A resident of Oakland, California, Chris has been heading up NaNoWriMo since founding the escapade in 1999. With his startlingly mediocre prose style and complete inability to write credible dialogue, Chris has set a reassuringly low bar for budding novelists everywhere. Chris is an anthropologist by training and a freelance writer by trade; his work has appeared in the Washington Post, the Believer, and Lonely Planet guidebooks. When not bossing strangers around, Chris spends debilitating amounts of time in coffee shops. His mercilessly pants-kicking book, “No Plot? No Problem!,” is available at your favorite bookstore.

Nick Bilton is a Designer, User Interface Specialist, Technologist, Journalist, Hardware Hacker, Researcher, etc. etc.

Nick has worked in numerous different industries within the context of design, research & development, technology and storytelling. He is currently the Design Integration Editor for The New York Times and the User Interface Specialist & Lead Researcher for The New York Times Research & Development Lab working on a variety of research projects and exploring technologies that could become commonplace in the next 2-10 years. His work in the R&D Labs includes exploring and prototyping content and interaction on futuristic flexible digital displays, a vast array of mobile applications and devices, Times Reader, Print-to-mobile SMS, Semacode integration, content in the living room and context aware sensors. Nick is also the co-founder, with Michael Young, or Shifd.com, a startup within The New York Times that helps people shift content easily between multiple devices. Shifd recently won ‘Best overall Hack’ at last years Yahoo! Hack Day. Nick’s work has been profiled regularly in multiple books, magazines, newspapers and websites.

Outside of The Times, Nick helped co-found NYCResistor, a hacker space in Brooklyn which offers hardware and programming classes and allows people to collectively work on innovative open source hardware and robotics projects.

Peter Brantley is the Executive Director for the Digital Library Federation, a not-for-profit international association of libraries and allied institutions. His background includes significant experience with research libraries and digital library development programs. He has served as the Director of Technology at the California Digital Library, New York University, UC Berkeley, and UCSF. He was the first IT Manager for Rapt, a private SF firm providing pricing optimization for online advertising delivery, and eons ago worked as a systems analyst in the mass-market division of Random House. Peter is a member of the Board of Directors for the International Digital Publishing Forum. He was first introduced to computing via the CDC Plato system.

Neelan Choksi is the CEO of Lexcycle, the company behind Stanza. With over 2.0 million users in over 60 countries and over 12 million eBooks downloaded, Stanza is the most popular eBook reader for the iPhone and IPod Touch.

Lexcycle was acquired by Amazon in April. Prior to joining Lexcycle, Neelan was the COO at SpringSource (recently acquired by VMWare), the company behind the popular open source Spring Framework. Neelan served as the co-founder and President at SolarMetric, a leading object relational mapping provider, which was acquired by BEA Systems in 2005. Neelan also worked for TechTrader, Andersen Consulting Strategic Services and Exxon Research and Engineering. He currently serves on the board of Tasktop Technologies. Neelan is a graduate of MIT (and was part of the often-publicized MIT Blackjack team), Stevens Institute of Technology, and the University of Chicago Booth Graduate School of Business.

Cory Doctorow (craphound.com) is a science fiction novelist, blogger and technology activist. He is the co-editor of the popular weblog Boing Boing (boingboing.net), and a contributor to Wired, Popular Science, Make, the New York Times, and many other newspapers, magazines and websites. He was formerly Director of European Affairs for the Electronic Frontier Foundation (eff.org), a non-profit civil liberties group that defends freedom in technology law, policy, standards and treaties. In 2007, he served as the Fulbright Chair at the Annenberg Center for Public Diplomacy at the University of Southern California.

His novels are published by Tor Books and simultaneously released on the Internet under Creative Commons licenses that encourage their re-use and sharing, a move that increases his sales by enlisting his readers to help promote his work. He has won the Locus and Sunburst Awards, and been nominated for the Hugo, Nebula and British Science Fiction Awards. His latest novel, New York Times Bestseller LITTLE BROTHER, was published in May 2008, and his latest short story collection is OVERCLOCKED: STORIES OF THE FUTURE PRESENT. In 2008, Tachyon Books published a collection of his essays, called CONTENT: SELECTED ESSAYS ON TECHNOLOGY, CREATIVITY, COPYRIGHT AND THE FUTURE OF THE FUTURE (with an introduction by John Perry Barlow) and IDW published a collection of comic books inspired by his short fiction called CORY DOCTOROW’S FUTURISTIC TALES OF THE HERE AND NOW. His next novel is MAKERS, due from Tor Books in October, 2009.

He co-founded the open source peer-to-peer software company OpenCola, sold to OpenText, Inc in 2003, and presently serves on the boards and advisory boards of the Participatory Culture Foundation, the MetaBrainz Foundation, Technorati, Inc, the Organization for Transformative Works, Areae, the Annenberg Center for the Study of Online Communities, and Onion Networks, Inc.

In 2007, Entertainment Weekly called him, “The William Gibson of his generation.” He was also named one of Forbes Magazine’s 2007 Web Celebrities, and one of the World Economic Forum’s Young Global Leaders for 2007.

He is presently working on a new young adult novel, FOR THE WIN (about union organizing in video games).

On February 3, 2008, he became a father. The little girl is called Poesy Emmeline Fibonacci Nautilus Taylor Doctorow, and is a marvel that puts all the works of technology and artifice to shame.

Mr. Epstein’s 50 year distinguished career in publishing, which includes among other accomplishments, serving as Editorial Director of Random House, co-founder of the New York Review of Books, creator of Anchor Books, which launched the paperback revolution, founder of the Library of America and of the Readers Catalog, the precursor to online bookselling. Mr. Epstein has received many honors. He was the first recipient of the National Book Award for distinguished contribution to American Letters, and also received the Curtis Benjamin Award of the American Association of Publishers for inventing new kinds of publishing. In 2001, he was awarded the Lifetime Achievement Award of the National Books Critics Circle for creative publishing.

Jason Fried is the co-founder and President of 37signals, a privately-held Chicago-based company committed to building the best web-based tools possible with the least number of features necessary. 37signals’ products do less than the competition – intentionally. Jason believes there’s real value and beauty in the basics. Elegance, respect for people’s desire to simply get stuff done, and honest ease of use are the hallmarks of 37signals products. 37signals products, used by over 2,000,000 world wide, include Basecamp, Backpack, Highrise, Campfire, Ta-da List, and Writeboard. Their latest book, Getting Real, has been called the Bible of Web 2.0. Ruby on Rails, another 37signals creation, is the underlying technology driving thousands web apps.

JEFF JARVIS is the author of What Would Google Do? (Collins, January). He blogs about media and news at Buzzmachine.com and as a columnist for the Guardian. He is associate professor and director of the interactive journalism program at the City University of New York’s new Graduate School of Journalism. He is consulting editor of Daylife, a news startup. Jarvis was creator and founding editor of Entertainment Weekly; Sunday editor and associate publisher of the New York Daily News; TV critic for TV Guide and People; a columnist on the San Francisco Examiner; assistant city editor and reporter for the Chicago Tribune; reporter for Chicago Today.

Sara Lloyd is Digital Director for the UK trade publishing house, Pan Macmillan. She is responsible for developing the company’s digital strategy and publishing programme, management of Pan’s Web platform, applications and tools and leading the organisational, cultural and operational change to enable Pan Macmillan to position itself for an increasingly digital future. Sara’s career over the last 15 years has spanned newspaper, academic, reference, STM and trade publishing and she has played a key role in transforming many publishing businesses from print to digital. She is a regular presenter and writer on all matters digital, and recently made waves in the global publishing scene with her article ‘A Book Publisher’s Manifesto for the Twenty First Century’, originally written for the US journal, Library Trends.

Tim O’Reilly is the founder and CEO of O’Reilly Media, Inc., thought by many to be the best computer book publisher in the world. O’Reilly Media also hosts conferences on technology topics, including the O’Reilly Open Source Convention, the Web 2.0 Summit, and the Gov 2.0 Summit. Tim’s blog, the O’Reilly Radar “watches the alpha geeks” to determine emerging technology trends, and serves as a platform for advocacy about issues of importance to the technical community. Tim is on the boards of CollabNet and Safari Books Online, and is a partner in O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures.

Nina Paley is the director of the acclaimed animated feature film “Sita Sings the Blues,” which is about to release under a Creative Commons Share-Alike license. “Sita” has screened internationally at almost 100 film festivals and won awards including Best Feature at Annecy and Avignon, Best Script at Athens, Greece, and an IFP Gotham Award. Wired called her a “One-Woman Pixar” and Roger Ebert said of her film: “I am enchanted. I am swept away. I am smiling from one end of the film to the other. It is astonishingly original.” Nina is also a longtime veteran of syndicated comic strips, creating Fluff (Universal Press Syndicate), The Hots (King Features), and her own alternative weekly Nina’s Adventures. Nina teaches at Parsons School of Design in Manhattan and is a 2006 Guggenheim Fellow. She is currently Artist-in-Residence at QuestionCopyright.org.

Robert Stein was the founder of The Voyager Company. For 13 years he led the development of over 300 titles in The Criterion Collection, a series of definitive films on videodisc, and more than 75 CD ROM titles including the CD Companion to Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, Who Built America, and the Voyager edition of Macbeth. Previous to Voyager, Stein worked with Alan Kay in the Research Group at Atari on a variety of electronic publishing projects. Seven years ago, Stein started Night Kitchen to develop authoring tools for the next generation of electronic publishing. Currently he is a Senior Fellow at the London School of Economics and the Director of the Institute for the Future of the Book, a think & do tank based in London and New York aiming to understand (and hopefully influence) how intellectual discourse is changing as it shifts from printed pages to networked screens.