Scott Thomas
Design Director of the Obama campaign
www.simplescott.com
Scott’s dream of rationalizing the irrational theory of the golden ratio, came to a halt when he became the Design Director for the Obama campaign. Soon enough, he found himself redesigning WhiteHouse.gov and “trying to impress politicos with his Lincoln-like beard.” When the historic election ended Scott felt that he should somehow record his experience. Twoyears later he crowdfunded and self-published ‘Designing Obama’, a chronicle on the role of art and design in the political realm. With over $80.000 ‘Designing Obama’ was one of the very first crowdfunded projects ever that raised such numbers. Today Scott, who goes by the moniker SimpleScott, plans to continue working on creative projects that might just one day change the world.
Jimmy Wales
Founder Wikipedia
www.wikipedia.org
“Imagine a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge. That’s what we’re doing.” Wikipedia has not only become the world’s largest encyclopedia, but also the world-renowned example for successful crowdsourcing. Jimmy’s role in creating Wikipedia prompted TIME Magazine to name him on its list of The World’s Most Influential People. Yes, Jimmy is the one to ask about the big picture.
Brian Fargo
Game Developer & Designer
www.inxile-entertainment.com
Brian has been in the software publishing industry since 1983, when he founded Interplay Entertainment Corp. He has been behind some of the greatest RPG franchises of all time including ‘The Bard’s Tale’, ‘Wasteland’, ‘Neuromancer’, ‘Dragon Wars’, ‘Stonekeep’, and the hits ‘Baldur’s Gate’, ‘Icewind Dale’, and ‘Planescape Torment’. Currently he is working on creating ‘Wasteland 2’ and ‘Torment – Tides of Numenera’. For each he raised his budget via the crowd, what makes him one of the most successful crowdfunders ever and a pioneer in his field.
Timo Vuorensola
Director
www.ironsky.net
Long before platform-based crowdfunding emerged, Finnish director Timo Vuorensola had the idea to make a movie about Nazis on the dark side of the moon. Back in these days, Timo and his team made crowdfunding history, when they sought the support of their online fans to fund this idea. That attracted other financiers. Ultimately with a budget of approx. $10,000,000, their movie ‘Iron Sky’ hit movie theaters all across Europe in 2012.
Molly Crabapple
Artist
www.mollycrabapple.com
Molly is the founder of ‘Dr. Sketchy’s Anti-Art School’ and has drawn for The New York Times (which calls her “a downtown phenomenon”), Wall Street Journal, Marvel Comics, DC Comics, Red Bull, and Playgirl. She also illustrated eight books. To date Molly has an impressive list of art projects financed via crowdfunding.
Zach Crain
Master Freaker
www.freakerusa.com
Zach is ‘The Ringleader of the Freak Circus’, a title which many translate to ‘CEO of Freaker USA’. The company makes knit drink insulators in the USA and originally launched intobusiness space through a crowdfunding campaign. Zach and his team of galavants are re-structuring the boundaries of wild creativity that has up until thispoint, been a defining limit of the business world. He also really enjoys pancakes.
Eric von Hippel
Professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology
www.mit.edu
As a professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management, Eric is one of the leading academics dealing with the nature and economics of distributed and open innovation. His research discovers and explores the sources of innovation and develops new processes to improve the ‘fuzzy front end’ of the innovation process – the end where ideas for breakthrough new products and services are developed. Eric shows how communities of users are actually becoming such powerful innovation ‘engines’ that they are increasingly driving manufacturers out of product developmentaltogether. Two of his major published works include ‘The Sources of Innovation’ and ‘Democratizing Innovation’. In short: Eric is the one who saw it all coming long before others.
David Alan Grier
Professor at George Washington University
www.gwu.edu
David is an Associate Professor of International Science and Technology Policy and International Affairs at George Washington University, Washington, D.C., and is currentlyserving as President for the IEEE Computer Society. His writing and work deal with the interactions between technology and people, how technology changesorganizations and systems and ways of interacting. Currently he concentrates on the division of labor that is known as crowdsourcing, the process that divides large jobs into small tasks, distributes those tasks over the Internet, collects the individual contributions, identifies errors and assembles the effort into a whole. His publications were featured in a broad range of periodicals ranging from Business Week to Washington Post. He also is author of books such as ‘When Computers where Human’.
Daniel Lieske
Graphic Novel Author
www.wormworldsaga.com
Daniel is the mastermind behind the beautiful online graphic novel ‘The Wormworld Saga’. Just recently, his saga won the prestigious Publishing Innovation Award at the Digital Book World Conference & Expo in New York. Thanks to his crowdfunded project he is now working full time as a graphic novel author and illustrator. He alsogives lectures, talks and workshops about graphic novel creation, independent publishing, and digital art.
