Panelist Biographies
Jim Baller is
a senior principal of the Baller Herbst Law Group, PC, in Washington,
DC. His practice includes a broad range of communications matters on
behalf of local governments and public power utilities in
more than
35 states. Over the last decade, he has been involved in most
of the leading community broadband projects in America, and he is widely
recognized as one of the nation.s knowledgeable attorneys in this area.
Since the
enactment of the Telecom Act of 1996, he has also participated
in numerous legislative and court battles over state barriers to municipal
entry, including a case that went to the Supreme Court of the United
States.
The National Association of Telecommunications Officers and Advisors
named him its Member of the Year for 2001. He is a graduate of Dartmouth
College and Cornell Law School.
Andrew Ó Baoill (facilitator)
- UIUC
Glenn Booth is the Director of
Marketing for Vivato. Glenn has over 20 years in engineering and marketing
with communications manufacturers and carriers. He is responsible for
providing wireless solutions into the rural, city, municipality and
educational markets for Vivato. Vivato makes wireless solutions based
around their "Smart
Antenna" technology enabling communities to build wireless networks
cost effectively.
Michael D. Brunelle (facilitator),
one of the co-organizers of the 2004 National Summit for Community
Wireless Networks, has worked for Prairienet Community Network for more
than three years and has supported a variety of community technology
initiatives throughout
Illinois. Michael holds a masters degree in Library and Information Science
and served as an intern for the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation's
U.S. Library Program. Michael recently served on an advisory committee
for the National Network of Libraries of Medicine and is moving
to Bryn Mawr, PA to pursue a long-held interest in becoming a physician.
Michael Calabrese is Vice
President of the New America Foundation, a nonpartisan policy institute
in Washington, D.C. As Director of the Spectrum Policy Program, Calabrese
oversees New America's efforts to improve our nation's management of
publicly-owned assets - particularly the radio frequency spectrum.
Previously, Mr. Calabrese served as General Counsel of the Congressional
Joint Economic Committee and as employee benefits counsel at the national
AFL-CIO. He is the co-author of three previous books on policy and
politics and has published opinion articles in the nation's leading
outlets, including the Atlantic Monthly, Washington Post, Wall Street
Journal and New York Times.
Annie Collins is
the Chairwoman of Fiber For Our Future, a municipal broadband project
seeking to establish Fiber to the Home (FTTH) in the TriCities. She
is a longtime community activist and a strong advocate of municipally
owned, fiber optic networking for community development.
Dr. Mark Cooper is Director
of Research at the Consumer Federation of America and a Fellow at the
Stanford Law School Center for Internet and Society, the Columbia Institute
on Tele-information and the Donald McGannon Communications Research
Center at Fordham University. He holds a PhD from Yale University and
is a former Yale University and Fulbright Fellow. He is the author
of numerous articles on digital society and telecommunications issues
and five books -- The Transformation of Egypt (1982), Equity and Energy
(1983), Cable Mergers and Monopolies (2002), Media Ownership and Democracy
in the Digital Information Age (2003), Open Architecture as Communications
Policy (2004). He has provided expert testimony in over 250 cases for
public interest clients including Attorneys General, People’s
Counsels, and citizen interveners before state and federal agencies,
courts and legislators in almost four dozen jurisdictions in the U.S.
and Canada on telecommunications and energy policy.
Dharma Dailey works
on spectrum issues for the Prometheus Radio Project. Her work seeks
to find ways to use unlicensed spectrum to bring free internet access,
internet radio, and more to communities all over the world.
Darrin Eden is currently serving
as Personal Telco Project, Inc.'s president. Personal Telco develops
community-operated networks through volunteer education and in partnership
with local businesses offering patrons free, wireless Internet access.
Mr. Eden lives and works as a network administrator in Portland, Oregon
because of the city's progressive policies, thoughtful urban planning
and amazing quality of life.
Harold Feld is the Associate
Director of the Media Access Project. He is the primary author of many
of the current public interest filings
on spectrum proceedings
at the FCC. He joined MAP in August 1999 after practicing communications,
Internet, and energy law at Covington & Burling. In 2002-2003,
he served on the ICANN Names Council as representative of the Noncommercial
Constituency, and currently serves as the Noncommercial Constituency
representative to the Advisory Committee of the Public Interest Registry
(which administers .org). Mr. Feld has written numerous articles
on Internet law and communications policy for trade publications
and legal journals. Media Access Project is a nonprofit public interest
law firm working to ensure a public voice in telecommunications policy.
Rob Flickenger
- A long time supporter of FreeNetworks and DIY networking, Rob is
a founding
member of the NoCat Network and one of the primary developers of NoCatAuth.
He has written three O'Reilly books about networking, including Building
Wireless Community Networks. He often presents ideas and projects at
various technology conferences, and enjoys spreading the good word
of open networks, open standards, and ubiquitous wireless networking.
Rob's current project is Metrix Communication LLC, providing wireless
hardware and software that embodies the same open source principles
he rants about in his books. He currently lives in Seattle, WA.
Kari Gray is the
Program Coordinator for the Common Assets Spectrum Campaign. Common
Assets was founded to reassert the public's ownership of the commons
by preventing giveaways of our common assets to private
interests. While we have three program areas, our founding mission
is perhaps
most understandable when it is applied to the battle for
spectrum and the current departure from Universal Service principles.
We are
dedicated to supporting efforts that assert the public's legal
right to our common airwaves.
Richard MacKinnon is
a Founder and CEO of LESSNetworks and the leader of the Austin Wireless
City Project. He has built a company around providing free software
and services empowering the Free WiFi Movement.
Robert W. McChesney is Research
Professor in the Institute of Communications Research at the University
of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He is the Founder and President
of Free Press, a non-profit organization working to involve the public
in media policymaking and to craft policies for a more democratic
media system. He is the author of numerous books on media policy
including the multiple award-winning Rich Media, Poor Democracy (1999),
and most recently, The Problem of the Media: U.S. Communication Politics
in the Twenty-First Century (2004).
Sascha Meinrath,
one of the co-organizers of the 2004 National Summit for Community
Wireless Networks, is a community organizer, media activist, and researcher.
He is the founder and coordinator of the Champaign-Urbana Community
Wireless Network (CUWiN) and the treasurer for the Global
Indymedia
Network. He co-founded the Urbana-Champaign Independent Media
Center
Foundation and the Tactical Media Fund, an international non-profit
organization that is engaged in strategic funding disbursements to
grassroots media
producers in the Global South. He is a project manager
for two
software development companies having founded the Acorn Active
Media Foundation in 2004 to engage in software, website, and technical
development
in support of the global justice movement. Sascha was elected
to the
board of directors for WEFT 90.1 FM and in his "free time" is
both finishing a masters degree in psychology and completing a PhD
at the University of Illinois, Institute for Communications Research.
Zach Miller has been a systems
administrator and web programmer since 1993. He's received degrees
in both Computer Science and Linguistics from the
University of Illinois. He specializes in network design and management,
web design and programming, organizational database development, system
administration, and information processing. Zach speaks Perl as a fluent
second language. Zach is a co founder of the Urbana-Champaign Independent
Media Center, the Prairie Green Party, and the Champaign-Urbana Community
Wireless Project. In his spare time, Zach likes to ride bicycles and
smash imperialism.
Russell Newman (facilitator)
is Program Manager for Free Press. He oversees initiatives ranging
from
grassroots organization to new research projects. Previous to joining
Free Press, he was a professional multimedia designer. He also served
as production designer on several independent films and was active
in radio for nearly a decade. He holds a degree in Brain and Cognitive
Science from MIT.
Michael Oh is President and Founder
of the Boston-based IT consultancy, Tech Superpowers, Inc. and founder
of NewburyOpen.net, Boston's largest Community Wireless Network. A
graduate of MIT, he has constructed one of the most widely-distributed
models for free wireless, called the Urban Hotzone Business Model.
Started in 2002, before for-pay WiFi was even a blip on the map, NewburyOpen.net
was one of the first commercial WiFi hotzones - and the only based
on the idea of corporate sponsorship at the time. Since then, NewburyOpen.net
has grown to 15 locations in central Boston, and others have sprung
up in other nearby cities like Salem, MA and Portsmouth, NH.
Michael Peralta is
a Native American Indian of Luiseno descent. He is a member of
the Rincon Band of Mission Indians. He resides on the Rincon
Indian Reservation in San Diego County in Southern California. He
has attended college at Palomar Community College in San Marcos, Ca. Mr.
Peralta has spent the last 5 years as a Tutor/Mentor for youth on the
Rincon Indian Reservation. He has been devoted to motivating
the youth to pursue higher education and helping them become positive
influences in the community. For the last 2 years he has been
working for the Tribal Digital Village in an effort to bridge the technological
divide that exists for Native American Indians in San Diego County. The
Tribal Digital Village has created a High Speed Broadband Network connecting
the 18 reservations in San Diego County. Their goal is to provide
access to technology and the information highway to the underrepresented
peoples of San Diego County. Mr. Peralta has also partnered with
his co-workers to start a wireless technology company called Tribal
Technologies. Tribal Technologies is currently planning several
wireless deployments throughout Southern California.
Matt Peterson founded the
Bay Area Wireless Users Group (BAWUG) in September 2000. BAWUG pioneered
the 'WUG' concept of spreading unbiased CWN and related technical information
to audiences worldwide. Mr. Peterson's work in wireless security and
advocacy has been chronicled in The Wall Street Journal, Wired, BBC
and other media. Matt is currently a SysAdmin at the Electronic Frontier
Foundation, a non-profit law firm specializing in digital rights. During
rare offline stints, Matt enjoys traveling in South East Asia along
with analog photography.
Chase Phillips
is a Systems Programmer at the University of Illinois's National Center
for Supercomputing Applications with 9 years of system administration
experience and 4 years of software development experience. Chase holds a Bachelor's
of Science from Tulane University with a CS major and minors
in Math and Philosophy. A supporter of radio spectrum policy
reform, he volunteers his time to help community wireless networking through
activism, software development, and maintenance.
He
currently serves as the CUWiN project webmaster and as a CUWiN
project developer.
Victor Pickard (facilitator)
is a doctoral student at the University of Illinois where his research
focuses on communications policy, political communication and democratic
theory. He holds an MA in communications from the University of Washington
in Seattle where he worked with the Center for Communication and Civic
Engagement, the Reclaim the Media Conference, and the Seattle Independent
Media Center.
Steve Pierce is a long-time
media activist, currently working on some of the cable franchise renewals
in the sixty communities comprising the New York State Capital Region.
He helped organize the Hudson Mohawk Independent Media Center, and
has been involved with grassrooots community radio for the past 25
years. He was formerly executive director of the Deep Dish TV Network,
assistant manager of the Pacifica Foundation's WBAI in NYC, and program
director of WWOZ in New Orleans. His academic work, for which he reeceived
an MS and PhD from the Department of Science and Technology Studies
at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, focuses on media and democracy.
Tim Pozar -
Technical Director of Electronic Frontier Foundation. Pozar has spent
much of his career working to ensure that media such as the Internet
will stay "democratic." As such, he was an early
activist, entrepreneur, and developer in the Internet. He co-founded
or was involved in the early stages of a number of companies, such
as TLGnet (San Francisco's
first ISP), Internet Archive/Alexa Internet, and Brightmail
(the first commercial anti-spam company). For 25 years before this,
Pozar was a radio broadcast engineer for commercial and community
radio
stations throughout the west coast. He has also had his hand
in starting
a number of community radio stations. In keeping with his
interests and experience, Pozar is also active in community wireless
networking.
He is a co-founder of the Bay Area
Wireless User Group, and the founder of the Bay Area Research Wireless
Network
(BARWN). BARWN studies the issues involved in deploying wireless
high-speed
Internet access in both urban and rural settings, to start
to address
the digital divide. Pozar is a long-time resident of San
Francisco, where he lives near the beach (good ground conductivity)
with his wife
and son.
Matthew
Rantanen was born in Washington, D.C. in 1969, an
American, a descendant of The Cree Indian Nation, Finland & Scandinavia.
His immediate family moved quite a bit until he was 14. His family
followed
his father's career
in
the Air Force and then the private Thoroughbred Veterinary World,
taking him to
Germany, Texas, Washington State, Kentucky, and California. He graduated
from
Washington
State
University in 1992 with a B.F.A., Graphic Design He then
moved to San Diego, CA and started a Freelance Design Business, MRRDesign,
which led
him to a fulltime position as a Senior Web Designer, Artist, and
Animator
for Blue
Mountain
Arts / Bluemountain.com / Excite @ Home from 1994-2001,
this position
exposed him to technology in every aspect. He is fluent in Computer
Graphics
Applications,
Website
Construction and Management, and well-versed in networking
and troubleshooting
of computer problems. He is currently the Director of Technology
and
Web Services for SCTCA/Tribal Digital Village providing IT and Infrastructure
Team Management and
Solutions. He has been with SCTCA and the Tribal Digital
Village since 2001.
As part of this role he also provides technical advice and creates
and
manages
all of the web entities that support SCTCA and the Tribal Digital
Village.
Greg Richardson is
the founder and President of Civitium LLC, a consulting firm focused
on the concept of Digital Cities. Prior to founding Civitium, Greg
was the Wireless Consulting Director for Siemens in the U.S.,
where he lead the wireless broadband consulting engagement
for Houston County Georgia, which was co-sponsored by Intel, Siemens
and
Alvarion.
Prior to Siemens, Greg was a founder and the VP of Professional
Services
for Wireless Knowledge, a pioneering joint venture between
Microsoft
and QUALCOMM. He is also an author of numerous publications
and a regular
speaker at wireless broadband industry events.
Charlie Ridgway is a newcomer
to the world of wireless. He is an active member of NYCwireless where
he is a member of the installer
cadre and the Social Impact
and Applications SIGs. Charlie is an emergency manager who has recently left
the public sector and is currently searching for his next challenge.
Paul Riismandel has been
an active participant, producer and researcher in non-commercial and
community media for the last fifteen years. He hosts a weekly radio
program called Mediageek (http://www.mediageek.org) which focuses on
grassroots and community media, emphasizing how we can make media that
is more responsive to the needs of individuals and communities. Paul
is also a co-founder of the Urbana-Champaign Independent Media Center,
currently active with its video collective. He has been working with
streaming media technologies for eight years, and his day job involves
producing and administering streaming media resources for the College
of Liberal Arts and Sciences at UIUC. Paul brings these ideas and pursuits
together in his doctoral work at the Institute of Communications Research.
Greg Rose
Christian Sandvig is an Assistant
Professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign where he
studies communication technology and public policy. He currently leads
a research project funded by the National Science Foundation to study
the cooperative provision of wireless broadband. He recently served
as Markle Foundation Information Policy Fellow at Oxford University
and has been named a "next-generation leader in science and technology
policy" in a junior faculty competition sponsored by the American
Association for the Advancement of Science.
Dan Schiller is Research
Professor in the Institute of Communications Research at the University
of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He is a communication historian whose
interests center on telecommunications history, and on the role of
cultural production in the socio-economic development of the market
system. His books are Digital Capitalism: Networking the Global Market
System (MIT, April, 1999); Theorizing Communication: A Historical Reckoning
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1996); Telematics and Government
(Norwood: Ablex, 1982);and Objectivity and the News: The Public and
the Rise of Commercial Journalism (Philadelphia: Univ of Penn. Press,
1981).
Ben Scott (facilitator) is
a Policy Analyst in the Washington office of Free Press. Previously,
he served as a
Legislative Fellow in the House of Representatives, handling telecommunications
policy in the office of Congressman Bernie Sanders (I-VT). He is also
currently completing his doctoral work at the Institute of Communications
Research at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. He has written
several articles on the history of American journalism and media policy
making. Most recently, he is the editor, with Robert W. McChesney,
of Our Unfree Press: 100 Years of Radical Media Criticism (2004).
Josh Silver is the Managing
Director of Free Press, a national media reform organization dedicated
to the democratization of media policy debates. Previously, he was
the campaign manager of the successful ballot initiative for Clean
Elections in Arizona in 1998. Since then, he spent three years as director
of development for the cultural arm of the Smithsonian Institution
in Washington, D.C. He is the former director of an international youth
exchange program, and worked with youth at risk. He has published several
articles on media policy, campaign finance and other public policy
issues.
Cliff Skolnick is
the CTO of Iron Systems. He is an active participant in the community
networks movement and a founding member of the Bay Area Wireless User
Group (BAWUG), the Apache Group/Apache
Software Foundation, and FreeNetworks.org. He has over
15 years of experience in the field of Internet servers, security,
and connectivity. Cliff was also co-founder and Chief Information Officer(CIO)
of Organic
Online. Before Organic, Cliff applied his networking and
software skills at Sun Microsystems in the Internet engineering
group as the project lead on one of the Internet Firewall
Projects.
Cliff also worked at Sun as a developer in the Clustered
Systems group,
and as part of the Sun Professional Services organization.
Paul Smith is the CNT's webmaster
and systems administrator, as well as the technical lead on the Wireless
Community Network project. He's been with the Center for Neighborhood
Technologies since 1999.
Jim Snider
is a Senior Research Fellow at the New America Foundation. His work
focuses
on reforming America's telecommunications policies. Mr. Snider holds
degrees from Northwestern University and
Harvard Business
School. He
is the co-author of Future Shop, one of the first books on the emerging
area of e-commerce. He has also published numerous
reports, including the acclaimed Citizen's Guide to the Airwaves.
Dana Spiegel is a distinguished
software consultant and founder of sociableDESIGN, a software and consulting
firm that specializes in social software and wireless technology research
and development. He has worked with industry leading companies including
Yahoo!, Nike, Primedia, IBM, ComputerRepair.com, and Bloostone to
develop products and programs that utilize innovative social software
(including online messaging, chat, and social network analysis and
visualization) and wireless technologies. Recently, Dana helped Yahoo!
develop a grassroots marketing campaign to showcase Online Holiday
Shopping at the Yahoo! Shopping Stores, which included the development
of custom Wireless Christmas Trees that provided free public Wi-Fi
and broadcast a customized Yahoo! Shopping website into public spaces
in New York City and Chicago. Dana holds a Bachelors Degree in Brain
and Cognitive Sciences from MIT and a Masters Degree in Media Arts
and Sciences from the MIT Media Laboratory's Sociable Media Group.
Dana also serves as a member of the Board of Directors for NYCwireless,
a New York City non-profit organization. Dana serves as a member of
the Board of Directors of NYCwireless, a high-profile, non-profit public
interest group advocating the development of free public wireless networks.
He is currently producing Spectropolis: Mobile Media, Art and the City
(www.spectropolis.info), a three-day event on October 1, 2, and 3 that
highlights the diverse ways artists, technical innovators and activists
are using communication technologies to generate new urban experience
and public voice. The event explores what is possible when wireless
communications (both new and old), mobile devices and media converge
in public space. In September 2003, he produced America's first Wireless
Art festival, the Wireless Park Lab Days, to critical acclaim. The
event showcased up-and-coming new media artists whose work explored
the convergence of wireless technologies and public spaces. Dana is
also NYCwireless' Director of Community Applications, leading a team
to develop software applications that build and support online wireless
communities
Heather Stewart is the Research and Policy Coordinator for Common Assets. She
is currently a librarian-in-training at San Jose State University. You
can generally find her riding a bike, gardening in her yard, or reading
about copyright law. Common
Assets was founded to reassert the public's ownership of the commons
by preventing giveaways of our common assets to private
interests. Common Assets
works in three
program areas: water, energy, and spectrum.
Jack Unger, the founder and
President of Ask-Wi.Com, Inc. (formerly Wireless InfoNet) may be the "Grandfather" of
the license-free wireless Internet community. He has provided continuous
network design, installation, training, consulting, on-site troubleshooting,
and technical writing for the WISP industry since 1993. He deployed
one of the first public wireless Internet POPs (1995), presented the
world's first vendor-neutral broadband wireless WAN deployment workshops
(2001), and wrote the industry's first WISP deployment handbook, "Deploying
License-Free Wireless Wide-Area Networks" (2003). His book, although
strictly vendor-neutral, was published by Cisco Press.
Emy Tseng is currently
Senior Policy Analyst for the Community Technology Foundation of California
and Director of the Technology Funders Collaborative. Previously, she
worked at the Ford Foundation
on issues of information and communications
policy. She has consulted on technology policy and
strategy for Consumers Union and for several
community networking projects including NYCwireless.
Emy has twelve years experience in the software industry
as an engineer, project manager and software
architect.
Emy received a Master of Science degree from
MIT’s Technology and Policy Program
(TPP) and a Bachelor of Science degree in Math/Physics from Brown University.
Antwuan
Wallace is a social justice advocate who helps construct
policy innovations for politically-marginalized and economically-stratified
communities. He serves as the Senior Research Associate for BCT Partners,
an IT management and policy consulting firm. A doctoral candidate
in Policy Analysis at New School University and a Research Assistant
at the Community Research Development Center, his dissertation investigates
informal learning and social construction by youth-of-color within
community-based organizations. He holds a B.A. from Hampton University
and a MPA from Indiana University-Bloomington.
David Young
graduated from Cornell University in 1999, with a bachelor's degree
in computer science. He is a software engineer with OJC Technologies
in Urbana, Illinois. For three years, he has dedicated himself to
lead software development for the Champaign-Urbana Community
Wireless
Network (CUWiN). His professional goal is to support grassroots
networking
initiatives around the world, by writing open-source software
that
runs large-scale rooftop mesh networks. |
