Clay Shirky Joins BIF Research Advisory Council

Posted by Chris Flanagan on November 28, 2007

I'm thrilled to announce that Clay Shirky has joined our research advisory council. Clay is a writer, consultant and teacher who has spent years talking about the social and economic effects of Internet technologies. He teaches New Media as an adjunct professor at New York University's (NYU) graduate Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP). His courses address, among other things, the interrelated effects of the topology of social networks and technological networks, 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.

Through his consulting practice Clay is focused on the rise of decentralized technologies such as peer-to-peer, web services, and wireless networks that provide alternatives to the wired client/server infrastructure that characterizes the Web. Current clients include Nokia, GBN, the Library of Congress, the Highlands Forum, the Markle Foundation, and the BBC.

Clay has written extensively about the internet since 1996 and he speaks frequently on emerging technologies at a variety of forums and organizations. Over the years, he has had regular columns in Business 2.0, FEED, OpenP2P.com and ACM Net_Worker, and his writings have appeared in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Harvard Business Review, Wired, Release 1.0, Computerworld, and IEEE Computer. He has been interviewed by Slashdot, Red Herring, Media Life, and the Economist's Ebusiness Forum. He has written about biotechnology in his "After Darwin" column in FEED magazine, and serves as a technical reviewer for O'Reilly's bioinformatics series. He helps program the "Biological Models of Computation" track for O'Reilly's Emerging Technology conferences.

I'll be sharing more about Clay in the coming weeks. I know that his experience will add tremendous benefit to the BIF community. He's one of the few who dare to ask (and answer) many philosophical and provocative questions surrounding the evolution of the Internet and the current social networking phenomena we're living under. Stay tuned and welcome aboard Clay!