Tara Tiger Brown has designed, developed and led innovative software development projects for 15 years. Her primary focus has always been on excellent user experience, anywhere data access, online communities, and open platforms.

She is currently immersed in a startup she co-founded, Teach Me Stuff, a digital media learning (DML) platform that matches interest-driven learners with mentors and coaches.

Previously she co-founded Noot, a real-time interactive mobile sports game and before that worked at Shazam, Topspin and Microsoft.

She’s passionate about getting more women into the technology field via the ladies technology group she founded, LAdy Tacos and as a contributor for ForbesWoman.

In an effort to showcase the soft spoken tech scene in LA, she wrote the Forbes piece Why Los Angeles Will Outpace Silicon Valley As The Tech Startup Capital and is currently working with startups and startup spaces to give LA a louder voice.

In her spare time she works on ridiculous things like: Cat Workout; crowd-sourced music videos: We Are The Doorways; and storytelling: TransmediaLA.

Greg Bennick is the singer of the hardcore bands Trial and Between Earth & Sky. He is the founder and executive director of One Hundred For Haiti, a development and relief organization focusing on bringing opportunities to people in post-earthquake Haiti. He co-founded The Legacy Project a multi-year initiative to explore how people transition from massive trauma on a social scale to a point of finding reconciliation and justice. He co-produced a number of documentaries which have been seen globally including the multi-award winning “Flight From Death: The Quest For Immortality”. He speaks to audiences around the world, full time, and is based in Seattle WA.

A longtime contributor to the notorious underground publisher CrimethInc., Brian has organized on a national level within the anarchist, anti-globalization, anti-war, and Occupy movements. In the course of the resulting adventures, he has breathed tear gas for days on end, faced felony rioting charges, and lost friends to the bullets of Mexican paramilitaries. Recently he has traveled the Americas and Europe speaking on grass-roots social movements and anti-capitalist strategies, appearing everywhere from the School of Fine Arts in Athens, Greece to the Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais in Belo Horizonte, but chiefly outside the academy at occupations, social centers, and union halls.

Maggie Mayhem had no idea that when she signed up to volunteer 5 hours a week at an HIV testing clinic in 2003 that her experiences would disrupt her life plan to pursue a career in law and turn her into a full time sex educator, HIV prevention and harm reduction specialist, and activist. By 2006 she was coordinating the University of California Free and Anonymous HIV test program and setting her sights on lifetime pursuing social justice.

After graduating from UC Santa Cruz she relocated to Oakland, CA and accepted a position as the HIV Senior Specialist at Larkin Street Youth Services in San Francisco. She spent the summer of 2009 doing grant work in HIV/AIDS prevention and care in Bagamoyo, Tanzania and resigned from her post at Larkin Street Youth Services to in 2010 to volunteer with disaster relief in Leogane, Haiti.

As an activist for sex positivity, Maggie also produces adult films that challenge gender and sexuality norms as well as unfair and exploitative industry practices. She works within a small community of queer identified indie performers and producers who are cultivating a sustainable model based on collaboration, communication, and authentic depictions of sexuality and desire. If you search for her on Google, be prepared for links that are NSFW and for an 18+ audience.

To navigate and create, unique and explosive art has been the life quest of Nova Han since she was a little girl. From visions of ultimate beauty to the genuinely twisted and obscure, Han's curiosity takes her viewers past conventional horizons, and makes them step courageously past it, beckoning the brave to face their own truths.

Han now tours the world, shaking up the masses and bringing raw art to the stages. She has spent the last 7 years running the world renowned cirque troupe, Lucent Dossier Experience as the Tech Director, Producer, Choreographer and Performer. She has now started her own interactive video mapping performance art troupe called Wilderbe.

Her work has been featured at the Coachella: Music and Arts Festival (6 yrs), The Official Grammy's Celebration (3 yrs), Electric Picnic in Ireland (5 yrs), Lightning in a Bottle (6 yrs), Boom Festival in Portugal, Optimus Alive in Portugal, Summer Sonic in Japan, Electric Daisy Carnival (3 yrs).

She has also been seen on networks such as MTV, BRAVO, VHI, Fuse TV, Spike TV, KTLA and Univision as well as a featured guest on the Ellen De Generes Show.

Nova Han's Production background includes working for Kevin Lyman founder of the Van's Warped Tour and Billboard's top 50 most influential people in music history as a Producer and Office Manager, as well as working for Madison House as a Producer and Creative Consultant.

Han's work has been featured all over the world including, England, Ireland, Italy, France, Portugal, Japan, Guatemala, and Canada.

Eric Gradman is an inventor and entertainer who makes others see technology as magic. He has a colorful history as a circus performer, professional whistler, roboticist, and rapid prototyper. He co-founded Doppelgames, a Los Angeles location-based gaming studio.

He is also one of the founding members of Syyn Labs, a group of artists, thinkers, technologists, engineers and scientists who build and twist together art and technology in original inventive ways. From its humble beginnings as "a drinking club with an art problem" the group's work became a viral sensation in 2010 when it co-directed OK Go's This Too Shall Pass music video, which has been viewed over 35 million times online. Its unique assembly builds creative contraptions and interactive installations that encourage audiences to play together by lowering social barriers.

The Syyn Labs members have designed and developed an elaborate portfolio of proprietary technological marvels including the DNA Sequencer, ArtFall, an interactive whiteboard; Rubens Tubes, a sound-reactive fire sculpture; Sonic Stalagmites, painting with sound and the Cloud Mirror, which uses augmented reality to bring an event's badges to life.

Their exhibits have been showcased in commercial spots for Comedy Central, Disney XD, Google and Young & Rubicam, and exhibited at LACMA and the Santa Monica Glow Festival. Syyn Labs has also be featured extensively in the media, including WIRED, The Wall Street Journal, Rolling Stone, CNN, the Los Angeles Times.

An incorrigibly nomadic cyberanthropologist gone gonzo, Jenny Ryan recently dropped out of graduate school to more fully tune in to emerging movements rooted in the shared struggle to reclaim the commons, create public spheres through the cultivation of open spaces, and enable direct democracy through principles of federation and open source or Read/Write culture.

Her past research ranges from an extensive ethnography of online social networking (The Virtual Campfire), to digital literacy skills for the 21st century (with Howard Rheingold), to the legal and ethical dimensions of problematic online content (with danah boyd), to posthuman anthropological explorations of how the dead live on online.

In her spare time, she makes websites for her superhero friends, helps to organize an emerging Oakland hackerspace (Sudo Room), and acts as a connector of aligned humans, groups and projects.

Simone Syed is particularly interested in building better futures. As an entrepreneur, product storyteller, community builder, and technology forecaster, she has been able to create value in the industries she thinks are most interesting and impactful.

Simone has co-founded BIL Conference, H+ Club, and LA Space Salon. BIL Conference is the open source, participant powered answer to the TED Conference Series, wherein BIL pilfers TED’s attendees, sponsors, and format to Set Minds Free by merging innovation and community to change the world. Her other community building efforts are cool too.

Simone has disrupted the financial industry by co-founding a mobile payments system called bitcoin.com. The mobile app pivoted into GammaPay after getting funded and incorporated many different currencies to pay anyone, anywhere, with anything… including sheep! The project was abandoned when the founders decided that they didn’t want to go to jail because the banking industry was annoyed that the app worked outside of the current financial system and government referred to bitcoin as a competing currency.

Simone likes disrupting popular notions of what health and science are. PaleoDream is seriously healthy ice cream made using liquid nitrogen and rocket power. WeScience crowd sources high-quality clinical trials performed by citizen scientists to find out what therapies actually work. GeneBook is a facebook/23andMe mashup to help you find a perfect partner through histocompatibility and social data.

Simone is busy with her new company BlackStarr, which specializes in integrating space and biotechnology into popular culture. BlackStarr is currently working on producing a Discovery Channel show as well as collaborating with Bill Nye the Science Guy, Virgin Galactic, and SpaceX to disrupt Hollywood.

Many of Simone’s antics are documented in Wired, The Wall Street Journal, The Los Angeles Times, Reason Magazine, NPR, Technology Review, and The Huffington Post.

Mitch Artman worked as a special education teacher for inner city children in Brooklyn before becoming a social worker in Los Angeles. He works for the county’s Department of Mental Health as a “Psychiatric Social Worker”, which means doing therapy and case-management for 200 people with mental illnesses. He loves his job.

Marc Horowitz is many things: a virtual cross country explorer, a comedic performance enthusiast, sheep shearer, social experimentalist, one of People Magazine’s 50 most eligible bachelors, and possibly the first would-be inventor of a brick-house, diesel-truck, hybrid helicopter.

One of his most recent digital adventures landed him on NPR’s Weekend Edition — discussing the Los Angeles to Richmond, Virginia road trip he and friend, Peter Baldes, took via Google Maps without ever leaving their homes. Prior to that, Marc was challenged to live 168 hours straight in a Nissan Sentra for the “Seven Days in a Sentra” national ad campaign.

Before his Nissan project, Marc spent the better part of an entire year traveling around the country having dinner with strangers he met out of a Crate & Barrel catalog. After that, he drove the shape of his coast-to-coast signature on a US map, improving towns along the way. These improvements include starting an Anonymous Semi-Nudist Colony in Nampa, Idaho and burying an entire town’s problems in Craig, Colorado.

Other projects include: the Talkshow247 internet broadcast, a 24/7 three month long lifecast; his involvement with The Center for Improved Living, The Me & You Show, the Human Video Game experiment; and well, you get the idea. Marc is a busy man, with many talents.

His work can be seen at ineedtostopsoon.com