Judges

Alex Wright

Alex Wright is the Director of User Experience and Product Research at The New York Times and the author of Glut: Mastering Information Through the Ages, hailed by the Los Angeles Times as "a penetrating and highly entertaining meditation on our information age and its historical roots."

Alex has led research and design projects for IBM, Microsoft, The Long Now Foundation, Harvard University, the Internet Archive, and Yahoo!, among others. His work has won numerous industry awards, including a Webby, Cool Site of the Year, the PRSA Silver Anvil and an American Graphic Design Award.

Alex's writing has appeared in The New York Times, Salon.com, The Christian Science Monitor, The Believer, Harvard Magazine, Utne Reader, Yankee, Think, Interactions, Boxes and Arrows, New Architect, WebTechniques, Boston Business, Design Times and Library Journal, among others.

A popular speaker and lecturer, Alex has presented at The Long Now Foundation, Gartner Group, UC-Berkeley, the Institute of Design-Chicago, Seybold, the ASIS&T Information Architecture Summit, CMP Web conferences, Association of Internet Professionals, Creating for the Web, and numerous IBM conferences.

Alex holds a B.A. in English and American Literature from Brown University and an M.S. in Library and Information Science from Simmons College. He has also completed graduate coursework in journalism at Harvard, and in usability engineering at UC-Berkeley.

Alex grew up in Richmond, Virginia and Sussex, England. He currently lives in New York City.

Amy Hoy

Amy Hoy hates writing about herself in the third person, but she's game if you are. Amy's got a mission: she's on a (gentle) crusade to promote imaginative & uncommon interaction design. When she's not dancing around trying to pull on her supersuit, she writes, wireframes, designs, speaks, trains, and generally does tricks, all under the slash7 moniker.

Amy grew up in the US but now lives in Austria, and finds Mark Twain ever funnier since trying to learn German. She does not actually wear a cowboy hat.

Amy Hoy

Bek Hodgson is a Visual and Interaction Design Consultant for global community-based e-commece sites, products and brands.

Inspired to empower all people to share, market and sell unique and valuable services and creations, Bek has led teams for a wide range of companies in the development of visual and interactive systems that inspire. Prior to consulting, Bek led UX and visual design at Etsy, a marketplace for handmade goods. Before Etsy, she worked at Blurb, a self-publishing company based in San Francisco, where she designed their award winning e-commerce site.

Charged to usher in sweeping changes to the ways in which people participate in the creation, manufacturing, distribution and life cycle of goods, Bek works to establish communities of connectivity and collaboration, and builds tools and experiences that enable them to thrive.

Brian Fling

Brian Fling has been a leader in creating interactive experiences for both the web and mobile mediums. He has worked with hundreds of businesses from early stage start-ups to Fortune 50 companies to leverage new media around the needs of real peoples.

Brian is a frequent speaker and author on the issues on mobile design, the mobile web and mobile user experience. He was the primary author of the free dotMobi Mobile Web Developer's guide , downloaded thousands of times over. He is currently writing O'Reilly Media's first "animal" book on mobile, Mobile Design and Development due out later this year.

Brian is the founder and president of the mobile agency pinch/zoom.

Donna Spencer

Donna's a freelance information architect, interaction designer and writer. That's a fancy way of saying she plans how to present the things you see on your computer screen, so that they're easy to understand, engaging and compelling. Things like the navigation, forms, categories and words on intranets, websites, web applications and business systems.

She's been doing this professionally since 2002, and she's a regular speaker at Australian and international events.

Jason Ryan

Jason is the Communications Manager at the State Services Commission. He is also the only head of communications in New Zealand's public service that compiles from source.

Jason first started working on the web in the mid-nineties, during the heady days of nested tables and spacer gifs. After many years futilely wrestling with Dreamweaver, he discovered web standards and eventually arrived at Gedit, Firebug and Filezilla as his tools of choice.

In his time at the Commission, Jason has been an advocate for the Government Web Standards and the use of Open Source. He is a recovering blogger, and his musings on public sector communications in the age of the Internet can be found on the Network of Public Sector Communicators website or in his twitter stream.

Rachel McAlpine

With her right hand Rachel McAlpine trains people to write web content. She's a director of Contented Enterprises, providing online training courses for online writers. Latest book is "Write me a Web Page, Elsie!" Rachel chairs Plain English Power, a lobby group pushing for government agencies to use language the public can understand. With her left hand Rachel writes poems, novels, plays and other stuff.

Russ Weakley

Russ Weakley has worked as a web designer for the last 13 years. Russ has a detailed knowledge of web design and development. His expertise covers graphic design, interface design, site architecture and standards based development especially in the area of XHTML/CSS. Russ chairs the WebStandards Group which was set up to assist web developers learn about new technologies and accessibility issues. Russ has produced a series of widely acclaimed CSS-based tutorials as well as a book, "Teach Yourself CSS in TenMinutes".

Thomas Fuchs

Thomas Fuchs' famous script.aculo.us framework was created during the development of one of the most highly interactive applications the Web had ever seen, and he's continued to push the boundaries of what is possible with JavaScript. Script.aculo.us has gone on to be used in such web sites & applications as CNN.com, NASA.gov, Me.com and more. In addition to being a Prototype core member and Rails core alumnus, Thomas is one of the world's top JavaScript and rich web app performance experts, and has co-authored JavaScript Performance Rocks! with his wife, Amy.