Webstock 06
Dori Smith
Web Standards: Why You Should Care
Dori Smith is author of Java 2 for the WWW: Visual QuickStart Guide, co-author of JavaScript for the WWW: Visual QuickStart Guide and "Mac OS X Unwired", and a contributor to numerous online and print computer industry magazines. A frequent speaker at industry conferences, she is on the Steering Committee for the Web Standards Project, as well as Publisher and ListMom for the Wise-Women's Web organization. Her upcoming books are "Dashboard Widgets for Mac OS X Tiger: Visual QuickStart Guide" and "Macromedia Dreamweaver 8 for Windows and Macintosh: Visual QuickStart Guide".
Roger Hudson
Roger Hudson from Web Usability has a post-graduate certificate in Internet Marketing and provides website usability and accessibility services to corporate, government and not-for-profit organizations. As an accessibility specialist, he is familiar with the needs of people with different disabilities and how these needs can be most effectively met.
Roger has a detailed understanding of the W3C Web Content Accessibility Guidelines and has undertaken a range of accessibility research projects. He has conducted many usability and accessibility evaluations with a wide range of web users including those with disabilities.
Russ Weakley
Let go and allow users to control their own experience
Russ Weakley is a standards-based web designer, developer and trainer from Max Design who has worked in the web industry for 10 years.
Russ co-chairs the Web Standards Group and co-founded Web Essentials. Russ has also produced a series of widely acclaimed CSS-based tutorials including Listamatic, Listamatic2, Listutorial, Floatutorial, Selectutorial. He recently wrote his first book, "Teach Yourself CSS in 10 Minutes".
Rachel McAlpine
From plain language to F-language: we're ready for rules
Rachel McAlpine is the director of Quality Web Content Ltd, and has specialised in online content since 1995. Rachel works as a consultant, writer, editor and trainer. She is especially concerned with improving intranet and web content on government and academic sites. She is now developing a standards-based, online course for people who write non-marketing content. In New Zealand, the Write Group provides Quality Web Content Workshops under license.
Rachel is the author of Web Word Wizardry, "Crash Course in Corporate Communications" and Global English for Global Business. She is also a poet, playwright and novelist. "Humming" is her latest novel, and you'll find her poetry blog on writing.co.nz.
Douglas Bowman
Common Structure
Douglas Bowman is an influential designer whose highly successful and widely acclaimed designs for sites like Blogger, Wired News, Capgemini, and Adaptive Path have pushed him to the forefront of responsible, forward-thinking web design. Bowman refuses to keep techniques and secrets he discovers to himself, instead, opting to share them with his clients and the web community at large. Bowman's consulting firm, Stopdesign, proves by example that beautiful, functional, and accessible design can coexist with efficient, standards-compliant code.
Douglas was sponsored by Positively Wellington Business
Heather Hesketh
Progressive Development
Heather Hesketh is the CEO of hesketh.com/inc., a leading user experience agency specializing in Internet-based solutions for progressive not-for-profits, higher education, and venture-backed startups. Having bootstrapped her business, Heather's approach is to focus on defined revenue streams and sustainable profitability. Her industry insights and business instincts have been developed alongside hesketh.com, which has grown from a one-person consultancy to a thriving full-service agency whose clients include Oxford University Press, Duke University, and Microsoft. The success of hesketh.com coupled with the reputation they've earned for client satisfaction has attracted a lot of attention, landing Hesketh on the pages of The Business Journal, Entrepreneur magazine, and Triangle Lifestyle magazine and garnering awards such as CED's Entrepreneurial Excellence Award for Community Service.
Heather was sponsored by DNA
Russell Brown
Content and Community
Described as a web entrepreneur and a mediaphile, Russell Brown is the mastermind of PublicAddress and the voice of HardNews. He's a blogger, a journalist, an "internet specialist", a columnist for the Listener and several other publications, and an authoritative media commentator.
Russell's photo courtesy Alastair Thompson (Scoop)
Tony Chor
Internet Explorer: The Good, the Bad, and the Future
Tony Chor is the Group Program Manager of the Microsoft's Internet Explorer team. He is responsible for leading the design, development, and release of new versions of IE including the upcoming IE7 as well as taking care of the hundreds of millions of existing IE users.
Tony is a fifteen year veteran of Microsoft and has worked on a variety of projects including digital imaging in Windows Vista, MSN Explorer, Works, Encarta Online, Bookshelf, Picture It!, children's products, and games. He holds a B.S. in Computer Science from Stanford University.
Darren Fittler
Web Accessibility - a user's perspective
Darren Fittler is the Vice-Chair on the management board of the Disability Discrimination Legal Center in Australia. He has worked with organisations such as Blind Citizens Australia, the Multicultural Disability Advocacy Association of New South Wales, the World Blind Union Asia-Pacific Youth Committee and the Blind Citizens Australia Youth Forum. He has a B.A. in Social Work, and a law degree from the College of Law. In addition to practicing in the legal profession, Mr.Fittler also has his own web consulting business. He is vision impaired.
Kelly Goto
About Interface: Designing for Lifestyle
Kelly Goto is currently a principal at gotomedia, an online consultancy for user experience and interaction design, Kelly continues to focus on developing new techniques for collaborative development in digital media. With over 15 years of experience in the advertising, design and interactive industry, Kelly bridges the gap between utility and aesthetics. Formerly an award-winning Creative Director at Idea Integration Kelly successfully managed the redesigns of many sites ranging from independent to corporate levels. In advertising and commercial design since the late 1980s, Kelly has acted as creative director, designer, and producer for many high-profile clients including KPMG Consulting, Compaq, IBM, Warner Bros., National Geographic, Adobe Corporation, Paramount Television, Macromedia Corp., and Sony Pictures. Kelly is the co-author of the highly acclaimed book Web Redesign: Workflow that Works.
Kelly was sponsored by Provoke
Ben Goodger
Firefox: Success and Challenges
Ben Goodger is a Software Engineer for Google Inc. in Mountain View, California and is the lead engineer on the Firefox project. Prior to joining Google in January of 2005, he was a Software Engineer at Netscape Communications Corporation working in the Navigator group, later joining the Mozilla Foundation. Ben led product and project management of the Firefox project from Phoenix 0.5 through the Firefox 1.0 release and established the product plan for Firefox 1.5. Ben's role in development has included architecting several key features, in particular Firefox's Extension Management system.
Rowan Simpson
Trade Me Unplugged - The inside story of NZ's largest website
Rowan Simpson has been part of the Trade Me adventure since the early days, after they acquired his fledgling start-up, flathunt.co.nz, in 2001.
At the time he was the only employee who didn't share a surname with the founder, Sam Morgan. He now leads the web development team in a company of 52 staff.
Donna Maurer
Information architecture: Beyond the hierarchy and Usability for rich internet applications
Donna is a freelance information architect and interaction designer. She has been designing structures and interfaces for websites, intranets, web applications and business tools professionally for more than 5 years, and has been hanging around the internet for much longer than that. She is easy to spot as she is often surrounded by brightly-coloured paper prototypes and sticky-notes, and continually surprises her colleagues by talking to people rather than computers, and using as many coloured markers as possible.
Donna is an experienced speaker and has presented at many events, most recently at the Information Architecture Summit in Montreal, and has developed and presented very popular workshops on information architecture; interaction design and usability topics.
Donna tutors and lectures in Human-Computer Interaction at the University of Canberra, and is studying for a Masters in Human Factors. She is also an active member of the community, serving on the organising committee for the Information Architecture Summit, as a local ambassador for UXNet (user experience network), Canberra representative for CHISIG and mentor for the IA Institute.
Donna was sponsored by GOVIS
Joel Spolsky
Shiny jeejaw
Joel Spolsky is a globally-recognized expert on the software development process. His website Joel on Software is popular with software developers around the world and has been translated into over thirty languages. As the founder of Fog Creek Software in New York City, he created FogBugz, a popular project management system for software teams. Joel has worked at Microsoft, where he designed VBA as a member of the Excel team, and at Juno Online Services, developing an Internet client used by millions. He has written two books: User Interface Design for Programmers (Apress, 2001) and Joel on Software (Apress, 2004). Joel holds a BS from Yale in Computer Science.
Joel was sponsored by Intergen
Kathy Sierra
Now Go Change the World
Kathy Sierra has worked for the last decade in game development, new media, artificial intelligence, and computer-based learning. She's created games and multimedia for Virgin, MGM, and Amblin, and the original producer of Nestle's Wonka.com website. Her most recent stint was for Sun Microsystems, where she worked as a "master trainer" helping Java instructors understand and teach the latest Java technologies, and as the lead developer of most of Sun's Java Certification exams. She is a multiple Jolt Award winner, the creator of the ground-breaking and bestselling Head First series for O'Reilly, the founder of the largest Java community website, and author of the Creating Passionate Users blog and upcoming book.
Kathy was sponsored by Novell
Andreas Girardet
The War of Words: An analysis of the struggle between Closed and Open Source Software and the development of the Web
Coming from a University background, Andreas was involved in the early development of commercial Internet services providers in system administration and management from 1995 to 2002. He is the founder of the New Zealand Linux distribution "Your Operating System" (Yoper), one of the more successful desktop Linux distributions which was ranked #1 on distrowatch.com in 2003. Andreas has worked in the largest New Zealand Linux migration project at Air New Zealand for IBM as technical lead. His past employers were The Internet Company of New Zealand, Telecom XTRA, IBM Global Services; currently he is employed by Novell as Consultant Architect for Linux. Andreas is also involved in SuSE development and is an enthusiastic and passionate supporter of the Open Source/Linux movement. He holds an MA in Philosophy and enjoys chess.
Steve Champeon
Simplicity, Web Standards, and Spam
Steven Champeon possesses a skillset best described by the wary as 'eclectic', having run through carpentry, pizza delivery, professional blood testing guinea pig, and SGML document conversion operator, to achieve new heights as founder and List Mom of WebDesign-L and co-founder and Group Leader of the Web Standards Project. He has been an author and editor of technical books on Web development and related topics, including many articles in print and online venues; his towering achievement is to have taken other people's best ideas and smashed them together into the concept of "progressive enhancement" in Web design.
Lately he's been resting on his laurels and spending all his free time fighting spam. His antispam package, EnemiesList, is used by ISPs, state governments, and Web hosting providers and is available in limited beta release to the public. He's served on the advisory boards for SxSW Interactive and the CMP/Miller-Freeman Web conferences and is good with kids. He is CTO of hesketh.com/inc in Raleigh, NC USA where he tries to keep the servers running. Despite all you may have heard, he's a pretty nice guy.
Steven was sponsored by Signify.
