San Francisco: Speakers

Charlene Li: Charlene Li is an influential thought leader and guide on emerging technologies, with a specific focus on social technologies, interactive media, and marketing. The co-author of the business best-seller, Groundswell: Winning In A World Transformed By Social Technologies, Charlene released her newest book, Open Leadership: How Social Technology Can Transform the Way You Lead in May 2010. Open Leadership addresses the challenges facing leadership of the modern organization–given the dramatic adoption and impact social technologies have had on customer, partner, and employee relationships, how can companies not only manage but thrive in this new open, transparent, authentic world? Named "One of the Most Influential Women in Technology" by Fast Company magazine, Charlene is the founder of Altimeter Group which provides speaking and consulting services to organizations looking to understand and thrive in a new economy driven by social media tools and techniques. You can also read insights from Charlene on her blog, "The Altimeter." Charlene is one of the most frequently-quoted industry analysts and has appeared on 60 Minutes, The McNeil NewsHour, ABC News, CNN, and CNBC. She is also frequently quoted by The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, USA Today, Reuters, and The Associated Press. She is a much- sought after public speaker and has presented frequently at top technology conferences such as Web 2.0 Expo-where she now serves on their Advisory Board, SXSW, and adTech. Most recently, Charlene was a Vice President and Principal Analyst at Forrester Research. She joined Forrester in 1999, after spending five years in online and newspaper publishing with the San Jose Mercury News and Community Newspaper Company. She is a graduate of Harvard Business School and received a magna cum laude degree from Harvard College.

Michael E. Meyers, Entrepreneur and Founder, nowpublic.com: Michael E. Meyers is entrepreneur who has been involved in numerous successful technology startups across a wide range of industries. Most recently, Michael was the co-founder and CTO of NowPublic.com, the first venture backed start-up based on Drupal, that pioneered the concept of Citizen Journalism. In September of 2009 NowPublic.com was acquired by The Clarity Digital Group which owns and operates Examiner.com, a top 100 web site that provides local news and information for over 175 cities in North America. As the CTO of the Clarity Digital Group Michael and his team are migrating the first top 100 web property to Drupal. Michael is an adviser to the board of the Drupal Association, the non for profit organization that provides support and guidance for the Drupal project.

Matt Cleveland, Director of eBusiness, Health Net: Matt Cleveland is a Director of eBusiness overseeing development and operations for 5 web properties at Health Net.  In 2010 Health Net's customer portal www.healthnet.com won recognition and awards from Webby, Strategic Health Care Communications, Web Marketing Association, W3 Awards and Web Health Awards.  Matt has been building web-based applications, and web sites for the last 12 years of his 15 year career in technology as a programmer and architect and more recently as a management leader.  For much of his career his focus has been Java and JEE web technologies, but in the past 2 years has become involved with Drupal, introducing Drupal to Health Net for an internal web-based application.  Additional Drupal projects are in the pipeline.  Prior to joining Health Net in 2003 Matt built web sites and applications at J. D. Edwards, GrowZone, QWest and Great West Life.

Zach Chandler, Academic Technologist, Stanford UniversityZach Chandler is a academic technologist at Stanford University. He specializes in building scholarly communication, publication, and collaboration frameworks; specifically in the Drupal CMS. He is the co-founder of Jasper Group, and internal Stanford consultancy that assists academics in successful drupal project rollouts and outsourcing.

Jacob Redding, Executive Director, Drupal Association: Jacob got his start in Drupal in 2005. Working in the IT industry over the past 12 years he has built custom software with everything from Microsoft to Linux and Unix technologies. Acting as the Executive Director of the Drupal association he is heavily involved Drupal communities around the world, speaking and leading classes in not only New York, San Francisco, Boston, and Washington DC, but also far-flung locales such as China, Hungary and Jordan. An enthusiastic advocate of open-source, he is currently dedicating his time to helping Drupal become the leading OSS project.

Dries Buytaert, Acquia CTO and Co-founder: Dries is the original creator and project lead for the Drupal open source web publishing and collaboration platform. He serves as president of the Drupal Association, a non-profit organization formed to help Drupal flourish. A native of Belgium, Dries holds a PhD in computer science and engineering from Ghent University. Dries' Blog: http://buytaert.net