Doug Engelbart, the founder and Director of Bootstrap Institute, has an unparalleled forty-year track record in predicting, designing, and implementing the future of organizational computing. From his early vision of turning organizations into augmented knowledge workshops, he went on to pioneer what is now known as collaborative hypermedia, knowledge management, community networking, and organizational transformation. Well-known technological firsts include the mouse, hypermedia, display editing, windows, outline processing, and groupware. Engelbart has received numerous awards for outstanding lifetime achievement and ingenuity, including the National Medal of Technology, the ACM Turing Award, and the IEEE John Von Neumann Medal. (481)
Richard P. Gabriel is a Distinguished Engineer at Sun Microsystems and President of The Hillside Group. His research areas include emergent software architecture, development methodologies, organizations (including chaordic organizations), and patterns and pattern languages. He is also interested in the philosophy of programming language, organization, and environment design -- all from the viewpoint of the design and construction theories of architect Christopher Alexander. Richard has published more than a hundred scientific, technical, and semipopular papers, articles, and essays on computing, and numerous poems in literary magazines. His most recent book is Writers' Workshops & the Work of Making Things (Addison-Wesley 2002). Throughout his twenty-five-year career in academia and industry Richard has endeavored to bring together art and science, artists and scientists. (483)
Christine Peterson is cofounder and President of Foresight Institute, a nonprofit that educates the public, the technical community, and policymakers on nanotechnology and its long-term effects. She also works with Freedom Technology Ventures LLC, and serves on the Advisory Board of Alameda Capital. She coauthored Unbounding the Future: the Nanotechnology Revolution (Morrow 1991) and Leaping the Abyss: Putting Group Genius to Work (knOwhere Press 1997), and is credited with coining the term "open source software." (485)
Henri Poole is a social entrepreneur, technologist, and software activist. He is currently exploring virtual communities, reputations, and gift economies with Affero, a start-up he cofounded in 2001. Prior to starting Affero, Henri led MandrakeSoft of Paris, France, to become one of the world's leading creators of the GNU/Linux operating system. In 1993, Henri co-founded and led Vivid Studios, a leading Internet consulting firm, until it's sale to Platinum Technologies in 1998. Henri currently serves on the advisory board of the Free Software Foundation. (487)