Speakers
Interesting and talented people from the four corners of the web
- Neil King
- Tatham Oddie
- Myles Eftos
- Tim Harrison
- James Bridle
- David Gravina
- Lisa Herrod
- Knud Möller
- HTML5 Panel
- Patrick Lee
- Michael™ Smith
- Grant Young
- Paul Hagon
- Gordon Grace
- Paula Bray
- Juliette Melton
- Mark Nottingham
- Rob Manson
- Jacqui Begbie
- Naveed Anwar
- Steve Souders
- Darren Menachemson
- Scott Thomas
- Donna Spencer
- Craig Sharkie
- Shane Morris
- Simon Pascal Klein
- Kenny Johar
- Dan Rubin
- Max Wheeler
- Dmitry Baranovskiy
- Michal Migurski
- Ben Schwarz
- Divya Manian
- Josh Williams
- Silvia Pfeiffer
- Matt Balara
- John Allsopp
- Daniel Davis
- Craig Mod
Neil King

Neil is an accessibility expert and project manager with Vision Australia’s web accessibility team. He has worked with people with disabilities for the past 8 years and this has evolved into a passion and drive to make the world more accessible.
Since joining Vision Australia in 2008 Neil has worked with a large number of government departments, commercial organisations and educational institutions promoting accessibility and providing business and technical advice across all aspects of a project. Neil is also responsible for developing and running the organisation’s web accessibility training programs, and has been the lead researcher on a number of high profile accessible information projects.
Tatham Oddie

Tatham Oddie is a technical strategist and roaming consultant. For the third year in a row he is a recipient of the Microsoft-issued “Most Valuable Professional” award, and a regular presenter and participant at conferences and industry groups throughout Australia, New Zealand and North America. His business experience includes the launch of a successful creative agency, a fashion retail and PR business, and is now focussed on the development of Tixi — a niche ticketing agency.
Follow Tatham on Twitter: @tathamoddie
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. During his 8-years in the industry, working under the moniker of MadPilot Productions, he has worked with pretty much everyone in Perth. He started 220, a coöperative workspace in Leederville and currently has a position on the committee of the Australian Web Industry Association.
Follow Myles on Twitter: @madpilot
Tim Harrison

UK born Tim Harrison is a California based Creative Strategist and new Director for the USA branch of PreviousNext — an Australian web design agency.
Trained in Graphic Design at St. Martins School of Art in London, Tim has worked extensively throughout the UK, Australia and USA as a design “agnostic”; covering a broad range of creative disciplines and industries — including Web Development, Environmental Design, Print & Branding and Music Businesses.
Prior to establishing PreviousNext in the USA, Tim worked for many years as a Creative Director with Apple Inc. and has recently been coaching a start-up program with Stanford University’s acclaimed d.school.
James Bridle

James Bridle is a publisher, writer and artist based in London, UK. He founded the print-on-demand classics press Bookkake and the e-book-only imprint Artists’ eBooks, and created Bkkeepr, a tool for tracking reading and sharing bookmarks, and Quietube, an accidental anti-censorship proxy for the Middle East. He makes things with words, books and the internet, and writes about what he does at booktwo.org.
Follow James on Twitter: @stml
David Gravina

David Gravina is the company principal and founder of Digital Eskimo, a design consultancy that applies the transformational power of design and technology to issues of social and environmental change. He is a founding member of greenUps, the Sydney green networking group, a director of the live local Foundation and was co-founder of the ‘Raise the Bar’ campaign which, as a former Melbourne boy, he’s pleased to say is slowly bringing Melbourne style small bars to Sydney.
Follow David on Twitter: @Deskimo
Lisa Herrod

Lisa is the Principal User Experience consultant at Scenario Seven with over ten years of hands-on experience on the web. She has a background in standards based design and development with the last 7 years focusing on design research, usability, accessibility and user experience strategy.
Lisa believes in an inclusive, holistic approach to user experience design that permeates every layer of a site and every role on a team. Her clients range from small, non-profit organisations through to large multinationals such as Macquarie Bank, Microsoft, Sydney Opera House, Qantas and the Brooklyn Museum NYC.
Lisa is an experienced lecturer and conference presenter having spoken at conferences both locally and abroad in the UK, NZ and the US. She’s a sporadic blogger and a crazy lover of whippets, with two little ones of her own…
Follow Lisa on Twitter: @scenariogirl
Knud Möller

Knud Möller is a post-doctoral researcher at DERI at the National University of Ireland in Galway, where he received his PhD on “Lifecycle Support for Data on the Semantic Web”. His work focusses on topics such as collaborative technologies, data lifecycles and networked knowledge, on which he has published and continues to publish in a range of papers. Knud is also a consultant on Semantic Web topics for socialbits.net, and has been involved in the organisation of a number of international conferences as the metadata and semantic technologies chair. He has been a member of the W3C RDFa Working Group since March 2010.
HTML5 Panel

Panelists
Daniel Davis (Opera, Japan), Divya Manian (Web Developer, USA), John Allsopp (Web Directions), Ben Schwarz (Web Developer, Australia)
Moderator: Michael™ Smith
Michael™ Smith joined the W3C in 2007. He help with work on W3C core stan dards related to browsing tech nologies; in particular, the phenomenon known as HTML5, as well as other stan dards related to Web appli cation APIs. Michael has been based in Tokyo since 2001. Prior to joining the W3C, he worked for Opera Software, and prior to that, for Openwave Systems — most of that time involved with design, devel opment, testing, and deployment of software for mobile operators.
Follow Michael™ on Twitter: @sideshowbarker
Patrick Lee

Patrick is a computer programmer and interaction designer. Usually at the same time.
He thinks JavaScript is an important language.
He works for ThoughtWorks.
Follow Patrick on Twitter: @boundvariable
Michael™ Smith

Michael™ Smith joined the W3C in 2007. He help with work on W3C core standards related to browsing technologies; in particular, the phenomenon known as HTML5, as well as other standards related to Web application APIs. Michael has been based in Tokyo since 2001. Prior to joining the W3C, he worked for Opera Software, and prior to that, for Openwave Systems — most of that time involved with design, development, testing, and deployment of software for mobile operators.
Follow Michael™ on Twitter: @sideshowbarker
Grant Young

Grant is founder of social innovation consultancy Zumio. In this role he combines his 15+ years’ experience in online and social technology with his passion for sustainability to help organisations harness these increasingly prominent market forces.
Zumio helps its clients — spanning the commercial, government and non-profit sectors — build platforms for social engagement that simultaneously deliver organisational value while increasing societal wellbeing and sustainability. Zumio has recently undertaken projects for the Cancer Institute NSW, the Inspire Foundation, VicRoads and Saasu.
Prior to founding Zumio, Grant produced projects for award-winning sustainable design agency Digital Eskimo and managed online communications and social media strategy for conservation organisation WWF-Australia, including for the inaugural Earth Hour (2007). He has also developed web applications for the business sector in the areas of financial and carbon accounting (Saasu, Climate Friendly).
Follow Grant on Twitter: @grantyoung
Paul Hagon

Paul is the Senior Web Designer at the National Library of Australia and has been working on the web in cultural institutions since 1999. His job entails a mix of design, coding, and accessibility. He is a thinker and “ideas” man. He finds cultural institutions fascinating because of what they bring to society, they are rich resources of information and provide vast potential for exploring hidden treasures. Paul enjoys making these items available and telling their stories in ways that may not be the most obvious. He likes to use technology in a relevant way to enrich the way we can interact with these resources.
In 2010 Paul was named a “Mover and Shaker” of the library world by Library Journal.
Follow Paul on Twitter: @paulhagon
Gordon Grace

Based in the Australian Government Information Management Office (AGIMO), Gordon has been working on whole-of-government websites and Australian Government web policies since early 2006.
Gordon likes making attractive, useful things that matter to people. He’s something of a ‘plate spinner’, and likes to punish himself by taking on too many projects at once. Gordon can often be found prodding and lifting dirty great big IT systems over usability, accessibility and standards-compliance hurdles, gently preparing them for the hostile, unforgiving and unpredictable web.
Gordon lives in Canberra with his wife and two young children, who are rarely hostile, frequently forgiving, and always unpredictable.
Follow Gordon on Twitter: @gordongrace
Paula Bray

Paula Bray is the Manager of the Visual and Digitisation Services department at the Powerhouse Museum that includes: Photography, The Image Resource Centre, The Photo Library and Rights and Permissions and Audio Visuals. Paula is responsible for managing the digital collections to the highest standard whilst coördinating photographic and AV projects for exhibitions, publications, events and the website. Paula runs a blog for the Museum called Photo of the Day and manages the Museum’s two Flickr accounts and numerous public groups.
Paula has also worked as a photographer in the Arts for many years including: the Art Gallery of NSW, The State Library of NSW and The Australian National Maritime Museum. Paula has worked as a freelance photographer and had several exhibitions of her work including a solo show at Blender Gallery in 2007. Her work has been collected by the College of Fine Arts and private collectors. Paula studied photography at the College of Fine Arts for 5 years doing a Bachelor of Art and a Master of Art whilst also receiving the Agfa Gevaert award for the most innovative use of photography upon graduating.
Follow Paula on Twitter: @paulabray
Juliette Melton

Juliette Melton is a user experience researcher and design strategist based in San Francisco. Her background in web development and product management gives her a practical perspective on how to conduct effective user experience research. She advocates building products that delight users while supporting organizational realities.
Juliette holds a master’s in education from the Technology, Innovation, and Education program at the Harvard Graduate School of Education where she focused on developing models for innovative networked learning applications. She runs Deluxify, a boutique UX consultancy, writes about her various projects at juliemelton.com, and makes lots of terrariums.
Follow Juliette on Twitter: @j
Mark Nottingham

Mark Nottingham is a Principal Technical Yahoo!, putting together Web-based infrastructure for sites like Yahoo! Finance, Sports, Tech, TV and Movies.
He has spent the last fifteen years designing, debugging, serving and caching Web content, with past stints at Merrill Lynch, Akamai and BEA Systems, along with scars from writing specifications like the Atom Syndication Format, WS-Policy and the WS-I Basic Profile, and chairing both IETF and W3C Working Groups.
Right now, his focus is on using HTTP for what the rest of the industry calls Web Services.
Past occupations have included being a photojournalist, Volkswagen mechanic, graphic designer, Webmaster, developer, systems administrator, research scientist, standards expert and all-around Web technology guy.
He’s married to Anitra, with two sons, Charlie and Bennet. They currently live in Melbourne, Australia.
Follow Mark on Twitter: @mnot
Rob Manson

Rob Manson is Managing Director of MOB, an Innovation Lab based in Sydney. He’s been working with cutting-edge technologies since the early 90s and is focused upon creating tangible experiences that change the way you see technology, business and the world around you.
MOB make complex things easy. They create innovative iPhone, iPad, Mobile and Internet based Applications and have created Augmented Reality (AR) applications and ARt installations for business and consumer markets as well as public display.
MOB’s customers include the Sculpture by the Sea, Sydney Opera House, The Royal Eastershow, IAG, Warner Music, St George, NAB and TEDxSydney.com to name a few.
Recently MOB have created a Mobile Augmented Reality experience using historic images of Sydney that the Powerhouse Museum released to the Flickr Commons and MOB regularly contribute to the Open Government/Open Data movement in Australia.
Follow Rob on Twitter: @nambor
Jacqui Begbie

Jacqui is Director of Web Policy for Accessibility and Style at AGIMO in the Department of Finance and Deregulation. She is responsible for developing strategy and policy for the Australian Governments web presence around accessibility and how the government uses new technologies to improve access to government information and services. Jacqui also manages the Australian Governments style publication.
With a strategic management background working in e-commerce for Phillips Electronics, Macquarie Bank and News Corporation, she has lead the development of many prominent websites. Jacqui has formal qualifications in marketing and business and has a Master of Science in Strategic Foresight from Swinburne University of Technology.
Naveed Anwar

As Senior Director of PayPal’s Developer Network, Naveed Anwar is a passionate advocate and supporter of developers using PayPal’s open payments platform, PayPal X. He champions the success of the PayPal developer community every day. In a previous life, Naveed started and ran the AOL Developer Network and with the motto “safety first,” he led many of AOL’s security efforts in Europe and the U.S. In his spare time, Naveed likes to get down and dirty, playing football, squash and cricket. Naveed is also active in non-profits focused on education in underprivileged communities around the world, including his family’s Anwar Foundation.
Follow Naveed on Twitter: @nanwar
Steve Souders

Steve works at Google on web performance and open source initiatives. He previously served as Chief Performance Yahoo!. Steve is the author of High Performance Web Sites and Even Faster Web Sites. He created YSlow, the performance analysis plug-in for Firefox. He serves as co-chair of Velocity, the web performance and operations conference from O’Reilly, and is co-founder of the Firebug Working Group. He recently taught CS193H: High Performance Web Sites at Stanford University.
Follow Steve on Twitter: @souders
Darren Menachemson

Darren Menachemson has worked in the design field since the late nineties. During this time, he has architected websites, designed complex person-to-Government interactions/user experiences, lead user research and evaluation processes and worked with senior executives and project teams to turn fuzzy concepts into integrated product and service blueprints. Darren has established and led design capabilities for a number of major Government agencies.
Darren currently leads an agency-based design group that provides (among other services) enriched storytelling to big projects, and has previously established similar successful capabilities in other agencies.
When he’s not working, Darren plays guitar, Irish fiddle, and he draws and writes things. He is a jogging enthusiast and a cycling nut. He is happiest when he’s travelling somewhere interesting.
Follow Darren on Twitter:: @thoughtpod
Scott Thomas

Scott Thomas, who goes by the moniker SimpleScott, lives by the idea that the simplest solution is the best one. Whether he’s building a website or singing emails operatically the motivation is always “less is more.” Back when SimpleScott had free time he could be found at a letterpress fashioning original prints and collaborating with fellow members of the design collective, The Post Family. All that, and his dream of rationalizing the irrational theory of the golden ratio, came to a halt when he became the Design Director for the Obama Campaign. Soon enough, SimpleScott found himself redesigning WhiteHouse.gov and trying to impress politicos with his Lincoln-like beard. When the historic election ended he felt that he should somehow record his experience. Two years later he self-published Designing Obama, a chronicle on the role of art and design in the political realm. We are all patiently awaiting Obamaʼs rave review. SimpleScott plans to continue working on creative projects that might just one day change the world. (Cue music)
Banner photo: © Fotomattic.
Follow Scott on Twitter: @simplescott
Donna Spencer

Donna’s a freelance information architect, interaction designer and writer. That’s a fancy way of saying she plans how to present the things you see on your computer screen, so that they’re easy to understand, engaging and compelling. Things like the navigation, forms, categories and words on intranets, websites, web applications and business systems.
She’s been doing this professionally since 2002, is a regular speaker at Australian and international events and has just completed her third book.
Follow Donna on Twitter: @maadonna
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 15 years. With tenure at the Australian operations of Ziff Davis, AOL, Yahoo! and Atlassian, 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, CSS, and JavaScript solutions to both leading-edge and legacy development issues, Craig continues to use the best of his disciplines 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, but perhaps on par with writing about them.
Follow Craig on Twitter: @twalve
Shane Morris

Shane Morris is one of Australia’s most respected user experience professionals. Through consulting, mentoring and training he has helped organisations create compelling digital experiences since 1991. In that time he has worked on desktop applications, internet applications, mobile user interfaces, physical devices and web sites. Shane has taught user experience topics around the world and is a key contributor to “101 Things I Learned in Interaction Design School” at ixd101.com.
Shane has worked with companies like Microsoft, Lonely Planet, M&C Saatchi, Cochlear, Amnesia Razorfish and Sensis — helping creative and technical professionals collaborate to create services that empower, inspire and reward. His passion is transforming the complex and constrained into the simple and powerful. Not just because it’s valuable endeavour, but because it’s hard — and therefore immensely rewarding.
Shane’s experience includes:
- Director of Automatic Studio (Formerly Echo Interaction Design)
- One of Microsoft’s first User Experience Evangelists world-wide
- General Manager and Principal Consultant at The Hiser Group
Simon Pascal Klein

Simon Pascal Klein is a graphic, web and interface designer, front-end developer, rampant ‘typophile’, UI and accessibility aficionado. Born in Mainz Mainz, Germany — the birthplace of Gutenberg — he now works in Canberra as a freelance designer while studying at the Australian National University. Simon is actively engaged in the Open Source community and local web industry, notably as one of the unorganisers to first bring BarCamp to Canberra. He also co-hosts a podcast on all things web, and publishes occasionally on things type on his site.
Follow Simon on Twitter: @klepas
Kenny Johar

Kenny manages the Software Architecture, development and technical innovations group in Vision Australia, and plays the role of an Enterprise Architect. Kenny has been part of W3C working groups for several years, with my most noteable contributions being in Accessibility of Rich Internet Applications (WAI-ARIA), Web Security Context: User Interface Guidelines, and the accessibility of audio/video in HTML5. In 2009, Kenny was awarded the Most Valuable Professional (MVP) award by Microsoft in recognition of his contributions to the Accessibility of Web-based applications. This was the first time that a person with a vision impairment was given this award.
Dan Rubin

An accomplished designer, author and speaker, Dan Rubin has over ten years of experience as a leader in the fields of user interface design and web standards, specifically focusing on the use of HTML and CSS to streamline development and improve accessibility.
His passion for all things creative and artistic isn’t a solely selfish endeavor either—you’ll frequently find him waxing educational about a cappella jazz and barbershop harmony, philosophy, web standards, typography, psychology, and design in general.
In addition to his contributions to sites including Blogger, the CSS Zen Garden, Yahoo! Small Business and Microsoft’s ASP.net portal, Dan is a contributing author of Cascading Style Sheets: Separating Content from Presentation (2nd Edition, friends of ED, 2003), technical reviewer for Beginning CSS Web Development (Apress, 2006), The Art & Science of CSS (SitePoint, 2007) and Sexy Web Design (SitePoint, 2009), coauthor of Pro CSS Techniques (Apress, 2006), and Web Standards Creativity (friends of ED, 2007), writes about web standards, design and life in general on his personal site, Superfluous Banter, and spends his professional time on a variety of online and offline projects for Sidebar Creative, Webgraph and Black Seagull, consulting on design, user interaction and online publishing for Garcia Media, and speaking and teaching at events, conferences and workshops (including An Event Apart, @media, SXSW Interactive, Future of Web Design, Web Directions, and various Refresh and AIGA events) around the world.
Photo: © John Morrison / Subism Studios
Follow Dan on Twitter: @danrubin
Max Wheeler

An interaction designer with a passion for emerging technologies, Max believes the web should function as beautifully as it looks. He currently resides in Canberra where he works with Icelab, a media-agnostic design agency with a team of good people.
In his spare time Max takes photographs, travels the world, and builds web applications that do useful things. His latest pet project is Decaf Sucks, a site for helping you to find the good cafés and avoid the bad ones. He also happens to be the current world champion in the sport of beach ultimate.
Follow Max on Twitter: @makenosound
Dmitry Baranovskiy

Dmitry has over ten 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 as Software Architect at Sencha.
He is also the creator of Raphaël, the JavaScript Library, as well as a Optimus, the Microformats transformer. 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.
Follow Dmitry on Twitter: @DmitryBranovsk
Michal Migurski

Stamen partner Michal Migurski has overseen the research and development of Stamen’s technology work since 2003, from running delivered code to prototypes and experiments to far-left-field disruption. He maintains an active weblog, and likes to talk in front of groups. You may remember him from such projects as Oakland Crimespotting, Walking Papers, Maps From Scratch, Digg Labs and API, Modest Maps, Mappr, and Reblog.
Follow Michal on Twitter: @migurski
Ben Schwarz

Ben Schwarz is a well known Melbourne Rubyist who funds his love of good food (at home) and sake (in bars) by designing sophisticated web applications using standards-based technology. More than anything else, he is driven by a maniacal desire to produce not only elegant code, but also beautiful software in the hands of its users.
Follow Ben on Twitter: @BenSchwarz
Divya Manian

Divya Manian is a Web Designer in Seattle. She made the jump from developing device drivers for Motorola phones to designing websites and has not looked back since. She takes her duties as an Open Web vigilante seriously which has resulted in collaborative projects such as HTML5 Readiness and HTML5 Boilerplate.
Speaker Photo: © Mohini Patel Glanz.
Follow Divya on Twitter: @nimbuin
Josh Williams

Josh Williams is CEO and co-founder of Gowalla, a mobile and Web service that gives people around the world a new way to communicate and express themselves through the everyday places and extraordinary settings they enjoy. Gowalla empowers everyone to capture and share their journey as they go while following the happenings of family and friends. Josh is responsible for building and growing the business while leading the product design team. Gowalla was launched in 2009 and is backed by notable investors including Greylock Partners, Alsop-Louie Partners, Founders Fund, and other prominent angel investors.
Josh is a self-taught designer and artist who has been creating online for over 15 years. Josh loves mid-century modern design, architecture, skiing, snowboarding and longboarding. He lives in Austin, Texas with his wife and two young daughters.
Follow Josh on Twitter: @JW
Silvia Pfeiffer

Dr Silvia Pfeiffer has worked on novel media technology for more than 15 years and is an internationally renowned expert in new Web video standards. Silvia completed her PhD in Mannheim, Germany, on audio-visual content analysis. She then spent 7 years at the CSIRO developing new video technology for the Web in the “Annodex” project. In 2007, she co-founded Australian video company Vquence which offers consulting and technology services for Web 2.0 video.
Silvia is now an invited expert on four W3C video-related working groups. She is making contributions to the new audio and video elements in HTML5, to media annotation standards, to media fragment addressing via URIs, and to video accessibility technology for hearing and seeing-impaired people (captions, audio annotations etc).
Speaker photo: © Alice Boxhall
Follow Silvia on Twitter: @silviapfeiffer
Matt Balara

Matt Balara is a freelance web designer, was a child prodigy violinist and is unintentionally bilingual, all of which has been vitally important to his success in designing for the web since 1993. Despite years of experience, he still can’t understand why so many websites are so useless and ugly.
Follow Matt on Twitter: @MattBalara
John Allsopp

John has been working with, on, for and against the web since the first half of the 1990s.
He’s a co-founder of westciv.com, and developer of Style Master, the most venerable cross platform CSS development tool, now more than 10 years old, and the author of numerous courses, tutorials, articles (including the still widely cited Dao of Web Design” from 2000), tools and resources for web designers and developers.
John is also the co-founder of the web conference series Web Directions. Web Directions is held in Australia, North America, Japan and the UK.
More recently still, John co-founded Scroll Magazine, a print, PDF and online magazine exploring the big ideas around designing and developing for the web, and is the co-chair of OWEA, a new XG at the W3C focussing on educating the next generation of Web Professionals.
John is the father of 3 girls, the light of his life, and in his copious spare time, does his best to do as much mountain biking, surfing and snowboarding as all these other activities allow, which is to say, very little.
John’s personal site is johnfallsopp.com.
Follow John on Twitter: @johnallsopp
Daniel Davis

Daniel is the Web Evangelist for Opera’s Japan office based in Tokyo. His previous work experience includes project management, IT training, web development, software development and system administration in both Japan and the UK, his home country. After studying Japanese and Chinese at university, he grew more and more interested in the flourishing field of IT and the web, learning as much as he could by playing and experimenting with internet-related technologies. His current work promoting web standards and cross-device web development at Opera fits in perfectly with his ideology of openness and equality across linguistic, social and socio-economic borders.
Follow Daniel on Twitter: @ourmaninjapan
Craig Mod

Craig Mod is a writer, designer, publisher and developer concerned with the future of publishing & storytelling.
In 2010 he founded publishing think tank PRE/POST. He is co-author, designer and publisher of Art Space Tokyo. He is also co-founding editor and engineer behind TPUTH.com, co-founder and developer of the storytelling project Hitotoki, and frequent collaborator with Information Architects, Japan. He’s lived in Tokyo for almost a decade and speaks frequently on the future of books and media. He is the worst speller you will ever meet.
Follow Craig on Twitter: @craigmod