Known as The Content Wrangler, Scott Abel is an internationally recognized global content strategist who specializes in helping organizations deliver the right content to the right audience, anywhere, anytime, and on any device. He writes regularly for business and content industry publications, is frequently selected as a featured presenter at content industry events, and serves on the faculty of the University of California, Berkeley, School of Information. Scott's message is clear: Content is a business asset worth managing efficiently and effectively. His firm, The Content Wrangler, exists to help content-heavy organizations adopt the tools, technologies, and techniques they need to connect content to customers.

At IBM Watson, Pavan serves as Director of Content, responsible for driving content strategy, partnering with content owners, and identifying new opportunities for cognitive content products. Prior to Watson, Pavan was the Chief Innovation Officer at Aptara, where he advised CXOs and Publishing Houses on the next evolution of content. He began his career as a banker at JP Morgan, then founded six tech startups which eventually led him to venture capital. 

Pavan spends his spare time investing in technology start-ups and advising existing cutting-edge tech companies on growth strategies. He also serves as an advisor to hedge funds and private equity firms on content technology opportunities, and was a digital innovation consultant to McGraw-Hill, the World Bank, and the Library of Congress. Pavan graduated from Johns Hopkins and London School of Economics.

Rahel Anne Bailie is a content strategist with a skill set encompassing content management, business analysis, information architecture, and communications. She is Chief Knowledge Officer at London-based Scroll, where she helps clients analyze their business requirements and spectrum of content to get the right fit for their content development and management needs, and facilitates transitions to new business processes, content models, and technology implementations. Her experience gives her an intimate understanding of end-to-end processes, from requirements-gathering to implementation.

Diana has more than 20 years' experience in the localization and content creation industry. Since 2001, she has been Account Director and Business Development Manager at Logos a world leader in language services company with headquarters in Modena, Italy, established in 1979. Trusted partnerships are their own reward and Logos has both the history and pioneering approach that nurtures the right-fit language solutions and the talented teams to make them happen.  The most rewarding part of this challenging industry for Diana is helping to nurture those partnerships over the long term, listening to and learning from all sides of the supply chain and across diverse customer industry verticals - comparing and contrasting needs and continuously matching tailored solutions.

Laura Bellamy is the Director of Information Experience at VMware, Inc. She has 15 years of industry experience as a technical writer and information architect. She has worked extensively in XML authoring technologies, is a co-author of the book DITA Best Practices, and a technical writing instructor University of California Santa Cruz Extension.

Skip Besthoff is the CEO of InboundWriter, the leader in content performance improvement. Skip is a frequent speaker on content marketing, and has 20 years of experience as a developer, strategist and investor in the software and Internet markets with companies including Everdream (acquired by Dell), IntraLinks (NYSE: IL) and MPV (acquired by Experian).

Melissa Biggs manages the globalization marketing team at Informatica, a software leader in data integration technology. Her focus centers on high value content localization strategies, solutions, tools and processes for marketing assets, marketing automation content management and web localization. 

Melissa has over 20 years’ experience leading localization and globalization business strategies and teams at Sun Microsystems, Oracle, and Informatica. Her experience spans software, hardware, documentation, training, and marketing content. She has previously managed technical documentation teams and content strategies and technologies at Sun Microsystems and Xerox Corporation. She has a BA from Bucknell University, postgraduate focus in Communications, and has participated in a wide range of localization industry initiatives.

George Bina  has more than 15 years of experience in working with XML and XML-related technologies and contributes to a number of XML related open-source projects. He is one of the founders of Syncro Soft, the company that develops oXygen XML Editor.

Justin spent his 7th grade summer with two friends making an 8mm film, Attack of the Killer Bean Bags, and never really stopped. For the past two decades, the award-winning content strategist/creator has developed online, print, and video material in a wide spectrum of roles. As lead Content Strategist with premier interactive agencies Sapient, Razorfish, marchFIRST, and Genex, he directed content development and branding efforts for Fortune 500 entertainment, automotive, consumer and pharmaceutical clients. Recently he led digital content and social media marketing for the XPRIZE Foundation. He currently helps startups and established brands spark their growth through innovative content marketing.

Tim Brandall has over 15 years of experience in the globalization industry, both on the vendor (Welocalize), and client side (Apple, Vivendi Universal, and Netflix). For the past 3 years, Tim has been leading the localization team at Netflix as their Localization Manager as they built a program that would accommodate Netflix’s rapid international growth. A software engineer at heart, Tim has recently moved into a role as Globalization Technologies Manager at Netflix where he is responsible for internationalization of the Netflix product, localization technologies, and international QC.

Scott Brinker is the president and CTO of ion interactive, a marketing software company that provides a platform for producing and delivering interactive content. He is also the author of chiefmartec.com, a blog that examines the intersection of marketing, technology, and management, and he is the program chair of the MarTech conference. He has degrees in computer science from Columbia and Harvard and an MBA from MIT. You can reach him on Twitter as @chiefmartec.

Richard Brooks is the owner and CEO of UK based Language Service Provider K International. He holds an MBA from Cranfield University and is a Director of the Association of Language Companies. Richard has completed and contributed to numerous educational programmes in Europe, USA and Asia and co-written several publications on topics of interest. His academic interests lie around entrepreneurism and international leadership development. His dream and that of his company is to create a world without language barriers. 

Gururaj BS manages a global team of user assistance developers and technical communicators at Oracle, where he drives and leads Oracle Cloud User Assistance efforts for PaaS and IaaS products. These products have REST API interfaces. Gururaj also drives technical documentation initiatives for Oracle Cloud Operations teams. He has been instrumental in defining documentation processes, guidelines, and standards for Oracle Cloud operational policies, standard operating procedures, and DevOps procedures. Gururaj has presented at several conferences, including tcworld (Germany), tcworld India, China Association for Standards (CAS), and STC India. Gururaj was President of the India chapter of STC in 2006.

Brian Buehling is currently the Managing Director for Dakota Systems, a leading firm specializing in dynamic content delivery solutions. At Dakota, he has worked on implementations for over a hundred corporate and government systems spanning publishing, aerospace, defense, manufacturing and software industries. Prior to Dakota, he led content management system initiatives for several companies including Wolters Kluwer Health, John Deere and AT&T. His team's decision support system at John Deere Health was selected as a Finalist for Business Intelligence Applications at Comdex/Window World Open and was nominated for the Smithsonian Award for innovation in information technology.

Fabiano Cid is the Managing Director of Ccaps Translation and Localization, a company that supports the language needs of global brands in Latin America since 1999. With more than 20 years of localization experience and an active member of the language industry, Fabiano is an Ambassador for the Globalization and Localization Association (GALA). As the co-creator of Think Latin America and former Board member and Chair of GALA and Milengo Inc., he is frequently invited to speak at industry conferences and write articles for specialized publications.

Wade Clements is a high-tech professional with direct sales, marketing, sales enablement, and competitive intelligence experience that specializes in the enterprise software and hardware markets. Currently, he is the Director of Information Services at CA Technologies leading a global team of Information Engineers and Information Architects who deliver technical content across multiple business units. In addition, Wade is leading a new team of Business Intelligence Specialists using state of the art analytics to gain deeper insights into customer requirements. Before joining Development, Wade spent several years in Support managing business intelligence and strategy.

Ben Colborn is manager of technical publications at Nutanix, a Silicon Valley IT infrastructure startup. In addition to writing documentation for support engineers, partners, and customers, he is involved in implementing an intelligent content strategy in his group and in collaboration with other parts of the company. Previously he worked at Citrix Education, where he developed instructor-led training material and eLearning for Citrix virtualization technologies and also participated in implementing DITA for training.

Charles Cooper is Vice President of The Rockley Group, and has over 20 years of experience in quality assurance and over 15 years of experience in eContent, user experience, taxonomy, workflow design, composition, and digital publishing. He teaches, facilitates modeling sessions and develops taxonomy and workflow strategies. He has assisted companies by analyzing their content, current workflow and taxonomy systems, helped to create new ones and worked to ensure that they are maintained on a consistent basis. He not only understands process, he understands the production tasks and can design a process that works for everyone in an organization.

Ranking among the top XML technology leaders today, Don Day not only contributes to the success of individual projects and products, his influence can also be found on nearly every XML initiative in production. His efforts have resulted in multiple patents, official recognition for his contribution to reengineering IBM's information assets, and designation as an OASIS Distinguished Contributor for convening and leading the OASIS Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA) Technical Committee. Don is well-known for advising and consulting on strategy, technology, and best practices for optimizing the value and usefulness of unstructured data.

Mike Dillinger, PhD is a well-known specialist in deploying machine translation technology and past President of the Association for Machine Translation in the Americas. He is currently Staff Technical Program Manager for Machine Translation at LinkedIn and had a similar role at eBay after investing 10 years as an independent consultant helping organizations around the globe to enable large-scale global communication. Before that he developed MT systems and did experimental research on how people read, write, translate, and interpret technical content.

Kristen James Eberlein is Chair of the OASIS DITA Technical Committee and owner of Eberlein Consulting LLC, a company that helps people develop or refine their DITA implementations. She also is co-editor of the DITA 1.2 and 1.3 specifications. Originally trained as a historian, she became a technical communicator at IBM, where she wore all the content worker hats you can imagine: Information developer, team lead, information architect, build specialist.

When not herding (technical) cats, she cooks, quilts, and enjoys her 2002 Mini Cooper S. She lives in the emerging culinary mecca of Durham, North Carolina, USA.

Jeannette Eichholz leads the Global Ultrasound Documentation team for GE Healthcare-Ultrasound, a collaborative team located in 9 different countries. She manages the component content management system, plans its re-use strategy, collaborates with the other writers to create content, single sources content, and oversees translating this content into 33 languages. She’s been a technical communicator since 1986, working as a technical communicator with GE Healthcare, Thomson Reuters Beta Systems, and with Compuware.

Robert J. Glushko is an Adjunct Full Professor in the School of Information at the University of California, Berkeley. After receiving his Ph.D. in Cognitive Psychology at UC San Diego in 1979, he spent about ten years working in corporate R&D, about ten years as a Silicon Valley entrepreneur, and now has worked over ten years as an academic. His interests and expertise include information systems and service design, content management, and ebook design and publishing. He founded or co-founded four companies, including Veo Systems in 1997, which pioneered the use of XML for electronic business before its acquisition by Commerce One in 1999. He is a co-author of Document Engineering: Analyzing and Designing Documents for Business Informatics and Web Services, published in 2005. More recently, he is the principal author and editor of The Discipline of Organizing, named an "information science book of the year" in 2014 by the Association of Information Science and Technology.

George D. Gopen is Professor Emeritus of the Practice of Rhetoric at Duke University, where he has held appointments in the Department of English and the Law School for 30 years. He holds both a law degree and a Ph.D. in English from Harvard University, which he achieved simultaneously. His publications include four books and fifty articles. His latest two books (Expectations and The Sense of Structure) explore his "Reader Expectation Approach" to the English language, which is revolutionizing the way in which writing is perceived and taught, both for students and for professionals.

Jeff Greer is a Digital Content Strategist and a board member of the Center for Plain Language. He believes that every company needs expertise in content strategy, search, plain language and customer understanding to make a great digital experience. Over the past 17 years, he’s helped major brands such as Disney, Blue Cross Blue Shield and Kellogg make better experiences on the web. He earned his Ph.D. in English and Creative Writing from Western Michigan University. He also holds an M.F.A. and B.A. in English from the University of Maryland at College Park. He lives near Detroit with his wife and two children.

Elizabeth Gschwind started her career in localization as a French translator, and has moved through many roles since: from vendor-side Project Manager, Vendor Manager, and Sales rep, to client-side Localization Manager. Her studies include a B.A. in French from San Francisco State University, graduate work at the Sorbonne Nouvelle in Paris, and French Translation studies at the Monterey Institute of International Studies. Elizabeth was hired in 2008 as the first Localization Manager at FICO, where she built the product localization program from the ground up, including streamlining budgets and priorities, defining processes, and evaluating and overseeing the implementation of various tools to manage and improve the company’s global content.

Martin Guttinger has been Senior Program Manager, Globalization at VMWare for the past four years. Previously, he held the positions of manager of translation and localization for Cisco Systems' voice technology group and Globalization Manager for Active Voice Corporation. In his current role, Martin manages globalization programs in VMware’s software localization team. He holds a bachelor's degree in modern languages from the Zurich Translator and Interpreter School and a master's degree in business administration in information technology from Jones International University in Centennial, Colorado. Martin has over 25 years of experience in the localization industry, both on the vendor and manufacturer sides and in technical and managerial roles.

Richard Hamilton is the founder of XML Press, which publishes information for technical communicators, marketers, managers, content strategists, social media practitioners, and the engineers who support their work.

Rob is the president of Precision Content Authoring Solutions Inc. and an expert in structured authoring and content management. He holds a designation from AIIM.org as a certified Enterprise Content Management Specialist (ECMs) and is a named Fellow of the Society for Technical Communication (STC). Rob is a member of the OASIS DITA Technical Committee and an executive member of the First Canadian Chapter of AIIM in Toronto. Rob’s company employs a team of information architects and skilled technical communicators that help organizations make their information easier to use. For more information, please see http://www.linkedin.com/in/singlesourceror

Sean Holmquest is a Content Manager at Huge's Brooklyn office, where he develops and implements content publishing guidelines, database schemas and CMS updates for client editorial teams. Prior to joining Huge, Sean was a Digital Producer for PBS's documentary series, POV, where he helped run content production and CMS management. He was also a Web Editor at Columbia Journalism School, overseeing CMS training and management.

Brenda Inman is the Manager, Localization at St. Jude Medical. Since January 2013, Brenda has managed the localization team and has additional experience prior to that as a technical writer writing manuals for patients and medical professionals, and managing the Author-it Content Management System. Brenda started her career in the medical device industry in 1992 with Medtronic working in the areas of clinical research, regulatory affairs, and technical writing. She has been at St. Jude Medical since 1998. She holds a BA in physics from Hamline University in St. Paul, Minnesota.

Katell started her career as a EN>FR translator, and has been working in localization for 15+ years, both on the vendor and client sides. She was was part of the centralized Localization team at Yahoo!, and for the past 3 years has been driving the Globalization effort at Box, one the global leaders in Enterprise cloud-based collaboration platforms, based in Los Altos, CA.

In 2013, Katell also joined the board of the Women in Localization, an organization dedicated to promote professional development, networking and continuous education among its rapidly-growing membership.

As principal of the consultancy Content Science, Colleen has led strategic initiatives for clients ranging from Dell to Equifax to Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. She regularly consults with executives and practitioners to improve their strategy and processes for digital content. Colleen shares content insights in her top-selling book, "Clout: The Art and Science of Influential Web Content" (New Riders). Her newly released second book, "Does Your Content Work?" (New Riders), explains how to start evaluating whether your content is effective. Colleen also is the co-founder of ContentWRX, a platform that evaluates your content's effectiveness.

Rob Kimm is an information architect, content strategist and DITA implementation leader for the Cardiac Rhythm and Heart Failure Group at Medtronic, Inc., the largest medical device manufacturer in the world. Since acting as technical lead for his team’s DITA adoption in 2006, Rob and his teammates have expanded their use of DITA to supporting multiple Medtronic products, creating online help, print, web and mobile content. He is currently a member of the Core Team implementing a new DITA CCMS and leading a department-wide DITA adoption process. Prior to working at Medtronic, Rob was an independent contractor designing and delivering online help, training, and documentation solutions at several large companies in the Greater Minneapols-St Paul  area. He currently lives in St. Paul, Minnesota.  

Gretyl Kinsey, a technical consultant with Scriptorium Publishing, specializes in content strategy and tech comm tools and technologies. Since joining Scriptorium, she has been involved with the development and implementation of content strategies for organizations in a variety of industries. She has experience with every step of the process, from customizing transforms to converting legacy content to helping with follow-on support. She also frequently contributes her graphic design skills to the marketing side of Scriptorium. With a background in journalism and visual communication, she is interested in the convergence between technical and marketing communication, and in content strategies that support it.

Paula Land divides her time between being a content strategy consultant and a technology entrepreneur. As founder and principal consultant at Strategic Content, she develops content strategies and implementation plans for private clients such as REI, Costco, F5 Networks, NetApp, and GHX, as well as partnering with other agencies on large-scale projects for clients like Microsoft and MasterCard. As cofounder of Content Insight, she is the impetus behind the development of CAT, the Content Analysis Tool, which creates automated content inventories. Prior to her current ventures, Paula was content strategy lead in the Seattle office of Razorfish. Paula is the author of the new book, Content Audits and Inventories: A Handbook (XML Press 2014).

Joan Lasselle is the founder and President of Lasselle-Ramsay, Inc. Since 1982, they have helped their clients connect with their customers, employees, and partners through custom content and learning—all the information to sell, support, and use new technology and services. As a professional services company, they work with clients in three ways: content strategy, content development and delivery, and content infrastructure. Their approach and methodology is guided by business requirements and user centered design principals. They help their clients go beyond developing a set of individual deliverables to building a content system that will scale, can support the increasing need of a global audience, and can be maintained.

Mitchell Levy is focused on democratizing thought leadership. He is the Chief Aha Instigator at the Aha Amplifier™ and the CEO and Thought Leader Architect at THiNKaha®. He and his team make it easy for corporations to easily create compelling content that help turn their experts into recognized thought leaders. Mitchell is an Amazon bestselling author with forty three business books, contributor at Entrepreneur Magazine, has provided strategic consulting to over one hundred companies, has advised over five hundred CEOs on critical business issues through the CEO networking groups he's run, and has been chairman of the board of a NASDAQ-listed company.

Mark is the author of the DITA Metrics 101 book that proves the savings and high content reuse percentages possible with DITA's structured, topic-based architecture. Mark is a contributing author of DITA 101 Second Edition by the Rockley Group. Mark manages the DITA Metrics LinkedIn group. He regularly presents on DITA, ROI and content strategy topics at national conferences. He and John Hunt co-chaired the OASIS DITA for the Web subcommittee. He is an STC Associate Fellow and was the STC Summit Track Manager for Content Strategy and Design. Mark is a Content Engineer and DITA Educator for Quark.

Catherine Long has been a technical writer at Varian Medical Systems, Inc. for four years. She was brought in to assist PSE with authoring standards and the publishing process, as well as to lead the move to DITA XML. Her previous experience includes authoring various document types including procedures, manuals, brochures, press releases, and data sheets. Catherine has been responsible for website design and maintenance. She has created lesson plans, interactive tutorials, and trainings in multiple formats, as well as authoring content used to certify global field support. Catherine has a BA in Comparative Literature with a minor in Electrical Engineering from San Jose State University.

Ed Marshall is an independent consultant technical writer and the sole proprietor of Marshall Documentation Consulting, with over 26 years in technical writing. He specializes in technical documentation for developers including API (application programming interfaces), SDK (software developer’s kits), Web Services products, etc. Over his career, Ed has developed expertise in using tools to “let the computer do the work,” such as advanced tools for editing files, comparing files, and searching / replacing text.

Madhu Mathew is Director of Technology at SASB, and has more than 15 years of progressive IT/technology experience. He is a technologist and business strategist who has developed and applied technology solutions to drive business transformation. Madhu has managed project teams both small & large and delivered both incremental & transformational results.

Marc Miller is the Division President of TransPerfect Medical Device Solutions, the specialized translation and content management division of TransPerfect Translations. Originally, Marc founded Crimson Life Sciences, the only translation provider exclusively dedicated to the medical device industry, in 1992. In 2006, Crimson merged with TransPerfect and in June of 2015, the division officially changed name to TransPerfect Medical Device Solutions. Marc is the co-author of the only translation quality system to be registered to ISO 13485, ISO 14971, and ISO 9001. Marc is also the co-author of the world’s only translation risk management patent (U.S. Pat No 8,140,322 B2). Prior to founding Crimson, Marc worked on medical device client engagements for international strategy consulting firm, SIAR. He holds an undergraduate degree from Harvard University and an MBA from the Scottish Business School at Stirling University. Marc lives in Newton, MA, with his wife and two children.

Anna Schlegel is Senior Director of Globalization Programs and Information Engineering at NetApp. Her background encompasses 20 years of leading international web teams, localization, and global engagement teams at VMware, Xerox and Cisco. Anna is a native of Catalonia, and holds a Masters in German Philology from the University of Berlin and is fluent in 6 languages. Anna is a co-founder of Women in Localization. Anna was introduced as the first globalization innovator on Fortune Magazine in 2014, has taught globalization at UC Berkeley and Stanford, and has published often on Forbes.

Kevin Nichols is a Global Content Strategist who most recently served as the Global Practice Lead/Content Strategy for Sapient/Nitro, one of the largest digital and interactive agencies in the world. For over seventeen years, Kevin has worked in Internet and web technologies. In 1995, while completing his graduate studies at Harvard, he interned at the Sabre Foundation. He went on to work in Bosnia and Herzegovina, where he conducted media relations and acted as Webmaster for the Physicians for Human Rights website. Returning to America, Kevin worked as a contract consultant, before taking a position at Sapient. Kevin then went on to play a key role in launching MITOpenCourseWare, where he designed a substantial part of the publication process and managed the production team. Later, as a senior consultant at Molecular, Kevin was responsible for 1MM+ accounts of Fortune 100 global brands like HP. During this time, he worked with marketing and communications groups to structure and stream-line their content and content life cycles.

Richard Perry has been an employee at Varian Medical Systems, Inc. for more than 20 years. He currently manages documentation for Product Support Engineering which provides internal and external service instructions and modifications. He is managing the department’s move to DITA XML. His previous positions include manager of the global imaging team and product support team member. In the Varian education department, Rich was an education supervisor, as well as a delivery system instructor. Before joining Varian, he served in the US Navy for 13 years as a communications technician. Rich has a BA in Education.

David J. Pileggi Jr. brings over 8+ years in SharePoint experience to Earley & Associates. David's passion for finding workable solutions plus his deep technical knowledge make him an outstanding team leader.  He has architected and implemented SharePoint solutions for corporations ranging from Small and Medium Business to Fortune 500 companies with as many as 35,000 employees. David is a sought after expert in the Microsoft SharePoint community and enjoys sharing his knowledge and passion through speaking at SharePoint User Groups, SharePoint Saturdays and other events.

Marta Rauch works in a development team at Oracle, where she leads teams and develops content strategy for mobile, cloud, and REST APIs. For the past few years, Marta has developed content strategy for developer docs and integration guides, provided input to corporate REST API standards, and participated with a team that is developing a new REST API publishing tool.   Marta’s content strategy term appears in The Language of Content Strategy, by Scott Abel and Rahel Bailie, and she provided information for Joe Welinke’s Developing User Assistance for Mobile Apps. Marta has over 160,000 connections on her social networks and is in the Top 160 U.S. women on Google+. With over 105,000 views on SlideShare, Marta has engaged many audiences with her presentations.

Chris Raulf is founder of Boulder SEO Marketing, a boutique online marketing agency located in beautiful Boulder, Colorado. The company assists local, national as well international clients with all of their SEO, social media and content marketing needs. Chris recently co-founded Piste Group, a business planning, marketing, sales and communication strategy consulting company and frequently presents and moderates marketing and business related events. Recently recognized by Professor Nitish Singh for sharing his knowledge and advice to help realize a best selling book entitled “Localization Strategies for Global eBusiness,” he currently works on writing his very own book and is busy creating online marketing and SEO courses.

Owen Richter is a Web Application Architect for the Customer Support Organization of Nutanix, a Silicon Valley cloud computing startup.  While at Nutanix, Owen has been responsible for implementing the documentation and search functions on the Nutanix Customer Support website.  Owen currently works almost exclusively as a JavaScript Programmer who also works extensively with SQL and MongoDB. In addition to documentation and search, he specializes in data analysis and visualization.

Ann Rockley is CEO of The Rockley Group, Inc. She has an international reputation for developing multichannel content strategies and digital publishing solutions. She has been instrumental in establishing the field in content strategy, content reuse, intelligent content strategies for multichannel delivery, and content management best practices. Rockley is a frequent contributor to trade and industry publications and a keynote speaker at numerous conferences in North America, Europe, and Asia-Pacific.

Jessica Roland serves as Director of Strategic Accounts at SDL. She has 15+ years of globalization experience, both in the enterprise software world with Documentum/EMC and with top web companies like Yahoo! and Glassdoor, leading global teams in international product development and evangelizing global innovation internally and with customers.

As CEO of Prisma International, Jim has been helping companies become global-ready for over thirty years. His relentless focus on the seamless communication experience—the right content delivered in the right language on the right platform—grew out of his experience as a small kid in an Italian family in New Jersey, where none of the three existed. As a grown-up professional linguist, Jim develops localization and content strategies for a broad range of clients, from start-ups to large companies to government agencies. His recent work involves developing translation management platforms for retail, healthcare and hi tech clients.

A recognized expert in content marketing strategy, digital media, and the social Web, Robert Rose, the Chief Strategy Officer for the Content Marketing Institute, innovates creative and technical strategies for a wide variety of clientele. He’s helped large companies such as AT&T, Fairchild Semiconductor, KPMG and Nissan tell their story more effectively through the Web. And, he’s worked to strategize digital marketing efforts for entertainment and media brands such as Dwight Yoakam, Nickelodeon, and NBC. Robert lives and plays in Los Angeles, California, with his beautiful wife Elizabeth and their Golden Doodle Daisy.

Founder and principal consultant at Simple [A], Cruce Saunders brings more than 15 years leading solution firms focused on content delivery technology. [A] leads large-scale content engineering engagements in partnership with global agencies; and delivers content engineering, content technology implementation, content management, and personalization for complex digital properties in government, healthcare, education, non-profit, finance and other institutional arenas. Cruce has directed more than 250 application and content engineering engagements. Author of “Content Engineering for a Multi-Channel World,” Cruce enjoys advocating for content engineering and hopes to see the content engineer become an imperative for all CEM initiatives.

Renee has devoted her career to creating exceptional customer experiences at technology product companies. With over ten years of experience in customer support, training, and technical writing, she is a key leader within Code42's award-winning Customer Experience Team. As Website Strategy Manager, Renee is editor-in-chief / product information manager of Code42's self-service help site, as well as Code42’s product websites. She joined Code42 in 2008 as the first customer support agent and was instrumental in building Code42's Customer Champion (Support) and Documentation teams, as well as all product documentation, from the ground up. In her free time, Renee dabbles in marketing as a concert promoter and serves on the Academic Advisory Board for Saint Paul College's Computer Science Department. She is Pragmatic Marketing certified.

Brandon Schauer is the head of Adaptive Path, the influential experience design consultancy and curator of annual design conferences such as UX Week, the Managing Experience Conference, and the Service Experience Conference. As of October 2014, Brandon and the Adaptive Path team are a part of Capital One working to create great human experiences that drive business. Brandon has a love of Excel that is unnatural for a designer.

Keith is a DITA Information Architect at IXIASOFT, DITA evangelist and technical writing nerd. Keith is also an award-winning lecturer on Information Architecture at the University of Toronto and Durham College. He is also an active member of the OASIS DITA Adoption and Technical Committees. He can often be found presenting at conferences, working with customers, and researching how DITA is being used and sharing those results with the DITA community. Keith’s popular industry blog DITAWriter.com has become a focal point on DITA resources and best practices. Connect with Keith on Twitter @KeithIXIASOFT.

Felice Schulz is a Senior Manager of Content Strategy with SapientNitro for over 8 years and has worked with digital properties and content since 1999. She has experience across a wide range of project activities including requirements, strategy, management processes, taxonomies, and the tactical activities need to support CMS implementations. She has worked on projects across many vertical markets including retail, telecommunications, material science, financial, and automotive. Felice’s primary area of expertise is defining content strategies for large organizations and facilitating the implementation of the content strategy across technology and creative. She has extensive experience with defining content strategy for global websites.

Emily Shields is a content strategist at Facebook with experience on ads payments, payments growth and friend sharing. She knows very fancy data phrases like “stat sig” and “haircut” which she sometimes uses in meetings when she wants people to know how important and popular she is.

Dr. Carmen Simon is changing how the world presents. Her ability to empower presenters is based on unique scientific research, and an unmatched understanding of both in-person and virtual environments. As the co-founder of Rexi Media, creator of Presenter Pro (#1 business app, 2008), the holder of a double doctorate in information technology and cognitive psychology, and former lead of AT&T’s learning and development program, Dr. Simon has built her career helping employees at America’s most visible brands craft their own compelling stories. A recognized expert and published author in human psyche, presentation delivery and audience engagement, Carmen is a sought-after keynote speaker who reveals the secrets of getting your message not just heard, but remembered.

Russell Sparkman has 25 years of experience in visual communications (photography, video), the last 10 of which have been as the head of Fusionspark Media, which specializes in content strategy, content marketing and content production across multiple platforms for B2B, B2C, non-profits and government clients. Russell presents on content strategy for content marketing, transmedia storytelling and gamification at conferences that have included Content Marketing World, American Marketing Association, Jackson Hole Wildlife Film Festival, and the Content Marketing Retreat, produced by the Langley Center for New Media. Russell is a member of the content marketing consulting team at the Content Marketing Institute.

Ralph Squillace is a senior content engineer for the Microsoft Azure Infrastructure team based in San Francisco, California. He works directly with customers trying and breaking Azure, as well as writing, publishing, and teaching cloud and distributed architecture and devops development mainly on Linux workloads and working with Linux, Mac, and Windows. He's responsible for much of the Azure CLI documentation, as well as Azure documentation for Docker, CoreOS, and various container orchestration systems such as Deis, Weave, Kubernetes, Mesos, and Docker's machine, swarm, and compose for contained applications.

When he was young, he did his graduate work in history at the University of California, Berkeley. Yes, he is aware that he is supposed to be an historian; you don't need to tell him. Instead, Ralph started his software career with OLE32 and then COM, after which he was a developer for several years, working on tools and applications for Microsoft and several other Seattle–based companies. He began writing articles for developers with the threading, async, and remoting documentation for .NET 1.0.

He’s been around a bit since then. He worked on Windows Communication Foundation (WCF). He worked on Service Bus. He worked on natural language processing and analytics across Microsoft developer and third party sites to identify customer desires and real-world customer. He spent a year advising customers with the Azure Customer Advisory Team (Azure CAT) in the United States, Europe, and the Middle East, and delivering architecture presentations as well as developer presentations at conferences.

Bill Swallow is a Technical Consultant with Scriptorium Publishing Services where he helps clients with content strategy, localization readiness, and technology implementation. He specializes in content strategy with an emphasis on handling challenging localization and terminology scenarios.

Val Swisher is the Founder and CEO of Content Rules, Inc., an end-to-end content services provider, helping customer plan and execute their global content strategy, create content in structured and non-structured environments, and prepare content for translation. Val is a global content strategy thought leader and an expert in making source English content global-ready. In addition to running Content Rules, Val is on the Executive Board for Translators without Borders, where she is responsible for creating and running the Simplified English program. Translators without Borders works with non-governmental organizations to provide critical, life-saving translations for humanitarian causes around the globe. Val’s third book, “Global Content Strategy: A Primer,” was published by XML Press in 2014.

Amber Swope is an internationally recognized expert on the Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA) who specializes in helping companies design and deliver compelling customer experiences.

Amber leverages her extensive information development experience to discover each company’s opportunities to leverage structured XML content to provide the right information at the right time to the right user. With her guidance, her clients create a clear vision for success and optimize their content to increase customer satisfaction, improve information quality, and reduce costs. As a mentor, Amber collaborates with the team to develop integrated support for authoring, storing, publishing, localizing, and delivering content.

In addition to co-authoring the “DITA Maturity Model,” Amber has authored numerous papers and articles on information design, development, and architecture, delivered webinars, and presented at leading industry conferences. Amber holds a Masters in Technical and Professional Writing and a Certificate in Computer Technical Writing from Northeastern University. 

In her 20-year career, Lisa Welchman has paved the way in the discipline of digital governance, helping organizations stabilize their complex, multi-stakeholder digital operations. Lisa’s thought leadership focuses on interpreting how the growth of digital impacts organizations, as well as the maturation of digital as a distinct vocational discipline in the enterprise. Currently, Lisa is president of Digital Governance Solutions at ActiveStandards. Lisa began her career in digital in Silicon Valley at Netscape and Cisco Systems before establishing website management consultancy WelchmanPierpoint, which was acquired by ActiveStandards in 2014. Lisa speaks globally on issues related to digital governance, the rise of the Information Age and the role of the information worker.

Darin Wonn is the Executive Director of Operations at Content Science, a think tank that advises clients on digital strategy, content strategy, content marketing and user experience. Content Science's clients range from Fortune 50 companies to government agencies to higher education institutes and nonprofits. He oversees the product management of Content Science Review, a digital magazine that assembles the most insightful voices and best resources in the field of content strategy, and ContentWRX, a one-of-a-kind product that combines survey responses and behavioral analytics to evaluate and improve content. He holds a Masters in Human-Computer Interaction from Carnegie Mellon and has over 15 years practicing UX and product management to deliver great customer experiences.

Jon Wuebben is the CEO of Content Launch, which offers the first content marketing software built for small and medium-sized businesses (SMB’s). Content Launch also provides content writing and content strategy services for hundreds of companies and digital agencies. His book, "Content is Currency: Developing Powerful Content for Web & Mobile," helps businesses learn how to plan, create, distribute and manage content. “Content is Currency” has been published in six countries worldwide. Jon has been listed as a thought leader in the content marketing space by countless publications since 2008.