As co-founder of Agaric Design Collective, Benjamin Melançon develops and maintains web sites for companies, organizations, and individuals, using open source free software. He also promotes and supports several nonprofit organizations, especially public interest news sources, including the Fund for Authentic Journalism, Art For Change in Spanish Harlem New York, Gringoyo Productions, and The NewStandard. He helped found and was elected to the board of directors of the Amazing Things Arts Center and is helping to form a nonprofit called People Who Give a Damn. He has worked in media, retail and consulting. He attended the University of Massachusetts-Amherst on a Commonwealth Scholarship and studied journalism, economics, political science and information technology.

Dan Schultz is a sophomore at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, where he is studying Information Systems. His professional experience has been limited to technically oriented internships, but he is known among friends for his independent work on dynamic web systems. Schultz began exploring the potential of the Internet as a community facilitator during his freshman year of high school. He built a forum and polling system from scratch, which he has used as an outlet for his talents in Information Systems. In pursuing his undergraduate degree from CMU, he is considering minors in Computer Science, Mathematical Sciences, and Policy and Management. He plans to improve his abilities as a programmer and a thinker and looks forward to taking on some of the creative challenges that lie ahead for this field.

Dori J. Maynard is president and CEO of the Robert C. Maynard Institute for Journalism Education, the nation’s leading trainer of journalists of color. She is the co-author of “Letters to My Children,” a compilation of nationally syndicated columns by her late father, Bob Maynard, the first African American to own a major metropolitan newspaper. Maynard was a reporter at the The Bakersfield Californian, The Patriot Ledger in Quincy, Mass., and the Detroit Free Press. In 1993, she and her father became the first father-daughter duo to be appointed Nieman Fellows at Harvard University.

G. Patton “Pat” Hughes has worked in a wide variety of media jobs, including community journalism, advertising, online hosting, clerking, TV reporting, sports reporting, and marketing. As the population of Paulding County, Ga. began to boom, Hughes saw the opportunity for a hyperlocal news site and obtained the Paulding.com domain in 1997 as editor of a local weekly newspaper. Monthly reach in the community is about 30 percent of households. Hughes has a B.A. degree from Hendrix College and is married with two children.

J.D. Lasica is an independent strategist, journalist, author and social media pioneer. He is president of the Social Media Group, a company that offers consulting in social media, video and podcasting services to companies and organizations. He is also co-founder and president of Ourmedia, a free community site and learning center for user-created video and audio. His book, “Darknet: Hollywood’s War Against the Digital Generation” explores the personal media revolution and the emerging media landscape. He was the first new media columnist for both the American Journalism Review and Online Journalism Review. He writes about citizen media and social networks at Socialmedia.biz. CNET named him one of the 100 top media bloggers in the world.

Jay Rosen teaches journalism at New York University, where he has been on the faculty since 1986. From 1999 to 2005 he was department chair. Rosen is the author of PressThink, a weblog about journalism issues that launched in September 2003. In June 2005, PressThink won the Reporters Without Borders 2005 Freedom Blog award for outstanding defense of free expression. He also blogs at the Huffington Post. In July 2006 he announced the debut of NewAssignment.Net, his experimental site for pro-am, open source reporting projects. His book about the rise of the civic journalism movement, What Are Journalists For?, was published in 1999 by Yale University Press. He lives in New York City.

Paul Lamb is a consultant and entrepreneur with more than 20 years of experience in business, nonprofit management, technology and public policy. He is currently the principal of Man on a Mission Consulting, a management consulting firm dedicated to leveraging technology for the social good. Paul is a founder and former executive director of Street Tech, an award-winning program providing computer training and job placement for low-income and underserved youth in San Francisco’s East Bay. Paul’s business background includes positions in U.S.-Asia relations at the U.S.-China Business Council in Washington, D.C., and Ernst & Young. Paul is a graduate of Earlham College, the Johns Hopkins University-Nanjing University’s Center for Chinese and American Studies, and the University of California, San Diego’s School for International Relations and Pacific Studies.

Leslie Rule is director of the newly created Center for Locative Media. She also runs the Digital Storytelling Initiative at KQED, the PBS station in San Francisco, working in the fields of Community Education and Outreach. She is an acknowledged expert on using digital storytelling as a communication strategy, sat on the Executive Board of the Digital Storytelling Association, and is on the advisory board of ourmedia.org. Currently she is using mobile devices and emerging technologies to create location-specific, community-based narrative projects, including “Scape the Hood,” a neighborhood narrative; “Re-storying,” a creek restoration project; “100 Years Later,” a community walk through San Francisco’s 1906 earthquake; and a social justice project inspired by Eyes on the Prize.” Ms. Rule has undergraduate degrees in Rhetoric and linguistics from U.C. Berkeley and an M.A. in Education with an emphasis in instructional Technology. She lives high atop the hills of San Francisco with her beloved son Thom and her beastly border collie, Bella.

Steven Clift is a public speaker and consultant who has worked across 25 countries, tapping the extremely small market of governments willing to pay for advice on how to listen to people online. A one time Visiting Fellow at the Institute for New Media Studies at the University of Minnesota, he is a new Ashoka Fellow now focused full-time on expanding non-profit E-Democracy.org’s local network of volunteer-based forums on public issues. Through E-Democracy.Org, Clift fosters conversations that create news in local communities in Minnesota, England, and New Zealand. In 1994, with the launch of the world’s first election information website, he coined the term “e-democracy.” He coordinated Minnesota’s early e-government efforts through 1997 while volunteering with E-Democracy.Org. Democracies Online, Clift’s blog/wiki/online community of practice opened in 1998 at DoWire.Org and his past speeches and articles are available at Publicus.Net.