Alexa Mills is the Community Media Specialist at MIT's Community Innovator's Lab, where she has combined her passion for stories with her passion for bottom-up urban planning. Alexa works directly with communities to develop media that expresses their perspective on various issues. Alexa's body of work includes Predatory Tales, the true stories of predatory lending scams in Lawrence, Massachusetts; an interactive map of Tambo de Mora, Peru, hand-drawn by local teenagers seeking to describe their town to outsiders; and a series of short films about organizing to protect the environment from the coal industry in eastern Kentucky. All projects use various forms of media to express a community's perspective on an issue. Alexa earned her BA in English, with a concentration in Medieval Literature, from Cornell University in 2003. She earned her Master's in City Planning from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2008. Before attending MIT, Alexa directed the SAFE Victim Advocacy Program in the Domestic Violence Unit of the Washington, D.C., city courthouse.

Audubon Dougherty is a multimedia producer interested in the role of technology for international and community development. She works on projects that focus on mobile technologies as an accessible medium for civic engagement.

Charlie is a graduate student in the Speech + Mobility group.

Dharmishta Rood studies the internet, and is interested in the intersection of technology, culture and human interactions. She is the co-founder of Populous, a Knight funded project that aims to provide collegiate and small town newspapers with the tools they need to survive in a web 2.0 environment. The project exists with three goals: to create an open-source CMS that newspapers can use for free, to create a platform newspaper staff can use to organize around goals, community events and the creation of news, and to integrate networking features that will allow community members to both share and create news.

In addition to being a researcher at Harvard Business School, she co-directed t=0, a festival for entrepreneurs, which happened at MIT fall 2011. Dharmishta holds an Ed.M. from Harvard University and a B.A. in Design | Media Arts from UCLA. She is currently learning to do handstands.

Federico Casalegno, is the Director of the MIT Mobile Experience Lab and Associate Director of the MIT Design Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
A social scientist with an interest in the impact of networked digital technologies in human behavior and society, Dr. Casalegno both teaches and leads advanced research at MIT, and design interactive media to foster connections between people, information and physical places using cutting-edge information technology.

His lab has developed Locast, an open source, flexible and cutting-edge location-based platform that combines distributed Web and Mobile applications that create hyperlocal and highly-connected experiences. Locast superimposes layers of collectively generated information within the physical space. This augmentation of space is democratically chosen by Locast users, in real time, as they participate in the content-generation process. Within Locast, the interconnection between content, spaces and people is simultaneous and ubiquitous.

Jeffrey designs maps visual programming environments and other stuff at the MIT Media Lab's Design Ecology group.

Leo Bonanni is the Founder and CEO of Sourcemap.com, the crowd-sourced directory of product supply chains and carbon footprints. The open-source website offers a suite of tools for companies and individuals to share information about where things come from, what they're made of, and their social and environmental impact. Since 2009, thousands of people have created sourcemaps of food, furniture, clothing, electronics and more. The Sourcemap team partners with for- and non-profit organizations to bring visibility into their supply chains and to connect consumers with the source of products. Sourcemap has been featured by the BBC, NPR, the Globe and Mail, the Boston Globe and the Huffington Post and received awards from Scientific American, Ars Electronica and ID magazine.

Leo holds a PhD from the MIT Media Lab's Tangible Media Group, where he currently works as a Visiting Scientist. He has an MS and a Master of Architecture from MIT, a BA from Columbia, and he teaches teaches sustainable product design at Parsons and at MIT.

Lisa Williams is the founder and CEO of the largest searchable index of local weblogs, Placeblogger.com. It was a winner of the Knight 21st Century News Challenge Award, a program aimed at funding innovative, open-source tech projects that promote new forms of journalism and access to civic information. In 2008, she participated in TechStars as one of only ten teams out of four hundred to be selected for seed funding and intensive mentoring as part of TechStars' annual start-up incubator program. Before Placeblogger, Williams started H2Otown.info, a nationally recognized citizen journalism community site covering and talking about Watertown, MA, where she lives and works. She has also worked with Boston.com on online community, social networking and blogging. Before that, she was director of the Enterprise Software research group at Yankee Group, a Boston area technology analyst firm. I've got experience in online community building, Drupal, online newspapers/journalism, staffing and managing tech projects. You can email me at lisa ---at-- placeblogger dawtcom. You can also reach me via Twitter, where I am @lisawilliams.

Matt's a Research Assistant at the Center. He has spent his career at the intersection of technology and social change. He graduated with high honors from the University of Maryland College Park, where he wrote a thesis on the disruptive role of political blogs in journalism. He went on to join the strategy team at EchoDitto, a boutique consulting firm building cool technology for nonprofits, startups, and socially responsible businesses.

Then Matt attempted to save democracy by directing new media at Americans for Campaign Reform, a bi-partisan grassroots effort to enact voluntary public financing of federal campaigns. Right before Citizens United v. FEC hit, he joined the New Organizing Institute, where he helped to train the next generation of organizers. For most of this time, he also ran one of the most popular NetSquared groups in the world.

Matt's interested in pretty much everything, particularly the everything taking place at the Media Lab.

Molly Sauter grew up in Bucks County, PA, and has lived, variously, in Annapolis, MD, Austin, TX, and Somerville, MA. She studied Philosophy and the History and Philosophy of Science at St John’s College and the University of Pittsburgh, where she was a Brackenridge Fellow.

Before arriving at MIT, she worked as a researcher at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University, and as a freelance narrative designer and game critic in the indie game scene. Molly’s research focuses on cultural and socio-political analyses of technology, particularly hacktivist and other political technologies exported across cultural lines. She also nurses interests in digital poetry, science and technology in popular culture, the HCI of information security, and remix aesthetics.

She can be found on Twitter @oddletters and occasionally blogging at oddletters.com.

Nick Grossman is a technologist & entrepreneur focused on the intersection of the web and urban, social, and civic systems. For the past 10 years, he has developed software and media products, advocacy efforts and enterprise businesses that help cities work better.

Nick currently works with three organizations that are building civic technologies on an international scale. He is the Executive Director of Civic Commons, a new nonprofit initiative that helps governments collaborate around technology development projects. Since 2006, Nick led new product and business development at OpenPlans, building civic media websites and developing enterprise open source software for cities. He is also an advisor to Code for America.

You can find nick blogging at The Exobrain, tumblogging at The Slow Hunch, and on Twitter at @nickgrossman.

Pablo takes part and develops his projects in several independent research groups such as: Basurama (Trash-o-rama), where he has developed 6000km.org, a project that, through geotagged information, researches about the landscapes that the Spanish real estate crisis has left behind; Meipi, which develops the open source software meipi.org for participatory mapping; Kulturometer.org, that researches about cultural expenses in Madrid Region; Montera34, a research group that develops organization and visualization tools such as newspaper surface coverage.

He holds a Master in Architecture by the Escuela Técnica Superior de Arquitectura de Madrid. He has also studied in the Technische Universität Dresden in Germany.

As a scholar in the Ronald E. McNair Post Baccalaureate Achievement Program, Rogelio has conducted research regarding the use of new media among Latina/o activists in Los Angeles. Emphasizing a "from-the-ground-up" approach to scholarship and civic engagement, Rogelio has been involved with integrating media and technology into social justice geared movements. His work looks into lessening educational and health related disparities among historically underrepresented and underserved communities. Past examples of such fusion between media and public service include his involvement with the Fast for Our Future, a human rights focused hunger strike that utilized a new media campaign, and the South Central Farmers Health and Education Fund, which aims to provide low income communities with affordable organic produce and essential dietary education with the assistance of new media.

Rogelio will work closely with the Center for Civic Media to further develop the use of technology and media as a means of addressing societal disparities, with an emphasis on ensuring access to emerging technology, media, and digital information among communities that often fall victim to the "digital divide."

William Uricchio is Professor and Director of the Comparative Media Studies Program and Professor of Comparative Media History at Utrecht University in the Netherlands. He has held visiting professorships at Stockholm University, the Freie Universität Berlin, and Philips Universität Marburg; and Guggenheim, Fulbright and Humboldt fellowships have supported his research. Uricchio considers the interplay of media technologies and cultural practices, and their role in (re-) constructing representation, knowledge and publics. In part, he researches and develops new histories of 'old' media (early photography, telephony, film, broadcasting, and new media) when they were new. And in part, he investigates the interactions of media cultures and their audiences through research into such areas as peer-to-peer communities and cultural citizenship, media and cultural identity, and historical representation in computer games and reenactments.