Panel Presenter Bios

Wayne Ashley, Independent Curator
BIO:
Mr. Ashley is a consultant now working in the areas of media arts, technology and cultural programming. He is also a consultant to a new cultural center in London opening in 2006 called Rich Mix http://www.richmix.org.uk and has been working with a Belgian artist collective called Workspace Unlimited http://www.workspace-unlimited.org for the creation of symposia, workshops, and an exhibition.

He has been curator of New Media and Public Programs at Lower Manhattan Cultural Council and spearheaded Downtown Digital Futures, a multi-year program that critically explores the role of information technology and interactive media in re-imagining the future of Lower Manhattan. And just a year ago he was the co-curator of Spectropolis, a three-day event in Lower Manhattan that highlighted the diverse ways artists, technical innovators and activists use communication technologies to generate new urban experiences and public voice.

Angela Beesley, Board Member, Wikimedia Foundation
BIO:
Angela Beesley is the Co-founder of Wikicities, a project to develop online wiki communities, and is Vice President of its parent company, Wikia. She is an elected member of the Board of the Wikimedia Foundation, which manages the free-content encyclopedia, Wikipedia, and its sister projects. She is a member of the Advisory Board of Ourmedia, a grass roots media archive.

Will Craig, Associate Director, CURA (Center for Urban and Regional Affairs
BIO:
William Craig is an international leader in GIS . geographic information systems. He was project director of the Minnesota Land Management Information System in the 1970s, one of the first GIS in the world. He currently serves on the Mapping Science Committee at the National Academy of Sciences. He is the chief author of the GIS Code of Ethics of the GIS Certification Institute. He has served at president of the University Consortium for Geographic Information Science (UCGIS) and the Urban and Regional Information Systems Association (URISA).

Craig has been a leader in promoting the use of GIS by community-based organizations. In 2002 he published the leading book in the field, Community Participation and Geographic Information Systems (Taylor and Francis). He began this campaign at the 1994 URISA conference in Milwaukee and has continued with numerous presentations, articles, and conference organizing . including this year.s 4th Annual Public Participation GIS Conference in Cleveland. His university center supplies GIS training and services to community groups in the Twin Cities.

Craig is the associate director of the Center for Urban and Regional Affairs (CURA) at the University of Minnesota. Craig has an undergraduate degree in mathematics and graduate degrees in geography from the University of Minnesota. He is a lifetime resident of the state of Minnesota and the city of Minneapolis.

James Farstad, Founder and President, rClient, LLC
BIO:
James Farstad is the founder and president of rClient, LLC, and a consultant to the city of Minneapolis' citywide wireless project. Jim has 24 years experience in strategic telecommunications consulting and business management. Jim is a past-President of the Minnesota Telecommunications Association (MTA) and is a former board member of the Society of Telecommunications Consultants.

Before founding rClient, Mr. Farstad was the founder and CEO of Epic USA, a telecommunications and technology-consulting firm. When Epic USA was sold to Larson, Allen Weishair and Company (LAWCO) in 1995; Jim became a member of LAWCO.s senior management team and board of directors. He managed Epic USA as a wholly owned subsidiary until he left LAWCO in 2000 to begin the effort to establish rClient.

Mr. Farstad has 20 years experience in strategic technology consulting and business management. He has gained a strong reputation in the consulting services industry, and is a recognized leader in strategy, vision, and innovation.

Daniel Gumnit, Executive Director, Intermedia Arts
BIO:
Daniel Gumnit is in his second year as Executive Director of Intermedia Arts, an organization that builds understanding among people through art. Intermedia Arts works with artists, educators, activists, funders, community leaders to provide multiple contexts and perspectives while encouraging and supporting new definitions of artistic excellence.

Mr. Gumnit brings to his role a rich, varied background in the arts, business, and public policy. Daniel isn’t new to Intermedia Arts but worked with the organization in the 1980s when it was formerly called University Community Video. His creative background includes time as an apprentice to the Nancy Hauser Dance Company, producing and performing in video and performance events at the Walker Art Center, Dance Theater Workshop in New York City and other venues. He has served as general manager and president for several Twin Cities-based creative companies. In the early ‘90s, he managed an organization that conceived of and created the first large-scale Web-based national medical training and certification program. His television work has been distributed worldwide. He received an Emmy nomination for his animation and special effects work for PBS’s Newton’s Apple. He has been involved in developing communities for people 55 and older in association with colleges and universities.

Arthur M. Harkins, Futurist and Faculty Director for the Graduate Programs in Innovation Studies
BIO:
Arthur Harkins is an associate professor in Educational Policy and Administration at the University of Minnesota. He is a faculty member in Comparative and International Development Education and the Department of Sociology. He is co-author or co-editor of several books, including Cultures of the Future with M. Maruyama. His most recent articles focus on new forms of knowledge production in universities and the potential applications of intelligence-amplifying software in the education of college and pre-college students.

Dr. Harkins’s most recent work is focused on social and economic challenges driven by rapid technological change, international competition, and the global effort to overcome obsolete methods of human capital development. His longer-term view is informed by the hypothetical "Singularity", a projected convergence of several key technologies over the next few decades.

He has been a consultant and speaker to many public and private organizations, among them colleges and universities, media, engineering societies, the military, computer and power companies, and city, state, and national governments. He has been a regular commentator for National Public Radio and several Twin Cities radio and television stations.

Adrian Herbst, Partner, Baller Herbst Law Group
BIO:
Adrian E. Herbst is a principal with the Washington, D.C. based firm The Baller Herbst Law Group, P.C., in charge of its Minneapolis, Minnesota office. He has over 25 years of experience in municipal and governmental work, with an emphasis on cable television franchising and regulation. Adrian has been extensively involved in representing local governments throughout the country on franchise renewals, governmental ownership alternatives, franchise compliance audits, and rate regulation issues. He has also been extensively involved in the development of ordinances to assist local governments in telecommunications regulation and development of fiber optic networks.

Adrian was a City Councilmember for the City of Bloomington, Minnesota and its City Attorney. He has served as a past President of the Minnesota Trial Lawyers Association and as Vice President of the League of Minnesota Cities. Adrian is a charter member of the National Association of Telecommunications Officers and Advisors (NATOA) and is also a member of the Alliance for Community Media, as well as various other legal organizations including the International Municipal Lawyers Association (IMLA), the Federal Communications Bar Association, and the Telecommunications Committee of the Minnesota State Bar Association.

Kathleen Kvern, Project Director, mnartists.org
BIO:
Kathleen Kvern is Project Director of mnartists.org, a project of the McKnight Foundation and Walker Art Center established to improve the lives of Minnesota artists and provide access to and engagement with Minnesota’s arts culture. Mnartists.org is an online database of Minnesota artists and organizations from all disciplines. It offers to Minnesota-based artists a central gathering place on the Web, and will grow to become a marketplace and community hub. It offers the public a new way to explore art and get to know artists. In addition to providing artists and organizations with a web page containing images and information, mnartists.org provides news and features about the local arts scene from a variety of sources.

Mnartists.org was developed as the result of a survey of Minnesota artists conducted by The McKnight Foundation. The survey revealed the survival struggles of individual artists. The McKnight Foundation partnered with the Walker Art Center’s New Media Initiatives group to develop mnartists.org.

Matt Lampe, Chief Technology Officer of the City of Portland
BIO:
Matt Lampe is the Chief Technology Officer of the City of Portland, with responsibility over the City’s e-government initiative, the technology and telecommunications infrastructure, and business applications to support the City government. Since arriving in Portland almost three years ago, he has been implementing and modifying the City’s IT strategic plan, including:

  • Launched PortlandOnline and migrated disparate City websites to its content managed, database driven structure and rich feature set, supporting calendar, service requests, subscriptions, and now public comment.
  • Completed the Evolvement project, emphasizing neighborhood focused web content to improve interaction with the City, a Best of the Web achievement award winner
  • Implemented a payment gateway supporting both City and County tax collections and other City services requiring payment.
  • Oversaw the expansion of the City’s fiber network to provide data services to other governmental and educational units in the Portland area.
  • Oversaw the re-organization of IT operations into a service based model, with projects underway to achieve significant infrastructure consolidation.
  • Serving as the City lead for the Unwire Portland Project.

Prior to coming to Portland, Matt served as the Director for Technology Strategic Planning for the City of Seattle, where he negotiated one of the nation’s earliest deployments of cable modem service.

Benjamin R. Lindau, Intern Architect/Architectural Designer, Ellerbe Becket Architects
BIO:
As a recent graduate of the University of Minnesota’s Masters of Architecture program, Benjamin Lindau holds an interest to create architecture from the people he serves, and he has researched methods to allow better access to architectural representation. These projects include the architectural use of stereoscopic tools, computer modeling, VR, and the innovative use of computer game technology for design. His masters thesis explored how computer game technology can best contribute to the architect’s design process, and was featured in USA Today’s Tech section in March of 2004.

Mike Linksvayer, Chief Technology Officer, Creative Commons
BIO:
Mike Linksvayer has ten years experience as an enterprise software, web, and multimedia developer and consultant. He co-founded Bitzi, a P2P utility startup, and holds a B.A. in economics from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He does not play amateur license lawyer on TV.

Cal Litsey, Partner, Faegre and Benson
BIO:
Calvin Litsey is the Administrative Partner for the firm’s worldwide intellectual property practice. He has handled complex patent, copyright, trademark, trade secret, unfair competition, advertising, media and entertainment cases for a diverse group of clients, including Wyeth, Target, Thomson/West Publishing, Mayo Clinic, Centerpulse Dental, Wagner, FTD Florists, Warner Bros., Columbia Pictures, CNN, Pella Corporation, MCA/Universal, ASCAP, the National Hockey League and noted individuals such as Tom Clancy, Prince and Lenny Kravitz. Cal regularly appears in federal courts throughout the United States, and has been consistently recognized as one of Minnesota’s top intellectual property lawyers in annual surveys.

Cal has taught advanced intellectual property litigation and other intellectual property and entertainment law seminars for the past ten years as an Adjunct Professor at the University of Minnesota Law School.

Cal advises clients, negotiates agreements and handles a wide variety of intellectual property, licensing, advertising, media and entertainment matters. He counsels clients on licensing technology, information, entertainment and trademarks; the protection of copyrighted and trademarked works; advertising clearance and use issues; contests and sweepstakes; film, television, music and publishing agreements; internet distribution; and brand management. Cal’s clients in these areas include 3M, The Thomson Corporation, Mayo Clinic, Lifetouch, ShopNBC, The Star Tribune Company, Better Life Media, MBI Publishing, Target, Wells Fargo, The Schwan Food Company, and Hormel Foods.

Pam Ludford, PhD Candidate, Dept. of Computer Science
BIO:
Pam Ludford is a PhD Candidate at the University of Minnesota, Department of Compter Science. Her main area of interest is Human-Computer Interaction, and more specifically, providing people with place-based information for doing everyday tasks. Recently she built PlaceMail, a mobile and ubiquitous tool that delivers user-authored task information at user-selected places and times. In the summer of 2005, she conducted the first user trial of the software and results will soon be available. Prior to her Computer Science studies, she earned an undergraduate degree in Marketing from the University of Minnesota Carlson School of Management and also worked for several years at a major airline providing technology solutions for cockpit information systems.

Chuck Olsen, MN Stories
BIO:
Chuck Olsen is the producer-director of Blogumentary, an open-source blog documentary combining his love of filmmaking with his passion for democratized media. Chuck’s work has been featured in Mother Jones magazine, Wired News, and on computer screens around the world. After working in public television for 7 years as a web producer, Chuck is now an independent consultant and media-maker helping shape the burgeoning videoblog revolution. His new project is a daily videoblog called Minnesota Stories, showcasing Minnesota-produced citizen video that slip through the cracks of broadcast media. Chuck is also the Minneapolis correspondent for Manhattan-based videoblog Rocketboom.

Shane Price, Project Director, AAMP (African American Men Project)
BIO:
Shane Price is a ten-year Hennepin County health service professional. He currently serves as the Coordinator for the African American Men Project (AAMP). In existence for nearly four years, AAMP is a Hennepin County research and implementation project based out of the need to address why young African American Men are too often in crisis and standing on street corners. Its mission is to investigate the forces behind the poverty, crime, poor health and isolation surrounding African American men, ages 18 to 30, and to build partnerships and tap resources to improve the quality of life for young African American men.

Mr. Price comes to AAMP from the Hennepin County Office of Planning and Development where he served as a Research Planner for approximately two years. Prior to that, he served in a variety of roles within the Children, Family and Adult Services Dept. He is credited with the organization and development of the first community-based social service site founded in 1995 in North Minneapolis — Village Social Services.

As AAMP Coordinator, Mr. Price provides direction, leadership and oversight to five staff persons and the Project’s 130-member Advisory Commission whose mission is to enhance and empower the condition of young Black men and their families through leadership, policy-making and infrastructure building in nine domains of well-being: education, housing, family structure, health, economic empowerment, criminal justice, community involvement, fundraising and communications.

Charles Ribaudo, Co-founder, Jambo Networks
BIO:
Jambo Networks provides a service to discover and connect people with those they want to meet that are nearby them. Jambo’s patent-pending process uses WiFi to discover the invisible opportunities in proximity. Mr. Ribaudo was also Co-Founder, EDS Ventures, EDS’s $150 million global venture capital fund. He managed venture activity for the Texas region and worked with CTO and senior officers to identify investment needs. He was selected as one of EDS’s top innovators for 2001 and 2002 and helped design EDS’s $50 million internal incubator. Other experiences include Accenture’s Change Management Division; American Express’s Interactive Enterprise Division; Park Leadership Fellow, Johnson School of Management, Cornell University, MBA.

Catherine Settanni, Executive Director, Digital Access Project
BIO:
Catherine is founding director of two non-profit projects: Digital Access (www.digitalaccess.org) and C-CAN — The Community Computer Access Network, (www.c-can.org). Both are Twin Cities (MN) projects helping to bridge the digital divide through the development and support of "community-based technology" initiatives. She has served as Board Chair at Twin Cities Free-Net (2001-02), and currently sits on the boards of two local technology funds; The Greater Twin Cities United Way’s "Service through Technology" committee, and the Minneapolis Foundation’s "MSNet Fund".

A professional media/technology consultant with her own company, Ms. Settanni helps Non Profit organizations and Government agencies develop and use Internet technology, with a specialty in the area of website development for public audiences. She is currently leading the Community Technology Empowerment Project (CTEP), a new AmeriCorps program that supports 25 full time AmeriCorps members working in community technology centers throughout the metro area.

Dr. Costis Toregas President Emeritus, Public Technology Institute
Plenary Session1 | keynote
BIO:
Dr. Costis Toregas recently capped a 32 year career at Public Technology Institute (PTI), retiring with the title of President Emeritus and with a promise to continue to give his exceptional energy and skills to his unwavering vision: that of strengthening local governments through the harnessing and effective use of technology. Since becoming President of PTI in 1985, he steered the organization to unprecedented success by creating innovative public/private partnerships which satisfied PTI’s technology development and transfer mandate and developed strong rewards for both sectors. He has inspired innovative leadership among elected and appointed local government officials, both through lectures to their national assemblies and by working with them individually to define bold new directions for their jurisdictions using technology.

Dr. Toregas has shaped and created a local government response to many breakthrough issues: he spearheaded a broad national awareness campaign on the Y2K computer problem during the turn of the century, as well as one on the National Information Infrastructure (NII) and its potential for local governments in the early nineties. Striving to establish partnerships among government entities, he helped found the Intergovernmental Enterprise Panel, a partnership of federal, state and local governments supporting the provision of seamless service to citizens through advanced information technology and served as its first Local Government co-chair. Dr. Toregas supports the concept of sustainability and balancing economic development with environmental concerns as an important local theme. Issues he is currently focused on include strategies to heal the digital divide, deployment of broadband WiFi networks at metropolitan scale, facilitating decisions on outsourcing and effective promotion of transformative E-Gov programs.

 

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