Who Makes Spot.Us Spin?

Bay Area Community Advisory Board

Marc G. Smolowitz is an Academy Award nominated documentary film & television producer. He is currently Producer at TellyTopia. He has served as Chair of the Technology Impact Circle at Full Circle Fund, an engaged philanthropy organization that cultivates the next generation of community leaders and drives lasting social change in the S.F. Bay Area. He has also been the Co-chair of the Community Technology Network (CTN) of the Bay Area since it was founded in 2001 and serves on the Professional Advisory Committees for Digital Film Making, Web Design & Interactive Media at the Art Institute of California.

Greg Wolff "My career has been driven by a curiosity to understand intelligence and create tools that make people, especially groups of people, smarter and better able to pursue their shared interests." Greg is currently Vice President of Ricoh Innovations and most recently established the Community Network Services group at RII and founded the UnaMesa Association.

Manuel Maqueda is an expert in social media with three years' experience as a reporter, a speaker, and a op-ed writer on citizen media and the transformations in journalism. Manuel is the director for the Americas of PeriodismoCiudadano.com, the world's leading news source and resource on citizen journalism, and the founder of Nuestra Voz, a nonprofit organization helping Spanish speakers participate in the online conversation. Manuel holds a graduate degree in Economics, as well as a graduate degree in Law. He is also a Sorbonne graduate in French Language and Civilization. Born in Madrid, Spain, Manuel lives in the San Francisco Bay area, where he is actively involved in several environmental causes and social media projects.

Ian Elwood has a Master's Degree in Media Studies from New College of California and has worked for multiple nonprofit technology projects. He recently earned featured project status at the 2008 NetSquared Mashup Challenge and won a grant from the Sunlight Foundation for a corporate accountability mashup of Securities and Exchange Commission data.

Liza Pike is the founder of Resource Media’s San Francisco office in 1998, Liza helped shape the overall growth and direction of the organization and was lead strategist on a number of campaigns and projects. Prior to joining Resource Media, Liza was a press officer for the Natural Resources Defense Council in San Francisco and worked with the Center for Investigative Reporting, as program and marketing director and in a number of other capacities. She is currently a member of CIR’s board. She is currently in R and D phase for a new resource for nonprofits on strategic communications in the social media age.

Santiago Wechsler has managed an environmentaly sustainable construction start up, leading multicultural team of over 40 people, successfuly delivering innovative projects in the Bay Area. He has been involved in political and social projects since the 2004 election, when he worked for the Kerry Edwards Campaign. He lead the grass root movement in Bay Area and Des Moines Iowa -working with the DNC and moveon.org- training them in providing narratives that break-through peoples resignation to regain an active role in local and national politics. He is actively involved in several local Oakland organizations, including his NCPC, where he is the co-chair, UNCO (United Neighborhood Council of Oakland).

Sarah Cove Sarah's interests lie in how the changing landscape of technology is and can be used to enrich communities. Sarah is the Marketing Manager at Wikispaces, a company that builds and hosts easy-to-use wikis. There, her goals are to build a service simple enough for anyone to use and to foster communities where individuals can meet and learn from one another. In her free time, Sarah is part of several neighborhood organizations in Oakland, sings in a local San Francisco choir, and is currently brushing up on her Chinese.

Los Angeles Community Advisory Board

Frank Sotomayor is a Senior Fellow at the Institute for Justice and Journalism, which provides resources for in-depth reporting on justice issues. He’s also an adjunct faculty member at the USC Annenberg School for Communication & Journalism. He worked as a Los Angeles Times editor for 35 years, including 18 years as an assistant metro editor. He was co-editor and a writer on the Times series "Latinos in Southern California," which won the 1984 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service. Sotomayor was a co-founder of the Maynard Institute for Journalism Education, the California Chicano News Media Association and the National Association for Hispanic Journalists. In 2002, he was named to NAHJ’s Hall of Fame.

Joni Byun is Senior Vice President of Nakatomi & Associates. She serves as the strategic manager for social marketing and communications campaigns reaching diverse audiences. Since joining the firm in 1996, Joni has led campaigns for clients such as the California Department of Health Services, The California Endowment, The California Wellness Foundation, California Department of Transportation, Casey Family Programs, Farmers Insurance Group, Freddie Mac, Southern California Edison, and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. She currently serves on two national committees for the American Heart Association: Women & Minority Leadership Committee and Communications & Marketing Coordinating Committee.

Wing Lam is a graduate of San Diego State University with a Bachelor's Degree in Finance and a minor in Spanish. In 1975 his family moved to Orange County from Brazil. Once the family moved to Orange County, Wing and his brothers became avid surfers. For fun, the three brothers would travel across the Mexican border in search of great surf. After a great day of riding fun waves, the brothers would refuel on the freshly -prepared tacos available at most roadside stands found in the Baja Peninsula. Then, in 1988, the brothers decided to import the fish taco they craved to Orange County and give it a unique twist. They combined the freshest ingredients with their Brazilian-family favorite recipes and a dash of Asian flare. The combination of the ingredients created a surfer meal that made Wahoo's Fish Taco a " must stop after a great surf session."

Todd Katz founded Century Park Partners LLC, a national real estate investment firm based in Los Angeles, in 1996, after 11 years working in the commercial real estate brokerage business. He balances his real estate work with volunteer work in the non-profit arena. Todd is on the Board of Directors of the Westside Family YMCA, the Los Angeles Metropolitan YMCA, and the UCLA Medical Center Board of Advisors. For 30 years, he has been a volunteer director of a YMCA residence camping program in Big Bear, and, along with his wife, Dana, he helps coordinate the Operation Mend Program at UCLA, a program that supports injured service members from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Media Advisory Board

We have a board of advisors that includes:

• Dan Gillmor
• Jay Rosen
• Jeff Jarvis
• Brant Houston
• Susan Mernit
• Fabrice Florin
• Leonard Witt
• Jennifer 8. Lee
• Jeremy Toeman

Spot.Us Staff

Founder and Director: David Cohn has written for Wired, Seed, Columbia Journalism Review and The New York Times. While working toward his master’s degree at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism, Cohn worked as the editor at newassignment.net, which focused on citizen journalism and ways news organizations could explore the social web. Cohn also worked with Jeff Jarvis from Buzzmachine.com to organize the first Networked Journalism Summits, which brought together the best practices of collaborative journalism. He has been a contributing editor at NewsTrust.net, is the editor-in-chief at Broowaha, an expanding citizen journalism network.

LA Managing Editor: Anh Do will go wherever the story takes her. A second-generation journalist, she has worked as vice president of Nguoi Viet Daily News, the largest Vietnamese-language newspaper in the U.S. where she founded Nguoi Viet 2, a weekly English section for younger readers. She started her career at the Dallas Morning News and the Seattle Times before writing for the Orange County Register for 12 years, including a column on Asian affairs, in addition to hosting "Vietscape," the paper's first radio show targeting bilingual listeners. Her coverage has been honored by Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism, the University of Washington's DART Award for excellence in reporting on victims of violence, the Asian American Journalists Association and Freedom Newspapers Sweepstakes Award.

Erik Sundelof is the Chief Technical Officer of Spot.Us. Erik was previously the co-founder and VP of Social Media and User Interface at San Francisco based Allvoices, Inc. Allvoices is a new content-based social network around news and opinions which currently is the biggest citizen news media site on the web. Erik was previously a fellow in the Reuters Digital Vision Program (http://www.rdvp.org) at Stanford University between 2005-2006. Most notably he created the Web site inthefieldONLINE.net, which was recognized by major global media including PBS, CNN and BBC, and got featured on Discovery International’s Rewind 2006 as one of 25 highlights of the Year. He is active in the social media arena and has directed the launch of several social media sites including the biggest blog in Sweden during 2005-2007. His academic orientations are rooted in a Master’s degree in Chemical Engineering and PhD licentiate in Numerical Analysis from the Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm.

Developer in Chief: Dan Newman has a diverse background in web, database, and application programming with special emphases on creative communication via AJAX UI design. My current frameworks of choice are Ruby on Rails and jQuery. To me, the crafting of a user experience is an artform. I write a rails Ajax blog, consult and work on original product designs in the "spare time" (is there such a thing?) My primary goal is to create new possibilities for human expression and collaboration.

Community Organizer (on leave as a Fulbright Scholar): Kara Andrade is a five-year veteran of multimedia journalism, print and online, who uses social media to bridge the world of newspapers, technologists and entrepreneurs to present relevant, accessible and edgy stories. She builds communities online and offline both through reporting and consulting work and organizes events in virtual worlds such as Second Life.

Foundation Support

Knight Foundation has supported Spot.Us through its Knight News Challenge grant. Spot.Us would not be possible without their support.

Full Circle Fund is an engaged philanthropy organization cultivating the next generation of community leaders and driving lasting social change in the Bay Area. They have been incredibly supportive through Spot.Us' growth.

The Kastia Foundation