DigitalNow: Association Leadership in the Digital Age

Day One

Clay  Shirky, Author of the groundbreaking book, "Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing without Organizations"

Clay Shirky divides his time between consulting, teaching, and writing on the social and economic effects of Internet technologies. Current clients include Nokia, GBN, the Library of Congress, the Highlands Forum, the Markle Foundation, and the BBC.

In addition to his consulting work, Clay is an adjunct professor in New York University’s (NYU) 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.

Before there was a Web, Clay 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.

Clay's new book, Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations, was published in February 2008, from Penguin Press. Here Comes Everybody is about what happens when people are given the tools to do things together, without needing traditional organizational structures.

Amber MacArthur, New Media Specialist and Web Strategist

Amber MacArthur is the personification of “old school” meets “new school.” If you visit her web site at http://ambermac.com/, you’ll find connections from Wikipedia to the New York Times, and from YouTube to the Canadian Broadcasting Company. According to Wikipedia, Amber is a Canadian television and netcasting personality, but it’s just not that simple to describe who Amber is and what she does.

Amber is a young media and technology professional who uniquely and perfectly represents our blended, cross-functional, multimedia, multi-cultural global society. Her work covers everything from reviewing the top 5 iPhone applications to discussing the unrealistic physical standards that the media promotes through the use of image editing and technical enhancements of photography.

With one foot anchored in traditional communications and relationships and the other splashing around in the river of new media, Amber is uniquely qualified to discuss the impact of social networking on our society in general, and to discuss how the social media “revolution” may affect associations in particular. When she's not reporting on the latest Web trends, Amber MacArthur is working with companies—including HP, Bell, Microsoft and Adobe—to research, design, implement and monitor them. At the world-famous Razorfish, in San Francisco, she was a strategist for a variety of Web content, branding and usability projects. She was also the Web communications director at HigherMarkets, and is a co-founder of Arktyp, which designed TWiT.tv, one of the first and most influential podcast networks in the world.

No one knows “new school” like Amber – and she understands it from the “old school” perspective. You won’t want to miss her dynamic and intriguing presentation.