boards.ie: who we are, what we do, where we are going

This talk will be about boards.ie, Ireland's largest community website: its evolution, some statistics, where it fits into the Irish web landscape, and some of the things our members do.

Darragh Doyle
Communications Manager, boards.ie
Blog | Twitter

Darragh Doyle is an online communications and content editor, entertainment and events blogger and Internet enthusiast with extensive experience in online community building and member services. He works with boards.ie Ltd. as communcations manager, looking after the education, engagement and involvement of the community of over 200,000 people. He has worked for the past nine years with various business and charitable organisations helping to provide members and readers with an excellent, easy and remarkable user experience.

Open community labs, creative spaces and doocracy

This talk will give some background to the setting up of 091 Labs, Galway's hackerspace, and also more generally about open spaces for creative collaboration and the principle of doocracy.

Declan Elliott
Founder, 091 Labs
Twitter

Declan Elliott has been an early pioneer in the emerging field of facilitation over the last decade. After working in business development and general management roles within Grand Metropolitan and Jardine Matheson across Asia Pacific, Europe and the US, he struck out on his own in 1998. Since then, he has focused on the evolving Internet space and its transformation of organisations' internal and external communications.

Applications of Twitter data extraction for business and research

This talk will discuss extracting data from Twitter, describing some recent trends both globally and from an Irish perspective.

John Conroy
Researcher, NUI Galway
Twitter

John Conroy is a social media researcher based at NUI Galway. He recently completed an MSc in Software Design and Development, where he researched the growth of Twitter and performed some trend analyses on various communities and events. He was also a contributing author to CMSWire, an online technology publication from Simpler Media Group, where he wrote for the "Social Media Minute" series of articles from 2008 to 2009.

WebFinger: a portable identity for the Web

This talk will describe WebFinger, a method whereby e-mail addresses are made more valuable, by letting people attach extra information such as profile data or avatars to them as a means of online identity.

Blaine Cook
Developer, Osmosoft
Former Lead Developer, Twitter
Blog | Twitter

Blaine Cook is a member of Osmosoft, a team of open source developers at BT. He was formerly lead developer for the social networking site Twitter. He is principal co-author of the OAuth and WebFinger specifications. He also worked for Yahoo! on the Fire Eagle project.

WebID: from blogging to a secure social web

This talk will discuss WebID, a secure identity system based on FOAF and SSL, and how it can be used to create distributed social networks from blogs.

Henry Story
Evangelist, Sun Microsystems
Blog | Twitter

Henry Story is a Semantic Web evangelist with Sun Microsystems, where he works on WebID (FOAF+SSL) and has contributed to the Atom Syntax and Protocol specifications. Previously, he developed and named the famous Babelfish machine translation service at AltaVista.

Keynote: A new kind of media literacy for a networked age

This talk has been moved to 1:30 PM

This keynote talk will discuss the need for more activist media consumers in addition to more responsible media creators, whereby a new kind of media literacy has to be designed for a networked age.

Dan Gillmor
Director, Knight Center for Digital Media Entrepreneurship
Blog | Twitter
This speaker is sponsored by NUI Galway's Millennium Fund

Dan Gillmor is a noted American technology writer and former columnist for the San Jose Mercury News. He was one of the leading chroniclers of the Silicon Valley dot-com boom and its subsequent bust. He is director of the Knight Center for Digital Media Entrepreneurship at Arizona State University's Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication, and a fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Univeristy. He is also the author of the book "We the Media".

The Facebook Platform

This talk discuss the Facebook Platform and some recent developments from the world's largest social network.

Charles Dowd
Manager of Platform Operations, EMEA, Facebook
Twitter | Facebook

Charles Dowd has 20 years experience in software and internet solutions, most of those in senior management or consulting roles delivering marketing, sales, technology and investment for innovation-led businesses. Before joining Facebook, he was founder of Ticket Truck, a hotel reservation service for Facebook, and has also worked with Travelonomy (now StudentUniverse.com), Cardform, Marrakech and IBM.

Panel: Social networks versus conversational networks

This panel session will be about differing types of online networks: those oriented around people and their social or professional connections, and those formed when people connect and converse through shared discussion topics of interest.

Chair: Adewale Oshineye
Social Web Developer Advocate, Google

Charles Dowd
Manager of Platform Operations, EMEA, Facebook

Blaine Cook
Developer, Osmosoft

Darragh Doyle
Communications Manager, boards.ie

Keynote: WeForest: a social network dedicated to reforesting the planet

This talk will discuss WeForest, an initiative that aims to leverage social media and social networks for a worthy cause: the reforestation of twenty million square kilometres of stripped land. The talk will cover how WeForest is using various social media channels for campaigning and the progress so far.

Bill Liao
CEO, Finaxis
Co-Founder, XING
Twitter

Bill Liao is a co-founder of the social network service XING and CEO of Finaxis AG, a financial services company. He is a special diplomatic envoy for Saint Kitts and Nevis, with a keen interest in sustainable development and the environment. He is also founder and coordinator of Neo.org, a global citizenship initiative, and of WeForest. He is author of the book "Stone Soup: A Secret Recipe For Making Something From Nothing".

Social media blur: blogs, networks, streams

This talk will discuss the evolution of blogs and social networks, and how comments and other content items are becoming part of real-time streams.

Stowe Boyd
Founder, /Message
Blog | Twitter

Stowe Boyd is a business strategy and information technologist, who focuses on real-time collaboration tools. He is widely credited with coining the terms "advisory capital" and "social tools". He is director of 301works.org, an Internet Archive initiative to preserve shortened URLs. He was previously president of Corante, a pioneering blog network, and was a research fellow with Accenture and the Market Intelligence Group.

Spinning out social media successfully for an NGO/charity

This talk will discuss how non-government organisations and charities can leverage social media to assist with worthy causes, using the SpunOut.ie website as an example in point.

Ruairí McKiernan
Founder and CEO, SpunOut.ie
Twitter

Ruairí McKiernan is founder of the Community Creations NGO which runs the SpunOut.ie national youth platform. Set up in early 2004 and based in Galway, Community Creations delivers a range of online and community-based services to empower young people as agents for positive social change. Ruairí has received several awards for SpunOut.ie.

From Galway to Silicon Valley and TechCrunch 50: building and raising capital for a consumer Internet startup

This talk will be about Fergus' experiences setting up a consumer Internet company in Silicon Valley, from raising capital from venture capitalists to technical infrastructures and team capabilities.

Fergus Hurley
Founder and CEO, Clixtr
Twitter

Fergus Hurley founded Clixtr in 2008, receiving seed funding from DFJ in Menlo Park in March 2009. The company was a finalist in the 2009 TechCrunch 50 event, won an emerging technology award for social networking from the Silicon Valley Business Journal in 2009, and took first prize in the Mobile Apps Showdown at CES 2010. He received his BE from UCC, an MS in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from MIT, and has also studied at Stanford University.

A context-aware mobile social Web

This talk will discuss context-aware multimedia content sharing, social communities and mobile advertising.

Laurent Walter Goix
Technical Leader, Telecom Italia
Twitter

Laurent Walter Goix has been working with Telecom Italia since 2001, on technologies including the mobile Web, VoIP / SIP, end-user service creation / mashups, and videoconferencing. He currently leads an R&D team on context-aware multimedia content sharing, social communities and advertising. He has also worked on the development of an advanced UGC and community platform for mobile users in e-tourism scenarios.

Apps are bad

It is universally agreed that mobile access to the Internet is growing in importance. What hasn’t been agreed is the debate of native apps vs. web apps for accessing online content. This talk will cover the arguments for and against each approach.

Ronan Skehill
Co-Founder, Cauwill Technologies
Twitter

Ronan Skehill is co-founder of Cauwill Technologies which won the InterTradeIreland Seedcorn competition for best new emerging company in 2009. Cauwill is a spinout from the University of Limerick, and provides solutions to the hospitality sector. In a previous life, Ronan lectured telecommunications in various universities.

Keynote: Communications 2.0: social media, storytelling, and standing out

How do you stand out in today's crowded social media landscape as people and companies put out increasingly creative multimedia, news feeds, and promotion? This talk will discuss multipurposing original content and maximising partnerships. At the same time, you can't leave behind old-school basics of great storytelling, savvy marketing and making yourself a trusted source.

Deanna Lee
VP of Communications and Marketing, New York Public Library
Blog

Deanna Lee is the vice president of communications and marketing at the New York Public Library. This year, she has overseen a multimedia online advocacy campaign, a ten-fold increase in NYPL's Twitter followers, an online-only annual report, and new ways of experiencing collections digitally. She came to communications after a 20-year career in broadcast news, including being a senior producer at ABC World News and overseas producer for ABC Nightline. She is the recipient of eight Emmy Awards.

The impact of social media on expert finding

This talk will discuss the impact of social media on sover search strategies, and the use of social channels to contact problem solvers.

Werner Breitfuss
Research Project Manager, Hypios

Werner Breitfuss is a research project manager with Hypios, an innovative French startup company that aims to identify the right problem solvers for various R&D projects. Prior to joining Hypios, Werner completed a PhD in the University of Tokyo and worked on animated intelligent virtual agents.

Panel: The rise of location-based media sharing and social networks

This panel of experts will discuss the rise of geospatial-oriented social platforms and services such as Foursquare, Gowalla, etc.

Chair: Mark Cahill
Co-Founder, Social Bits

Laurent Walter Goix
Technical Leader, Telecom Italia

Fergus Hurley
Founder and CEO, Clixtr

Ronan Skehill
Co-Founder, Cauwill Technologies

Who am I: social identity in enterprise social networking

This talk will discuss identity management in a corporate environment, in particular in the context of globally distributed corporations, and related aspects such as presentation and reputation of an individual.

Gabriela Avram
Lecturer, University of Limerick
Blog | Twitter

Brian O'Donovan
Senior Development Manager, Sametime, IBM
Twitter

Gabriela Avram is a lecturer in digital media at the University of Limerick. She is also a researcher with the Interaction Design Centre, focusing on social media and Enterprise 2.0-related topics. Between 2005 and 2008, she was involved in a project studying collaborative work practices in distributed software development. She also advises companies on how they can benefit from using social software tools.

Brian O'Donovan has been working at IBM since 1994, and currently manages a group developing tools which help customers create applications for collaboration platforms that IBM sell under the Lotus brand name. He also leads the Centre for Advanced Studies which involves a number of programs to allow academic researchers collaborate with IBM on research topics of mutual interest. He previously worked at Digital and Verbatim.

Social media and LinkedIn for business

This talk will describe methods to derive maximum impact from your LinkedIn profile and connections.

Ted Vickey
Researcher, NUI Galway
Founder, FitWell LLC
Blog | Twitter

Ted Vickey is a researcher at NUI Galway, where is studying for a PhD on social networks and exercise adherence in the School of Engineering and Informatics. He is founder and president of FitWell LLC, a fitness management consulting company. From 1994 to 2005, Ted was executive director of the White House Athletic Center, under the Bush, Clinton and Bush administrations.