Speakers and panellists will include:

Alex Butler is Director of Transformational Strategy at the COI.  Alex leads COI’s Interactive cluster - services that enable citizens to directly interact with government departments and agencies for information, help or advice.  Her area also advises on wider service delivery online and has responsibility for digital policy, standards and guidance, reporting directly to Cabinet Office Ministers.  Alex came to COI from Directgov, which she joined in January 2005 as Strategy and Marketing Director at its birth.  She has a long career in brand marketing particularly with technology and internet brands.

Jonathan Akwue is a Managing Consultant at Digital Public, where he has helped inform the development of multi-channel solutions for clients including BBC 1Xtra, the National Treatment Agency, and the Ministry of Justice.  At the Department for Children Schools and Families,  he has recently been involved in designing the next generation of information support services for parents. Prior to his work with Digital Public, Jonathan was a Director at Involve, a national organisation that specialises in engaging young people and adults usually considered hard-to-reach.  Jonathan originally trained as a designer and has worked across several disciplines including marketing and communications, enterprise and management, web services and online music publishing.

Dave Briggs is Managing Director of DavePress, an independent consultancy that acts as a digital enabler for public, third and private sector organisations. Previously, he served as the Change Manager at the Information Authority, where he was involved in developing relationships and building communities, both on and offline, between all the various stakeholders in the further education sector.  He has created a number of tools related OpenGov, including ReadWriteWeb, Palimpsest, LGSearch, localgovglossary, Blogbase and KMSearch.

Paul Clarke (@paul_clarke) has worked in some of the UK government’s most challenging cross-cutting areas, from major change, technology and shared service programmes, to the design of a national response to catastrophes post 9/11. For the last two years, he was Head of Strategic Proposition at Directgov. He is passionate about the smart use and reuse of public information, excellence in service design, and taking the ‘long view’ of what openness and government mean to each other.

Sharon Cooper is Directgov Director Proposition Strategy and Product Design.  Having graduated from the University of London with a degree in chemistry, Sharon has worked predominantly in the publishing industry – across book, journal, and magazines, and on print, electronic, multimedia and web products. From the Oxford English Dictionary and Who’s Who on CD-ROM to Which? Online she has significant experience of moving information delivery from a print paradigm to that of the multi-faceted opportunities that digital channels offer.  She joined Directgov in 2007 in this newly created role, where she is responsible for the development of the overall strategic vision for Directgov, product design and customer insight. Additionally she manages the mobile and digital tv channel teams. In January 2009 she launched the innovate.direct.gov.uk website as a place for the public to engage in developing new approaches to delivering public services in the digital age.

James Crabtree is Senior Editor at Prospect and an advisor to openDemocracy.  Previously, James has been a Deputy Director of IPPR, and senior policy adviser at the New Democrat Network, a think tank based in Washington DC. He has worked with the Joseph Rowntree Reform Trust to establish a democracy commission examining the future of British politics. Prior to that he set up and ran the iSociety project at The Work Foundation, examining various aspects of technology, social change and reform of Government. James is also: the founder of Voxpolitics.com, an online think tank examining e-democracy; a founder of MySociety, an organisation developing online civic applications; a trustee of the charity UK Citizen’s Online Democracy; an associate editor of Opendemocracy.net; a board member of the political journal Renewal.  He is a UK Fulbright award winner and graduate of the Harvard Kennedy School and London School of Economics.

Tim Davies, Managing Director of Practical Participation, is an independent consultant, researcher and social entrepreneur now based in Oxford, UK. Tim holds a first class degree in Politics, Philosophy and Economics (PPE) from Oriel College, Oxford. From October 2009 he’ll be back at Oxford University, studying for an MSc in the Social Science of the Internet

Paul Evans, a social media consultant and the author of the Local Democracy blog.  He is a local democracy practitioner with a long track-record of running e-democracy projects at a local level with a particular focus upon the promotion of local representative democracy. Paul’s current projects include the Councillor.info project and the Slugger O’Toole Awards. Previously, Paul helped to establish Poptel Technology Ltd in 2002, and was a director of this successful worker co-op web development company until 2007. Previously, Paul worked as a political researcher to an MEP specialising in broadcasting and media regulation.

Chris Francis is a leader within IBM’s Government Programmes, and an expert on innovation and collaboration within the public sector.

Jeremy Gould was, until recently, a senior civil servant with responsibility for digital media strategy at the UK Ministry of Justice. He led a team of web professionals managing a portfolio of websites, developing customer-centric online communication propositions, and using social media tools to encourage online engagement. Jeremy was the catalyst for the first two UK government barcamps held in January 2008 and January 2009. Jeremy blogs at www.whitehallwebby.com.

Steph Gray is Head of Engagement at the Department for Innovation, Universities and Skills. He leads a small team who try to facilitate deeper and more valuable engagement between policymakers, stakeholders and citizens though intelligent use of social media techniques alongside traditional offline approaches. He previously worked agency-side at digital agency Reading Room; in strategic communications and research roles at the Central Office of Information; and as a researcher at Ipsos-MORI. He has a personal blog at helpfultechnology.com.

Ben Hammersley, Assoc. Editor of Wired, and former social media advisor to the FCO.  Ben is a British journalist, broadcaster, photographer, and technologist, currently based between London, England, and Florence, Italy. He is currently deputy editor of Conde Nast’s Wired UK magazine, which is due to relaunch in 2009. He is also a freelance reporter for the BBC: he previously worked as the first Internet reporter for The Times, where he was shortlisted for one of the British Press Awards, and as a reporter for The Guardian and the UK arm of MSN.

Mark O’Neill is the CIO for the Dept. of Culture, Media, and Sport. Mark has been with DCMS since its inception, coming from the Department of National Heritage.   He began his IT career in criminal justice IT where he helped develop transaction processing and network management systems for what was then Europe’s largest real-time processing system. He has also worked with CCTA (now OGC) as an independent advisor on a number of major Government IT projects and represented UK government in various European and international groups helping to develop standards for directory services and network management.  Mark has written and lectured on various technology and business issues and has been a visiting lecturer at both the National School for Government and on Kingston University’s MSc programme

Alberto Nardelli is co-founder of TweetMinister, a service that connects people with UK politics through Twitter. He is also CEO of UnLtdWorld.com, an online platform that connects social entrepreneurs and empowers the way information is exchanged within the social entrepreneurship market. He holds an MA in Media and Communication Studies and a BA in Political Science.

Mitchell Sava is the CEO of polyWonk, a firm providing software and services for collaboration and innovation in public policy.  Previously, Mitchell was the Sr. Advisor to NESTA, and an innovation policy advisor in the UK and Europe.  Before relocating to the UK, he spent eight years as a strategist with Deloitte in San Francisco where he launched the Innovation Well, one of the first consultancy services focused on innovation. In 2001, he co-founded OnRamp, a business accelerator serving start-ups and spin-outs of Fortune 500 firms.  Other experience includes work with the UN Commission on Science and Technology for Development, the Missouri Innovation Center and the Center for Technology Assessment and Policy.  Mitchell holds an MPA in innovation from the Harvard Kennedy School, an MSc in Technology Policy and Management, and a BSc in Computer Science.

Chris Thorpe is a developer and part of the team which launched Guardian OpenPlatform.  Since he gave up playing with really big computers as a research scientist Chris has been trying to find more and more excuses to play with really big computers powering websites. Amongst many other things, he’s been involved in projects as diverse as social worlds for 7-11 year olds, video archives of Nobel Prizewinners telling their life stories, a James Bond Premiere Webcast and putting contemporary sculpture on Trafalgar Square’s FourthPlinth. He’s recently formed Jaggeree, a social media consultancy which designs, builds and advises on all aspects of social games and social applications. He is also working with MySpace as the MySpace Developer Platform Evangelist for the UK.