Forum Network

Professor Ramon Borges-Mendez was born in San Juan, Puerto Rico and has a professional career in the United States and abroad. He has held academic positions at American University's School of International Service, The Johns Hopkins' School of Advanced International Studies, and the University of Chile's Public Policy Program. Professor Borges-Mendez has also served as a Research Associate at the Mauricio Gaston Institute for Latino Community Development and Public Policy at UMass Boston. He has also worked as a consultant for the Ford Foundation, the World Bank, the Economics Commission on Latin American and the Caribbean of the United Nations (ECLAS), the Inter-American Development Bank, the Brookings Institute, the Japanese International Cooperation Agency and the government of Chile. He has written on various public policy issues ranging from Latino poverty and community development in the United States (especially in Massachusetts) to decentralization and civil society matters in Latin America. Most recently, he has been evaluating participatory practices in sustainable forestry and environmental services in Costa Rica; assessing programmatic options to support innovative practices in local government, participation and plural networks in Chile and Peru; assessing the value-added contributions of community-based organizations to workforce development in various US cities; and the implementation of regional workforce development strategies in the US.

Dennis L. Haarsager has led Washington State University's public broadcasting and educational telecommunications organization since 1978, serving as associate vice president and general manager, Educational Telecommunications and Technology since 1995. His organization includes 13 public radio stations operating as Northwest Public Radio, two public television stations, the country's busiest statewide distance learning network, and WSU's instructional support services. From 2001-2003, he took a half-time leave of absence to head up the Corporation for Public Broadcasting's Digital Distribution Implementation Initiative and has done consulting work for several other organizations. Currently, he is one of the principals behind the Public Service Publisher initiative and he edits a weblog at technology360.com. Prior to WSU, Haarsager served as state coordinator for Idaho Public Broadcasting and as director of administration for South Dakota Public Broadcasting. Haarsager has his master's degree in public administration and a bachelor degree in political theory, both from the University of South Dakota.

Dan Gillmor is founder and director of the Center for Citizen Media, a nonprofit organization aimed at enhancing and expanding grassroots media and its reach. The center is an affiliate of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University Law School and the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California, Berkeley. Dan is the author of We the Media: Grassroots Journalism by the People, for the People, published in 2004. From 1994-2004, Dan was a columnist at The San Jose Mercury News, Silicon Valley's daily newspaper, and wrote a blog for SiliconValley.com. He joined The Mercury News after six years with The Detroit Free Press.

Dr. Smith has been the Program Director for Education at The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation in Menlo Park, California since 2001. Prior to that, he was Acting Deputy Secretary and Under Secretary for Education in the Clinton Administration. During the Carter Administration, he was Chief of Staff to the Secretary for Education and Assistant Commissioner for Policy Studies in the Office of Education. While not in government, he was at different times an associate professor at Harvard, and a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Stanford. At Stanford, he was also the Dean of the School of Education. A member of the National Academy of Education and former chairman of the board of the American Institutes of Research, he has authored a large number of publications on topics varying from computer content analysis to early childhood education to effective schools and standards-based reform. Dr. Smith has served on numerous commissions and committees of the National Research Council and been a consultant to many government agencies, foundations, and nonprofit organizations such as the Education Testing Service, and to foreign governments. Dr. Smith earned a bachelor's degree at Harvard College and both a master's and a doctoral degree in Measurement and Statistics from the Harvard Graduate School of Education.

Annie Valva is Director of Research & Development for WGBH Interactive. Valva has over 15 years experience in developing interactive media, including broadband applications, enhanced TV, Web sites, and CD-rom/ DVDs. As Vice President of Content and Technology Integration for Pearson Broadband in London, she oversaw the development and launch of broadband services to primary school children throughout the U.K. Annie spent six years as Director of Technology for WGBH Interactive where she both managed the interactive technology team and produced prototypes for emerging digital platforms. She has worked extensively with high tech companies in order to develop partnerships that showcase high quality content across multiple distribution platforms. Annie earned her Masters in Educational Technology from Harvard University and received her BA in Community Studies and Photojournalism at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

Over the past sixteen years Dave Johnston has overseen the development and implementation of many of the Public Broadcasting Service's business processes and information systems for the K-12 and higher education divisions. Johnston established PBS's first public Internet "gopher server" and in 1994, along with several colleagues, launched the first PBS Web site that was to become PBS Online. In his current role he is responsible for the technical infrastructure and services of PBS Online, the award-winning website that currently attracts more than 145 million page views per month and is the number one "Dot Org" site on the Internet (according to Nielsen NetRatings). Mr. Johnston has contributed to the "transition to digital broadcast" as PBS's representative to the ATSC T3/S17 specialist group working to create standards for the enhancement of digital television. He also served as the PBS member of the Advanced Television Enhancement Forum (ATVEF). Johnston lives in Northern Virginia with his wife and three children.

Andy Carvin is senior strategist for National Public Radios Social Media Desk. As coordinator of NPRs social media strategy, he has helped NPR programs learn how to use user-generated content, crowdsourcing and social networks to promote dialogue and collaboration with the general public. Prior to coming to NPR in 2006, Andy was the director and editor of the Digital Divide Network, an online community of more than 10,000 educators, community activists, policymakers and business leaders in over 140 countries working to find solutions to the digital divide. Andy is also author of the PBS blog learning.now (http://www.pbs.org/learningnow), which focuses on the impact of Internet culture on education.

Rick Prelinger is an archivist, writer and filmmaker, and founder of the Prelinger Archives, a collection of 60,000 advertising, educational, industrial, and amateur films acquired by the Library of Congress in 2002 after 20 years of operation.

Mitchell Kapor, is a pioneer of the personal computing revolution and has been at the forefront of information technology for 30 years as an entrepreneur, software designer, activist, and investor. He is widely known as founder of Lotus Development Corporation and the designer of Lotus 1-2-3, the "killer application" which made the personal computer ubiquitous in the business world in the 1980s. Mr. Kapor was born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1950 and graduated from Freeport (Long Island) High School in 1967. He received a B.A. from Yale College in 1971 and studied psychology, linguistics, and computer science as part of an interdisciplinary major in Cybernetics. In 1978, he received a Master's degree in counseling psychology from Campus-Free College (later renamed Beacon College) in Boston and worked as a mental health counselor at New England Memorial Hospital in Stoneham, Massachusetts. He also attended the Sloan School of Management at MIT, taking a leave of absence one term short of graduation in 1980 in order to take a job in a Silicon Valley start-up company. In the fall of 2005 he became a Lecturer at the University of California, Berkeley, and co-taught a course "Open Source Development and Distribution of Information". In 2006, he was appointed Adjunct Professor at the School of Information at U.C. Berkeley. Mr. Kapor has written widely about the impact of personal computing and networks on society. He has contributed articles, columns, and op-ed pieces on information infrastructure policy, intellectual property issues, and antitrust in the digital era to Scientific American, *The New York Times*, *Forbes*, *Tricycle: The Buddhist Review*, and *Communications of the ACM*.