Feature

Internist and social scientist Nicholas Christakis has earned an international reputation as an expert on social networks—how they form and how they affect our lives and, especially, our health. He is the author of Connected: The Surprising Power of Our Social Networks and How They Shape Our Lives. For his groundbreaking research on social networks and health, he was named to the Time 100 in 2009.

Don Tapscott's book, Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything, is the first book to explain how the Web is being transformed into the first global platform for collabor-ation in history and how businesses can tap the full potential of the emerging networked economy and its self-organized, mass-participatory communities to generate value.

As founding director of MIT’s Center for Collective Intelligence, Tom Malone investigates how people can connect to act collectively—and more intelligently. He researches the new communications capabilities of Web 2.0, the structure of effective collaboration, and how these impact the global organization. He is the author of the landmark book, The Future of Work, on new organizational designs.

James Fowler is an internationally recognized political scientist who specializes in the study of social networks. He is the author of Connected: The Surprising Power of Our Social Networks and How They Shape Our Lives, which explains how social networks form and how they help to shape our tastes and beliefs, our health and wealth, even our happiness. He was named "most original thinker" of the year by The McLaughlin Group.

danah boyd is an internationally recognized authority on sociable media and social networks—who inhabits them, what they do there, and why. She’s advised a wide range of companies on social media, including Yahoo!, Google, Intel, the BBC and Fox Interactive, and she’s designed tools for enhancing online identity presentation. danah is Harvard University's Berkman Center for Internet & Society.

Chris Anderson is the editor-in-chief of Wired magazine and the author of one of the defining books of modern business, The Long Tail. The Long Tail describes how niche producers serving niche communities in the new networked economy together represent a powerful new economic force. Chris explains how the long tail business model works and the role that networked communities play in their success.

Author Steven Berlin Johnson (The Ghost Map, Emergence and others) is well-known as a Web 2.0 and social media innovator. His website FEED pioneered web-based journalism. His book Interface Culture predicted the rise of the blogosphere; Emergence foresaw many Web 2.0 developments. Most recently, he’s created (outside.in, the first website to gather in one place online conversations about local places.

Named one of MIT Technology Review’s "35 top Young Innovators for 2006", Jane researches how massively-participatory culture is changing the ways we define ourselves as individuals and how companies can talk to and design products, services and experiences for the new online communities. Director of Game Research and Development at the Institute for the Future, she is a leading designer of Alternative Reality Games.

James Surowiecki ‘wrote the book’ on how to systematically tap your organization’s collective, collaborative intelligence to solve business problems. In The Wisdom of Crowds, he describes practical methods for organizing the intelligence available in your organization to arrive at decisions that often are better than even ‘expert’ individuals could make. Jim writes a twice-monthly financial column for The New Yorker.

#11 on Forbes’ list of Top 25 Web Celebrities, Ze Frank has had unparalleled success creating online community spaces and innovative content that gets the audience to ‘act’ and then ‘interact.’ He has direct personal experience with ‘viral marketing’, bringing more than 50 million people to his own website, (zefrank.com. It’s won a Webby and was in Time magazine’s Top 50 Websites of 2005.