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Board of Advisors

The Socialtext Board of Advisors is made up of innovators, thought leaders and emerging technology drivers.

Tom Gruber

Co-founder, Intraspect Software

Tom Gruber is an innovator in technologies that extend human intelligence. Building on early work in computer-based learning and artificial intelligence, he now focuses on creating environments for organizational intelligence. He was co-founder and CTO of Intraspect Software, which create environments for people working together on line. Intraspect applications help people collaborate in large distributed communities, learn from each other, and continuously contribute to a collective body of knowledge. Intraspect is used by hundreds of corporate customers in Financial Services, Marketing Services, Professional Services, High Technology, and other globally distributed enterprises.

Zack Lynch

Founder, TimeBack

Zack Lynch is the veteran of multiple enterprise software startups. Lynch most recently founded TimeBack, a provider of communications productivity applications. Previously, Lynch was a founder and VP of Marketing and Sales at Steelwedge, an Enterprise Forecasting Optimization company, where he brought in the company’s first outside investment money and developed its initial go-to-market strategy. Prior to this, Lynch served as VP of Marketing and Sales at a provider of Trade Relationship Management software.

Lynch also spent four years building Maxager Technology where he worked his way up through product marketing to become the VP Marketing. His hands-on leadership of the product marketing, product management and corporate communications teams played a critical role in positioning the company in a new market that focused on bringing profit optimization software into the daily processes occurring across the enterprise.

Lynch has taught classes on scenario planning techniques and consulted to companies including Bell Atlantic and Intel on the long-term impacts of undefined technologies.

Lynch has an M.A in economic geography and a double B.S. in evolutionary biology and environmental science with high honors from UCLA. His masters thesis examined how the Internet transforms communications and commerce. He is currently writing a book on the societal implications of neurotechnology. He resides in San Francisco with his wife.

Jerry Michalski

Founder and President, Sociate

Jerry Michalski (ma-call-ski) is the founder and president of Sociate, a technology consulting firm. Through Sociate, Michalski offers advice, speaks, writes and invests, taking a more hands-on role in developing the products and services he has written about for a dozen years. His interests lie mainly in the many ways that technology and people interact – in private and business settings, and at all scales: as individuals, businesses, economies and societies.

Michalski is working on his first book, which offers (among other things) a humanist answer to the dysfunctions of consumer capitalism, innovative approaches to improve the world’s culture and help creators make a better living, and ways for corporations to make transparency and openness profit drivers, not just ethical guidelines.

For the five years before he founded Sociate, Michalski was the Managing Editor of Release 1.0, Esther Dyson’s monthly newsletter, and co-host of the annual PC Forum. For the five years before that, Jerry was an industry analyst and research service director with New Science Associates, which was later bought by Gartner Group. Michalski earned an MBA from the Wharton School and a BA in Economics from UC Irvine. He was raised in Peru and Argentina and speaks fluent Spanish, German and French.

Mitch Ratcliffe

President, Internet/Media Strategies Inc.

Mitch Ratcliffe is a leading commentator on the economy and technology. He is president of Internet/Media Strategies Inc., a consultancy that has worked with America Online, EarthWeb, Audible, Time Warner, ZD Net, Comdex and SoftBank, among others. Additionally, he is co-founder and a principal of Creative Media Partners, a programming development and production company and editorial director of InnovationWorld LLC, a research firm covering foreign direct investment decision-making and best practices. He has served in key positions in the publishing, technology, and financial services industries, often managing virtual workgroups.

Ratcliffe led the development of the ON24 Financial iNetwork, the first streaming news organization, from 1999 to 2001, when he guided the editorial and production teams from startup to producing more than 24 hours of personalized news content each day. Simultaneously, he developed and managed the ZDY2K Web site, a source of Year 2000 information and commentary on the ZD Net supersite.

During the early 1990s, as editor of Digital Media, the seminal publication of digital convergence, Ratcliffe pioneered coverage of electronic commerce, consumer privacy and encryption technology. Prior to Digital Media, Ratcliffe was editor-at-large and networking editor of MacWEEK, the newspaper of the Apple Macintosh industry. He is the co-author of three books published by Random House, and his work has appeared in Forbes, Fortune, PCWEEK, PCWorld, In-Formation, National Review, and Feed, among others. Mr. Ratcliffe is also a widely-quoted commentator on digital technology and the networked economy; he has been quoted in Time, Newsweek, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, and many other publications.

Ratcliffe was an executive at Ziff-Davis Exposition & Conference Co., later known as SoftBank Forums, where he was a vice president responsible for content and business development. He was producer and host of the Digital World Conference and helped to launch the JavaOne tradeshow, as well as representing SoftBank on the board of Electric Classifieds and Match.com. He is a trustee of the Chaordic Commons, an international non-profit dedicated to developing new organizational models.

Doc Searls

Senior Editor, Linux Journal

Doc Searls is a writer and speaker on topics that arise where technology and business meet.

He is the Senior Editor of Linux Journal, one of the world’s leading technology monthlies, with a paid circulation of over 100,000.

He is also co-author of The Cluetrain Manifesto: The End of Business as Usual, a New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Business Week, Borders Books and Amazon.com bestseller. (It was Amazon’s #1 sales & marketing bestseller for thirteen months and sells around the world in nine languages.)

He also writes Doc Searls Blog. J.D. Lasica of Annenberg’s Online Journalism Review calls Doc “one of the deep thinkers in the blog movement.” Doc’s blog has over 60,000 readers per month, and comes out on top when you look up “blog” on Google.

Countless companies — even industrial giants such as Coca-Cola — have credited Cluetrain as both a wake-up call and a source of strategic insight about the conversational nature of today’s networked markets, and the way in which they have redistributed the balance of power between supply and demand.

Doc also delivers clues in the form of speeches, presentations and workshops to companies such as Johnson & Johnson, Migros, Nortel Networks, Xoriant, and Borland/Inprise, and at events such as the SOHO Summit, Government Technology Conference, CES, Comdex, Linux World Expo, First Tuesday/Zurich, O’Reilly Open Source and Peer-to-Peer Conventions, JabberCon, Seybold and Buzz2000.

A former radio personality, Doc has appeared on TechTV, CNBC, CNet Radio, KOMO-TV, KING-TV, and as a moderator and panelist at too many events to list here. He is also a regular on The Linux Show.

Doc’s marketing background began in 1978, when he co-founded Hodskins Simone and Searls, which became one of Silicon Valley’s leading advertising and public relations agencies. (HS&S; was sold to Publicis Technology in early 1998.) Doc’s marketing consultancy, The Searls Group, began as the public relations side of HS&S.; Over the years he has worked with Hitachi, Sun, Apple, Nortel, Borland, ArrayComm , Motorola and other leading companies, in addition to many start-ups.

As a writer, his byline has appeared in OMNI, Wired, PC Magazine, The Standard, The Sun, Upside, Wired, The Globe & Mail and many other publications. Much of his writing is archived in Reality 2.0 and LinuxForSuits.com.

Clay Shirky

Adjunct Professor, NYU’s Graduate Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP)

Shirky divides his time between consulting, teaching, and writing on the social and economic effects of Internet technologies. His consulting practice is focused on the rise of decentralized technologies such as peer-to-peer, web services, and wireless networks that provide alternatives to the wired client/server infrastructure that characterizes the Web. Current clients include GBN, the Library of Congress, the Highlands Forum, the Markle Foundation, and the BBC.

Shirky is also an adjunct professor in NYU’s graduate Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP), where he teaches courses on the interrelated effects of social and technological network topology — how our networks shape culture and vice-versa. His current course, Social Weather, examines the cues we use to understand group dynamics in online spaces and the possible ways of improving user interaction by redesigning our social software to better reflect the emergent properties of groups.

Shirky has written extensively about the internet since 1996. Over the years, he has had regular columns in Business 2.0, FEED, OpenP2P.com and ACM Net_Worker, and his writings have appeared in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Harvard Business Review, Wired, Release 1.0, Computerworld, and IEEE Computer. He has been interviewed by Slashdot, Red Herring, Media Life, and the Economist’s Ebusiness Forum. He has written about biotechnology in his “After Darwin” column in FEED magazine, and serves as a technical reviewer for O’Reilly’s bioinformatics series. He helps program the “Biological Models of Computation” track for O’Reilly’s Emerging Technology conferences.

Shirky frequently speaks on emerging technologies at a variety of forums and organizations, including PC Forum, the Internet Society, the Department of Defense, the BBC, the American Museum of the Moving Image, the Highlands Forum, the Economist Group, Storewidth, the World Technology Network, and several O’Reilly conferences on Peer-to-Peer, Open Source, and Emerging Technology.

Prior to his appointment at NYU, Shirky was a Partner at the investment firm The Accelerator Group in 1999-2001, an international investment group with offices in New York, Los Angeles, and London. The Accelerator Group was focused on early stage firms, and Mr. Shirky’s role was technological due diligence and product strategy.

Shirky was the original Professor of New Media in the Media Studies department at Hunter College, where he created the department’s first undergraduate and graduate offerings in new media, and helped design the current MFA in Integrated Media Arts program.

Prior to his appointment at Hunter, he was the Chief Technology Officer of the NYC-based Web media and design firm Site Specific, where he created the company’s media tracking database and server log analysis software. Site Specific was later acquired by CKS Group, where he was promoted to VP Technology, Eastern Region.

Before there was a Web, he was Vice-President of the New York chapter of the EFF, and wrote technology guides for Ziff-Davis, including a guide to email-accessible internet resources, and a guide to the culture of the internet. He appeared as an expert witness on internet culture in Shea vs. Reno, a case cited in the Supreme Court’s decision to strike down the Communications Decency Act in 1996.

Shirky graduated from Yale College with a degree in art, and prior to eloping with the internet, he worked as a theater director and designer in New York. His company, Hard Place Theater, staged “non-fiction theater”, theatrical collages of found documents.

Shirky’s writings are archived at shirky.com, and he currently runs the N.E.C. mailing list for his writings on networks, economics, and culture.

Hans van Rietschote

CEO, Mercury Swan Consulting

Hans van Rietschote worked at Symantec from 1999-2009, where he was the senior director of the Technology Scouting Group in the office of the CTO. In that role he scouted out and analyzed thousands of technology companies that were at the leading edge of innovation in areas such as Storage, Security, System Management and Virtualization. Hans also identified and continues to monitor the top ten technology trends that will have a serious impact on the software industry in the next 3-5 years.

Before that, he spent more than 10 years working at AT&T; Bell Labs in the Netherlands. Hans has over 20 software patents filed in his name in the areas of virtualization, system and network management, and storage technologies. Hans has both an MS in mathematics and an MBA in telecommunications. Hans’ expertise lies in the areas of SaaS, Cloud Computing, Cloud Services, Cloud Storage, Virtualization for both the Enterprise data center and the desktop, Enterprise and Consumer Security, Enterprise and Consumer Backup and Enterprise and Consumer Storage technologies. He currently is or was a senior technical advisor for several companies including Diginome, SonaSoft, BlueGem Security, FortKnock, Qlayer, SocialText, Panta Systems, and Transitive.

He also is the founder and CEO of Mercury Swan consulting, a company that provides senior advisor services to start-ups and small companies. For larger companies Mercury Swan consulting provides technology scouting and technology trend monitoring services. Additionally they provide technical due diligence services to companies, investors and venture capital firms.

David Weinberger

Evident Marketing

David Weinberger is a highly-regarded author, speaker, and consultant on Internet communication, publishing and marketing.

Weinberger is frequently published and quoted in venues such as the New York Times, Boston Globe, Newsweek, and Harvard Business Review. He is currently a columnist for MIT Technology Review, Darwin Online, Intranet Design and KMWorld and is a frequent commentator on NPR’s “All Things Considered” and “Here and Now.”

Weinberger’s consulting practice, Evident Marketing, has served a wide range of clients including RR Donnelley, Intuit, Sun Microsystems, Esther Dyson’s Release 1.0 and CSC Index.

Weinberger served as VP of Strategic Marketing at Open Text Corporation, where he helped Open Text move from one of the first Web search engine companies (the engine behind Yahoo!) to market- and thought-leadership in Web-based collaborative software. At OpenText Weinberger contributed to a successful public offering in 1996.

Prior to Open Text, Weinberger was Vice President of Strategic Marketing at Interleaf. At Interleaf he helped launch the industry’s first document management system and its first electronic document publishing system, years ahead of the Web.

Weinberger began his career in the late ’70s teaching philosophy at New Jersey’s Stockton State College for five years. During this time he maintained his steady freelance writing of humor, reviews and intellectual and academic articles, publishing in places as diverse as The New York Times, Harvard Business Review, Smithsonian, Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine and TV Guide.

Weinberger earned his doctorate of philosophy in philosophical studies at the University of Toronto.

Kevin Werbach

Founder, Supernova Group

Kevin Werbach is the founder of the Supernova Group, an independent technology analysis and consulting firm. He advises companies and writes about emerging technologies in communications, media and software.

Werbach is a contributor and former editor of Release 1.0, a renowned publication that explores trends related to the Internet, telecommunications and computing. He also co-organizes the exclusive PC Forum conference. His writing has appeared in Harvard Business Review, Fortune, Wired, The Industry Standard, Harvard Law Review, Slate, Red Herring, and Business 2.0, among other publications.

Previously, Werbach served as Counsel for New Technology Policy at the Federal Communications Commission. Called ï¿1⁄2one of the few policy wonks who really got itï¿1⁄2 by Wired, he helped develop the United States Government’s e-commerce policy, shaped the FCC’s approach to Internet issues, and authored Digital Tornado, the first comprehensive analysis of the implications of the Internet on telecommunications.

A sought-after speaker and commentator, Werbach appears frequently in print and broadcast media including CNN, CNBC, NPR, ABC News, USA Today, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post. He is a fellow of the Global Institute for Communications in Japan, and serves on the advisory boards of SocialText, Participate Systems, Kasenna, and the Genesys Angelbridge Fund.

Werbach is a magna cum laude graduate of Harvard Law School, where he served as Publishing Editor of the law review, and a summa cum laude graduate of the University of California at Berkeley. He lives in the Philadelphia area with his wife and son.

Socialtext Board of Advisors Tom Gruber Zack Lynch Jerry Michalski Mitch Ratcliffe Doc Searls Clay Shirky Hans van Rietschote David Weinberger Kevin Werbach

June 6: Live Webinar with Andrew McAfee

Social Transformation: Accelerating Industry at the Pace of Social

Esteemed author and principal MIT research scientist, Andrew McAfee discusses the impact of social collaboration technologies on the modern industrial landscape.