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Speakers | Web Directions South

Speakers

• Douglas Crockford
• Jina Bolton
• Lynne D Johnson
• Derek Featherstone
• Jeffrey Veen
• Jeff Croft
• Daniel Burka
• Mark Pesce
• Gabriel White
• Michael(tm) Smith
• Ruth Ellison
• Craig Sharkie
• Teale Shapcott
• Myles Eftos
• Lucas Chan
• Dmitry Baranovskiy
• Kay Smoljak
• Diana Mounter
• David Peterson
• Laurel Papworth
• Grant Young
• Hurol Inan

Douglas Crockford

Douglas Crockford is a product of the US public school system. A registered voter, he owns his own car. He has developed office automation systems. He did research in games and music at Atari. He was Director of Technology at Lucasfilm. He was Director of New Media at Paramount. He was the founder and CEO of Electric Communities/Communities.com. He was founder and CTO of State Software, where he discovered JSON. He is now an architect at Yahoo!. He is the world’s foremost living authority on JavaScript.

Douglas will be presenting Ajax security as well as a full day workshop, Javascript - The Good Parts.

Jina Bolton

Jina Bolton is a designer and artist, working and residing in Silicon Valley. She is excited to be involved with the CSS Eleven, and has spoken at conferences in North America and the UK.

Jina is a co-author of The Art & Science of CSS, and has also written articles for publications including SitePoint, .net Magazine, and Vitamin (of which she is an advisor). Jina has consulted for various agencies and organizations including the W3C Web Accessibility Initiative and Mass.Gov.

She holds a BFA in Computer Arts and Graphic Design from Memphis College of Art. Jina enjoys traveling, is learning Italian, and considers herself a sushi enthusiast.

Jina will be presenting Creating sexy stylesheets.

Lynne D Johnson

Lynne d Johnson is the Senior Editor/Community Director for FastCompany.com, a leading website and community for people passionate about business ideas that also offers the complete content of Fast Company magazine. She also writes Digital Media Diva, a technology blog following web, media, and consumer trends for FastCompany.com, and has recently served as a guest blogger or columnist for TheDailyVoice, techPresident, Black Web 2.0, Rushmore Drive, IAC’s online community for African Americans.

Lynne also serves on the Board of Directors of the Literary Freedom Project, a nonprofit arts organization, which seeks to empower communities of color through literature, creative thinking, and new media. Prior to joining Fast Company, she was the General Manager, New Media for VIBE, SPIN, and VIBE Vixen where she she managed marketing, editorial, production, business development, and sales operations for the magazines’ websites and mobile properties. Her personal blog, Lynne d Johnson || music, media, my life, which launched in July 2001, is the recipient of the 2006 Black Weblog Awards Black Blogger Achievement Award.

Derek Featherstone

Engaging, surprising, and inspiring, Derek Featherstone is an internationally-known authority on accessibility and web development, a respected technical trainer, and author. Creator of in-depth courses on HTML, CSS, DOM Scripting, and Web 2.0 applications, his approach never fails to champion the cause of web standards and universal accessibility. As founder of Further Ahead, he has been an in-demand consultant to government agencies, educational institutions, and private sector companies since 1999. He is the leader of the Accessibility Task Force of the influential Web Standards Project and also serves on their DOM Scripting Task Force.

Derek will be presenting Web App Accessibility as well as a full day workshop, Real World Accessibility for Ajax and Web Apps.

Jeffrey Veen

Jeffrey Veen is an internationally sought-after speaker, author, and user experience consultant. As a consultant, Jeffrey has been involved in designing the leading blog and social media applications on the web, including Blogger, TypePad, Flickr, and more. Jeff also led the creation of Measure Map, the well-received blog analytics tool acquired by Google in 2006.

After five years with Adaptive Path, where he was a founding partner, Jeff moved to Google, where he where he lead the redesign of their Analytics product and managed their web apps UX team. He left Google in May, 2008, to work on personal projects. Previously, Jeffrey served as the Executive Director of Interface Design for Wired Digital and Lycos Inc., where he managed the look and feel of HotWired, the HotBot search engine, Lycos.com and others.

In addition to lecturing and writing on web design and development, Jeffrey has been active with the World Wide Web Consortium’s CSS Editorial Review Board as an invited expert on electronic publishing. He is also the author of the acclaimed books The Art & Science of Web Design and HotWired Style: Principles for Building Smart Web Sites.

In 1998, Jeffrey was named by CNET as one of the “First Annual Web Innovators” and has won the Communication Arts Interactive Annual award for his work on Wired News. Other clients include Technorati, Creative Commons, Macromedia, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and National Public Radio.

Jeffrey specializes in the integration of content, graphic design, and technology from a user-centered perspective.

Jeffrey will be presenting Designing our way through data.

Jeff Croft

Jeff Croft is a web designer and developer at Blue Flavor, an experience and design consultancy in Seattle. Beyond his work for Blue Flavor, Jeff is a blogger, speaker, critic, and industry thought leader. Prior to joining Blue Flavor, Jeff was a Senior Designer at World Online, an online journalism outfit responsible for a host of award-winning websites and the place of origin for Django, the Python-based open-source Web framework for perfectionists with deadlines.

Jeff has been designing and developing web sites nearly as long as there have been web sites to design and develop. He created his first web page in 1994 and got his first web-related job in 1995. Although Jeff possess many technical skills, his true passion lies in visual design, user interface, communication, and social media.

Jeff has recently co-authored two books, Pro CSS Techniques, published by Apress, and Web Standards Creativity, published by Friends of ED.

Jeff will be presenting Elegant web typography as well as a full day workshop, Building a Custom CMS with Django.

Daniel Burka

Daniel is the creative director at Digg, a founder of Pownce, and a founder of the Canadian web firm silverorange.

At silverorange, Daniel worked with a wide range of clients including Mozilla, Ning, Revision3, and Sloan. He’s since been lured to San Francisco after Kevin Rose dangled the prospect of In ‘N Out burgers and the opportunity to develop the user experience for the social news website Digg. As Digg’s creative director, Daniel has helped the site grow from a niche technology news site into one of the leading media services on the web with a massive and passionate community. Recently, along with Leah Culver and Kevin, Daniel helped found Pownce - a social network that lets you share files, events, messages, and links with your friends. Daniel works on feature development and the user interface of Pownce.

Daniel will be presenting Interaction design case studies.

Mark Pesce

Known internationally as the man who fused virtual reality with the World Wide Web to invent VRML, Mark Pesce has been exploring the frontiers of media and technology for a quarter of a century. The author of five books and numerous articles, Pesce has written for WIRED, Feed, Salon, PC Magazine, and The Age.

For the last three seasons, Pesce has been a panelist on the hit ABC show The New Inventors. From 2003 to 2006, Pesce chaired the Emerging Media and Interactive Design Program at the world-renowned Australian Film Television and Radio School. In February he received an appointment as an Honorary Associate at the University of Sydney, and has gone on to found FutureSt, a Sydney media and technology consultancy.

Mark will be presenting the Closing Keynote of Web Directions South 2008: The human network - sharing, knowledge and power in the 21st century.

Gabriel White

Gabriel is a seasoned interaction designer and world traveler. Currently Interaction Design Director at Punchcut in San Francisco, Gabriel was a Principal Designer at Frog Design, led design teams at Motorola China, visited Microsoft’s Research Lab in Beijing, and consulted in Australia.

With ten years’ experience in the design industry and a deep understanding of the mobile space, Gabriel is passionate about creating meaningful products and services that help improve people’s lives. He has written for ACM Interactions Magazine, and publishes regularly through his mobile design blog, Small Surfaces. Gabriel was the interaction design lead for Motorola’s MotoFone, a phone designed specifically for poor, non-literate people in developing countries.

Gabriel will be presenting Sensing context in mobile design.

Michael(tm) Smith

Michael(tm) Smith is co-chair of the W3C HTML Working Group (helping develop the next version of the Web’s core language, HTML5) as well as one-half of a tag team of W3C rowdies who do the grunt work for the Web Applications Working Group.

Mike’s been involved in design, development, testing, and deployment of Internet applications for more than 10 years — from carrier-grade e-mail delivery systems and server-side content-transformation technologies to Web browsers deployed across a range of devices.

Before joining the W3C, he worked on systems for mobile operators in Japan — at Openwave Systems (whose mobile browser has shipped on more than one billion handsets) and at Opera Software (whose mobile browser was the first “full” browser to ship preinstalled on handsets in Japan). At the W3C, he started as the Asia lead for the Mobile Web Initiative before shifting to his current focus on work related to core browser technologies.

Mike will be presenting A Jungle Cruise through the Wild Regions of HTML5 and Surrounding Territories as well as appearing at the W3C Workshop - Building the Semantic Web.

Ruth Ellison

Ruth Ellison is an interaction designer and user experience practitioner. She is extremely passionate about creating accessible and useful user experiences.

Ruth has over six years experience working on a number of accessibility and user-centred design projects across the Government and private sectors. She is currently a senior consultant at Stamford Interactive, a usability and user-centred design consultancy. She takes a holistic approach to her design work, drawing upon her background of accessibility, usability and human-computer interaction.

In her free time, Ruth can be found out and about taking photos, renovating her house and making music.

Ruth will be presenting Integrating accessibility into design.

Craig Sharkie

A degree in Fine Art may seem an odd stepping stone to a career in coding, but its a step that’s led Craig Sharkie on a journey lasting over 13 years. With tenure at the Australian operations of Ziff Davis, AOL and Yahoo!, Craig’s seen the Internet bubble, burst, and be reinvented, and at each turn his foundation in visualising the Web has stood him in good stead.

Focussing on accessible, extensible, and usable HTML and CSS solutions to both leading edge and legacy development issues, Craig continues to use the best of JavaScript to deliver interfaces that marry a user’s goals with corporate aims. From onclick to Unobtrusive Scripting, via the DOM and Ajax, he enjoys coding standards based solutions even more than championing them.

Craig will be presenting Javascript libraries - Putting the cross in cross-browser compatible.

Teale Shapcott

Teale commenced her career in web development and graphic design in 1998. She is currently working within Suncorp’s Business Technology division as a Designer for internal web applications specialising in web standards, usability, accessibility, xHTML and CSS. Her primary focus in her current role is embedding usability practice into agile web development within Suncorp.

Teale will be presenting From disordered to managed usability in an Agile environment.

Myles Eftos

Myles is a Perth-based Web developer who feels as at home building INNER JOINS as he does calculating the specificity of CSS selectors. He has worked in all the major web languages, with his weapon of choice being Ruby on Rails. He is a big advocate of semantic CSS, and unobtrusive JavaScript. He has a weakness for code double dares, many of which have resulted in crazy experiments, such as @baggygreen: a twitter cricket commentator and a version of Super Mario Bros. written entirely in HTML, CSS and JavaScript.

During his 8-years in the industry, working under the moniker of MadPilot Productions, he has worked with pretty much everyone in Perth. He has also been on the committee of the Australian Web Industry Association since it’s inception, currently residing in the role of event coordinator.

Myles will be presenting Web APIs, Oauth and OpenID: A developer’s guide.

Lucas Chan

Lucas has been building the web since 1995 and has vast experience developing applications of all colours, shapes and sizes with a particular focus on community driven apps. As Systems Manager at SitePoint he spends his time tinkering with elastic clouds (Amazon EC2), managing high-performance scalable web sites and whipping large data sets into shape.

Lucas has an obsession with fixed-gear track bikes and his name is sometimes seen in a decidedly small font size next to well known breakbeat and drum & bass artists.

Lucas will be presenting Choosing the right web application framework.

Dmitry Baranovskiy

Dmitry has over 8 years experience in creating web applications. Having started as a back end developer, more recently he has changed his orientation to front end development and even pure design. These days he spends his working hours trying to embrace a wide range of front end technologies while working as a UI Developer for Atlassian.

He is also the creator of Optimus, the Microformats transformer, as well as a Microformats based conference scheduler creator. At any given moment he is always working on three secret projects, though no one knows where he gets the time for any of this.

Dmitry will be presenting Start Using Web Vector Graphics Today.

Kay Smoljak

Kay has been working with the web since the dark days of the last

millennium. She left full time employment to start Clever Starfish

with her partner and two overly bossy cats in 2006, and does not miss

commuting in the slightest. Because she’s a sucker for volunteering,

Kay sits on the committee of the Australian Web Industry Association (AWIA) and is one of the organisers of the WA Web Awards. She has three separate blogs (at last count) and also writes on ColdFusion for SitePoint and Fusion Authority.

Kay will be presenting Starting and running a successful web development business.

Diana Mounter

Diana Mounter combines her 10 years of experience in graphic design, IT, database management, and marketing to approach web project management creatively and with a fine-toothed comb. In her role at the Local Government and Shires Associations Diana designs, coordinates, and supports the Associations’ many websites, giving her experience working with both a CMS and custom build applications. A notable example is the success of the 2008 Cultural Awards website, which allows council officers and artists to showcase their cultural projects online.

This year she has introduced her enthusiasm of the web further into this sector by co-founding the Local Government Web Network. The network is designed to promote learning amongst government web coordinators, with the aim of improving the quality of Council websites for the benefit of their communities.

Diana will be presenting Custom V CMS – don’t take sides.

David Peterson

David Peterson has been a web developer since 1995. He works way up north in the tropics of Townsville, about as far from any tech as possible. Currently he is Head of Research at BoaB interactive and is working hard to kickstart the Semantic Web down under. Not only that, but he is an Advisory Committee representative to the W3C. Wow.

His wonderful family, making lovely photographs and searching for the perfect espresso keeps him happy.

David will be presenting Climate change and next generation distributed social networks.

Laurel Papworth

Laurel teaches social media and marketing and public relations courses at Universities and Colleges here in Australia and overseas (Saudi Arabia). She also runs workshops with major media companies such as publishing houses, television and music companies on their social network strategies. Laurel consults with companies ranging from global electronics companies to dating communities to Australian Government departments on all things communication, collaboration and community.

Laurel will be presenting The business of being social.

Grant Young

Grant has worked for over a decade in web and media roles, more recently focusing on social media and networking opportunities for non-profits. Grant recently founded Zumio, a consulting business with an emphasis on online strategy development. Since starting Zumio earlier this year Grant has advised a number of organisations including WWF-Australia (Earth Hour 2008) and Amnesty International on social media and campaign development.

Previously Grant held the role of Online Communications Manager at WWF-Australia, and worked as Senior Producer at award-winning design agency Digital Eskimo. In these roles he advised on and produced projects incorporating a variety of social networking tools and approaches, including weblogs, wikis, Flickr, YouTube, MySpace and Facebook.

Grant has also developed web applications for the business sector in the areas of financial and carbon accounting. He presented on the topic of social media in the financial services sector at the Investor Weekly Branding conference in March 2008.

Grant will be presenting Strategies for social media engagement.

Hurol Inan

Hurol Inan is a sought-after consultant, speaker and author. He is widely recognised as a global authority on online analytics and research, and has authored two books on the subject – Measuring the Success of Your Website (2002) and Search Analytics (2006). Hurol has also written numerous articles for print and online publications.

Hurol is the Managing Director of Bienalto Consulting, a specialist consultancy based in Sydney that enables its clients to realise the full potential of online marketing and website performance. Bienalto provides web analytics, customer experience architecture and online marketing services to some of Australia’s leading businesses. Prior to founding Bienalto, Hurol consulted with Accenture and Deloitte for 11 years.

Hurol will be presenting Informing experience architecture with quantitative insights.