stratford PEI. “We build low power - low cost embedded linux machines. Our first major device is for a VOIP over Fiber. But we're getting asked to do more and more stuff - GPS, GPRS, CDPD etc... Once the hardware boots linux, it becomes a fuzzy line between traditional embedded programming, and web programming. That's why I'd like to get to know everybody.”

Sébastien is a computer scientist and physicist who's fascinated with emerging knowledge sharing technologies and social software. He works in Moncton, New Brunswick, as a researcher in the elearning group at the National Research Council of Canada. In his copious spare time he likes to play guitar, synth, and ocarina.

Sebastian studied Psychology at the University of Erlangen-Nürnberg, Germany, and the University of Wales at Cardiff, United Kingdom. He earned an advanced degree in Psychology from the University of Erlangen-Nürnberg and a MEd in Instructional Technology from the University of Georgia, USA, where he was also working as a research assistant in the Learning Performance Support Lab (LPSL). Sebastian is currently pursuing his doctoral degree in Media Pedagogy (Medienpädagogik) at the University of Augsburg, Germany. He is teaching graduate seminars in the Media Pedagogy program at the University of Augsburg and seminars on Human-Centered Design in the joined Media Didactics program of the University of Zürich and the ETH in Switzerland. In parallel to his academic activities Sebastian works as a free-lancing consultant on Human-Centered Design and Educational Technology projects for corporate clients.

Stephen is a web designer and developer at silverorange. Stephen is also the owner and developer of myRPHA.com, a fantasy based hockey game that he has been working on as a side project since 1997.

Leila Boujnane is currently CEO and co-founder of Idée a Toronto based software firm developing visual search technologies. Prior to co-founding Idée, Leila worked for 10 years as a consultant for technology firms including Algorithmics, Infinity Financial Technology and Bank of Montreal. She was a pioneer in the early development of multilingual interactive solutions. Leila is keenly interested in solving image retrieval challenges and is regularly spotted talking to her dog Robert.