SocialDevCamp Chicago is a weekend conference + unconference + hackathon all about making the most of the social web. It’s the event for social app and platform developers, mobile developers, strategists, evangelists, and enthusiasts. At SocialDevCamp you’ll join hundreds of passionate developers and creators for a weekend of robust talks on social platforms, apps, APIs, mobile experiences, identity management, and new media.
Alexis Ohanian co-founded reddit, launched Hipmunk as its head of marketing, and always doodles his own logos. He serves as YCombinator‘s ambassador to the east and is an active angel investor with Das Kapital Capital. His life mission is to make the world suck less.
Alexis’s new project, Breadpig, creates geeky things like the books xkcd: volume 0 and Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, and donates all the profits — $180,000 so far. TechCrunch calls him “one of the more passionate and audacious young entrepreneurs in tech.” Hide your kids.
Julien Smith is a New York Times bestselling author (co-wrote Trust Agents with Chris Brogan), consultant, and speaker who has been involved in online communities for over 15 years–from early BBSes and flashmobs to the social web as we know it today. He was one of the first Twitter users, and among the first people to use podcasting in 2004 and be broadcast by traditional radio. He has worked with numerous media publications such as Sirius Satellite Radio, GQ, CBC, and Cosmopolitan.
Alex Wilhelm is a Chicago based technology journalist and editor for The Next Web who has worked for technology companies in both the Midwest and the West Coast. He is a noted social media analyst, ideally positioning him to moderate discussion around Rackspace‘s trendsetting customer service efforts. Alex’s writing covers a variety of topics, including a focus on Chicago-area startups.
Kathryn is Director of Development & External Communications for Metro Chicago Information Center (MCIC) & Apps 4 Metro Chicago Illinois Project Manager. As A4MC Project Manager Kathryn is working with the A4MC to make sure the competition truly sets a new bar for civic apps competitions everywhere! Kathryn is a recovering attorney and graduate of the University of Iowa College of Law who after two years of litigation practice found her true calling in nonprofit development and marketing. Prior to joining MCIC Kathryn worked with a variety of nonprofit organizations using strategic marketing, innovative events and unique outreach tactics to expand and improve consumer engagement to achieve results. Kathryn is a Chicago native still hopelessly waiting for either a World Series Title (Cubs) or Superbowl Championship.
Emile Cambry, Jr. is the founder and CEO of the 21st Century Youth Project, a social entrepreneurship project teaching middle and high school students to create mobile applications and business planning. Emile is a Professor at North Park University, a Visiting Professor at Devry’s Keller Graduate School of Management, and Principal of MetroWorks Films, an award-winning film production company.
Ms. Carlson joined MCIC (Metro Chicago Information Center) asPresident in January 2009. She is responsible for external relations andstrategic visioning, serving as the public face of MCIC. In addition, shewill add her research expertise and knowledge to the development of newMCIC products and capabilities.
Jeff’s passion is to help beginners experience the joy of building websites for themselves. In 2008 he started Purple Workshops, conducting beginner-level workshops in Ruby, Rails, and agile software techniques. He co-wrote the book Ruby on Rails for .NET Developers, published by Pragmatic Press, speaks at technical conferences throughout the year, and is now a Ruby on Rails contributor, teacher, and writer.
Rob works for the Rackspace Cloud currently as a customer advocate for cloud services. He started his career with Rackspace in May of 2007 as a Linux Systems Administrator working under Rackspace Cloud founder Jonathan Bryce (when we were called Mosso). He worked his way to Manager of Operations for the Cloud Sites product where he managed a team of dedicated Linux and Windows Administrators. Later, Rob took on the challenge of founding and leading the Rackspace Cloud Professional Services Team. In 2008, he was awarded the coveted Straightjacket award.
Chris is the mobile product manager for Tribune Media Group. Since leaving behind his print roots in 2008, he has designed over 30 mobile applications. In addition to his duties with the Tribune, he is currently participating in Excelerate Labs (a Chicago-based business incubator) with A Space Apart, which focuses on layering existing social graphs together to help people network more efficiently at events. The company recently received its first round of seed funding and will debut for public use later this summer. Prior to his mobile endeavors, Chris was co-creator of the Chicago Tribune’s RedEye tabloid.
Chris serves as CTO and principal iOS developer at KeyLimeTie. He architects and develops mobile solutions for enterprise clients including iPhone/iPad apps, developer APIs, and server-side solutions for mobile integration. As CTO, Chris keeps abreast of developing mobile trends across platforms and leads KeyLimeTie’s mobile development team consisting of iOS, Android and Windows Mobile developers. For more than 15 years Chris has designed and implemented custom solutions in diverse industries such as insurance, finance, publishing, energy, time tracking, and construction.
Jeff Hamilton is the marketing maestro of Red Foundry and a concatenation of creative, strategic, and tactical marketing knowledge. An electrical engineer turned marketer, Jeff is equally comfortable discussing the latest trends in electronics as he is devising marketing programs to accelerate and grow company profits. Jeff has led marketing and sales organizations at technology companies National Semiconductor and innovative start up Superconductor Technologies. Most recently Jeff led the development of an ecommerce initiative for the first web 2.0 global community serving design engineers worldwide at Premier Farnell, a billion dollar distributor of electronic components and software. Jeff has developed industry leading vertical market segmentation strategies, lead management processes, and partner marketing programs.
Dave authored the book Apprenticeship Patterns: Guidance for the Aspiring Software Craftsman for O’Reilly, instigated the Software Craftsmanship North America conference, and is the Chief Craftsman at Obtiva. Dave learned Ruby in 2002 and has been using it full-time since 2006. He lives near Chicago with his wife and three children. In his spare time, Dave competes in endurance sports.
David is the author of “Design for Hackers: Reverse-Engineering Beauty,” which is due out with John Wiley & Sons in September 2011. He also blogs about design and entrepreneurship at kadavy.net
Previous to being an author, David studied the origins of typography in Rome, and designed for Silicon Valley startups such as oDesk, PBworks, and UserVoice.
Sundeep is an industry recognized expert who has delivered keynotes, run panels, and delivered ‘relevant, inspirational, and outstanding’ education for organizations like the Direct Marketing Association, Shop.org, National Sports Forum, Online Marketing Institute, ClickZ, Search Engine Strategies, Email Experience Council, Teradata Partners, National Association of Federal Credit Unions, Annual Catalog Conference, Marketing Sherpa, eCom Expo UK, NCR Self Service Universe, and the Panel of Peers. His daily dose of best practices can be found at EmailYogi.com, where he has more than 1200 articles on best practices. He has a BA in Economics, a BS in Computer Science, and an MBA.
Joshua founded The Printed Blog, the world’s first print newspaper comprised entirely of blogs and other online content. Started in December of 2008, The Printed Blog captured the attention of the national and international media alike, culminating when Business Week named The Printed Blog one of “America’s most promising startups.” The Printed Blog has licensed its brand to media companies in St. Petersburg, Russia and Lisbon, Portugal. Those teams plan publication and distribution of international editions of The Printed Blog across Russia and in every major media market in Europe.
Most recently, Karp launched Kumbuya – a deal platform for businesses to connect and build relationships with communities of the most appropriate buyers.
Brett serves as Product Manager at Groupon. He helps identify, define and build new product features across Groupon’s website and mobile products for consumers and merchants. Before joining Groupon, Brett was the CEO and co-founder of Sharethrough, a startup providing viral media distribution for major brand advertisers. Brett received his MBA from Stanford Business School in 2008 and holds a Bachelor’s degree in Finance from Boston College. A Wisconsin native, Brett is a huge fan of the Superbowl champion Packers and loves cheese.
Philippe heads the W3C Interaction Domain, which produces frontend Web technologies including HTML5, CSS3, SVG, WOFF, or Web APIs. Until July 2008, Philippe lead the W3C Architecture Domain, which produced the W3C Core technologies in the area of XML, Web Services, and Internationalization. He is a former Chair of the Document Object Model (DOM) Working Group.
Prior to joining W3C, Philippe promoted the use of XML inside Bull in 1998, also focusing on the interaction between XML and object structures. He wrote the first version of the CSS validator in 1997.
Heidi Massey is currently the Program Manager of the Social Enterprise at i.c.stars, an organization that works with change-driven, future leaders to develop skills in business and technology. Heidi works with those who have finished the internship portion of the program, as they move on to provide social media support and website development for small businesses. She is convinced that her attendance at her first SocialDevCamp in 2009 completely transformed the path she was on. The warmth of the people she met at that conference and the fascination with technology that she discovered from attending the sessions have now placed her solidly at the juncture of technology and nonprofits. Heidi is currently one of the organizers of a NetSquared monthly meetup that focuses on technology, innovation and nonprofits and in 2010 created Chicago COUNTs, a conference for nonprofits to learn more about technology.
Jonathan is a mobile technology professional with a background in product management, software development, analytics and organizational strategy.
He currently leads client strategy and mobile product design for Lextech Global Services, an enterprise mobile application development group that has built some of the most advanced iPhone and iPad apps in the world. Before coming to Lextech, Jonathan established and led the mobile applications unit for the Tribune Company within its interactive division.
Nico is a postdoctoral scientist at the UW-Madison Center for Sustainability and the Global Environment. His research focuses on the intersection of ecology, computing, and health. He is currently directing the dotSkapes Project, a research initiative that leverages emerging web technology to study environmental change and global health. This platform is being designed to interoperate with the Sahana Eden disaster management platform, to expand analytical capacity during natural disasters and disease
outbreaks. Nico became involved with the Sahana Project in the aftermath of the Haiti earthquake.
John is the Executive Director and Co-Founder of Digital Hope – a not-for-profit organization that performs international volunteer projects powered by the social web. John has been a web entrepreneur for over 10 years during which time he has strived to find a way to mix his two most significant passions – web and volunteering – in to an organization that could help under-resourced efforts and projects around the world. Digital Hope is officially slated to launch in early 2012 and will be powered by an innovative web application that combines social networking and volunteerism.
Dan Sinker heads up the Knight-Mozilla News Technology Partnership for Mozilla. From 2008-2011 he taught in the journalism department at Columbia College Chicago where he focused on entrepreneurial journalism and the mobile web. He is the author of the popular @MayorEmanuel twitter account and is the creator of the election tracker the Chicago Mayoral Scorecard, the mobile storytelling project CellStories, and was the founding editor of the influential underground culture magazine Punk Planet until its closure in 2007. He is the editor of We Owe You Nothing: Punk Planet, the collected interviews and was a 2007-08 Knight Fellow at Stanford University. He occasionally blogs about media for the Huffington Post.
Craig is a technologist and entrepreneur interested in things that scale. He works on various projects but is best known (and spends most of his time) as the Founder/CTO of the Chicago travel startup Where I’ve Been, which was recently acquired by Trip Advisor.
Matt is a solution consultant at Rackspace, helping startup companies going through explosive growth. He transitioned from there into a role that focused on introducing cloud technologies to advertising agencies for their high traffic digital campaigns and later became a cloud solution specialist for enterprise level customers. Matt is now part of a team of engineers providing support and guidance to Rackspace customers and partners in real time through social media channels. During his off time, Matt is mainly dedicated to being a Father and Husband. He continues his physical training and plans to participate in additional Ironman events in the future with a goal to qualify for Kona.
Half Costa Rican half Kansas Citian, Desiree graduated from Yale University with B.A. in Latin American Studies in 2004. Prior to launching GiveForward, she worked as a specialist in collegiate entrepreneurship at the Kauffman Foundation in Kansas City and as an independent consultant for Arabella Philanthropic Investment Advisors. She is passionate about philanthropy and the role that young and small-scale donors can have on our communities. When not working, she spends her time inventing new recipes that don’t always work, walking her golden retriever, Ellie, and spending time with her crime-fighting husband, John, and her hilarious stepdaughter.
Christina is the founding director of the Institute on Higher Awesome Studies, an organization dedicated to nurturing small awesome ideas around the world; she also serves as a trustee on the Boston chapter of the Awesome Foundation. By day, she works at Breadpig, an uncorporation trying to make the world suck less by harnessing the goodwill of geeks worldwide. She is one of the co-founders of ROFLCon, the world’s first conference/convention about internet culture.
Peng is a Developer Programs Engineer for Google Commerce. He’s helped thousands of developers integrate the Commerce APIs since 2007. Having written docs, sample code and client libraries for multiple commerce APIs he’s an expert in enabling monetization for your web app.
After graduating from Columbia College Chicago in December 2010, Daniel moved to San Francisco to join Twilio as a product manager. He is currently in charge of their SMS short code product and spends his days trying not to break too many things.
Developers and designers; caffeinate and get ready to dominate. Ply your mad skills to a group of talented peers and celebrity judges. Dust off your idea notebook and compete for prizes and props!
The SocialDevCamp Hackathon takes place over a caffeine-induced 36-hour period. We provide the shelter, sustanance, and spare outlets. Join a team or pull an Einstein and invent alone.
The Unconference is the part of the event that YOU drive. Bring your ideas and passions to share, find like-minded people, and discuss the topics that pique your curiosity and get you excited.
Don’t be shy, you get what you give. In traditional camp fashion, the Unconference is minimally structured and formatted for attendees to drive the content. Come, share, and learn on your own terms.
