Jeff De Cagna
Co-founder of Association Renewal LLC and Chief Strategist and Founder of Principled Innovation LLC

Jeff De Cagna is chief strategist and founder of Principled Innovation LLC, located in Arlington, Virginia. A former association executive with various regional, national and international associations, Jeff founded Principled Innovation LLC in February 2002 to advance his mission of making innovation more possible in the association community. Today, Principled Innovation LLC works exclusively with associations on the challenge of organizing for innovation in a turbulent and uncertain world. Jeff is also principal and co-founder of Association Renewal LLC, a joint venture of Notter Consulting and Principled Innovation LLC, with offices in Gaithersburg, Maryland and Arlington, Virginia.

Jeff is a Fellow of the American Society of Association Executives (ASAE), and a frequent speaker and author for various trade and professional organizations, including ASAE & the Center for Association Leadership. He served as the founding managing editor of the Journal of Association Leadership, the association community’s only peer-reviewed journal, and still serves on the publication’s editorial advisory board. Jeff has been a member of both the ASAE Executive Management and Professional Development Section Councils, and has chaired various task forces and working groups over many years.

Jeff writes The Association Innovation Blog at www.associationinnovation.com, and he is the association community’s podcasting pioneer, producing the Associations Unorthodox podcast at www.associationsunorthodox.com. A graduate of The Johns Hopkins University, Jeff received a master of education degree from Harvard University.

Sheryl Hansen
Director, Professional Development Programs, Ohio Learning Network

Sheryl Hansen is Director, Professional Development Programs, at The Ohio Learning Network (OLN), an initiative of the Ohio Board of Regents. OLN is a consortium of sixty-six two- and four-year, public and independent colleges and universities in Ohio.

Sheryl has over 25 years experience in public education. Her passion is co-developing and integrating collaborative and community building initiatives. She has worked at the local, state and national levels, focusing on professional and program development and assessment, communities of practice, collaborative problem solving, and eLearning. Sheryl initiated and directs the OLN Learning Communities Initiative (LCI) which enables inter- and intra-institutional partnerships, collaborative learning, resource sharing, and capacity building within and across Ohio’s colleges and universities. It is a labor of love!

Prior to the establishment of the OLN, Sheryl was director of Education Improvement and Innovation at the Ohio Education Association and held numerous positions at The Ohio State University including the OSU President’s Office, the Office of Human Resources, and International Affairs. She serves on a number of state and regional education policy and advocacy boards.

John Ittelson, Ph.D.
Professor in the School of Information Technology and Communications Design, and Director of the Interactive Design and Educational Applications Lab (The I.D.E.A. Lab)California State University, Monterey Bay; and Community Facilitator for the Apple Digital Campus Exchange

Dr. Ittelson is a Professor in the School of Information Technology and Communications Design and Director of the Interactive Design and Educational Applications Lab (The I.D.E.A. Lab) at California State University, Monterey Bay. Dr. Ittelson is a community facilitator for the new Apple Digital Campus Exchange Project.

In addition to his teaching schedule, some of the roles Dr. Ittelson has played over the past five years include being the CSU Liaison to the Digital California Project (DCP), designed to build the network infrastructure to serve the entire K-20 education and research community; serving as one of two National Learning Infrastructure Initiative (NLII) Fellows; and serving as Principal Investigator for a federally funded PT3 Grant.

Dr. Ittelson received a Bachelor’s degree in Radio-Television-Film, a Master’s Degree in Instructional Television, and a Ph.D. in Educational Psychology and Instructional Design from Northwestern University.

Jack Merklein
Director, Knowledge & Learning, Xerox Global Services, Inc.

Jack received his BS from the United States Military Academy, West Point, NY 1976, his MS from Golden Gate University, San Francisco, CA 1983.

He retired in 2001 as a Lieutenant Colonel, US Army. Assignments included being the Director of Knowledge Management and Distance Learning and faculty member, US Army Inspector General School, 1996-2001.

After retirement from the military, Jack joined Xerox Global Services in March 2001 as a National Principal for Knowledge Management, and became Director of Knowledge and Learning in Jan, 2002. His responsibilities include corporate technical and certification training; the development and nurturing of all internal Communities of Practice; all internal Knowledge Management training and Knowledge sharing initiatives. He serves as a senior Knowledge Management consultant, as a senior Training and Training Management consultant, and as a senior training developer within Xerox Global Services.

Previous speaking engagements include KMWorld 2003; International Society for Performance Improvement 2003; Systems for Training, Evaluation, and Performance 2003; KMWorld 2004. Relevant publications include in Mass High Tech, The Journal of New England Technology, an article "Blended Training Approach Brings Out the Best in Employee Performance;" and Optimize Magazine, "Training 'Out of the Box'."

Mark Neff
Senior Advisory Staff Member, Computer Sciences Corporation

Mark Neff is a member of the Office of Innovation at CSC, a company with over 76,000 employees worldwide. Mark nurtures the development of knowledge management practices in his role within the CSC Knowledge Program. Mark has extensive experience coaching global communities and teams at CSC. He has a B.S. from the United States Naval Academy and a M.A. from the Fielding Institute in Santa Barbara, CA. He has authored and co-authored a chapter in two books addressing knowledge management in corporations.

John Smith
Community Steward, CPsquare, and Principal, Learning Alliances

John is a technologist, developer and coach for communities of practice. He speaks and writes on topics related to communities of practice, including the design and configuration of technology for communities, improvisation, narrative, community self-assessment, and community development. He organizes technology-enhanced events for communities and coaches others on event design. He is the community steward of CPsquare, an international community of practice on communities of practice. In collaboration with Etienne Wenger and Bronwyn Stuckey, he has offered the Foundations of Communities of Practice workshop over the last seven years. He worked in higher education as a planner, institutional researcher, administrator and technologist. He received a Bachelor’s degree from St. John’s College and a master’s degree in planning and architecture from the University of New Mexico.

www.learningalliances.net
www.technologiesforcommunities.com

Bronwyn Stuckey
MEd, BEd, GD Ed Studies, Educational Researcher and Community Developer

Bronwyn is an educational technologist and researcher in the area of online community and communities of practice. Over the past two years she has facilitated and consulted to online community groups and communities of practice here in Australia and internationally. She is a founding member of CPsquare (www.cpsquare.org) and coach in the CPsquare Foundations of Communities of Practice Workshop (www.cpsquare.org/edu/foundations/). Bronwyn leads a small globally distributed research team currently investigating discourse and social network analysis in communities of practice. Bronwyn has facilitated in large online civic events like Listen to the City and Flying into the Future for citizen dialogue on matters of city planning. She has served as consultant and advisor to a number of educational agencies planning to intentionally develop communities of practice.

Bronwyn has extensively researched the conditions for design and development of successful Internet-mediated communities of practice , and is working in the Indiana University Learning Sciences team with Sasha Barab investigating adoption of a new 3D multi-user program for student collaborations, Her work in part focuses on developing a community of practice design perspective for the student activity and a community for teachers and researchers around the world.

Beverly Trayner
Departamento de Economia e Gestão, Escola Superior de Ciências Empresariais, Setúbal, Portugal

Beverly Trayner lectures at a Business School in Portugal. She has had over five years of designing and facilitating oniine learning courses and learning environments, researching into communities that work in more than one language. Currently she is also designing modules for the International Labour Organisation who are developing communities of practice to combat exclusion in Lusofone countries. She has been an active member of CPsquare since its inception, participating in a number of their events and organization.

btrayner.info

Etienne Wenger
Author of Situated Learning, where the term was coined, Communities of Practice: learning, meaning, and identity, where he lays out a theory of learning based on the concept, and Cultivating Communities of Practice.

Etienne Wenger is a globally recognized thought leader in the field of communities of practice and their application to organizations. He was featured by Training Magazine in their "A new Breed of Visionaries" series. A pioneer of the community of practice research, he is author and co-author of seminal articles and books on the topic, including Situated Learning (Cambridge University Press, 1991), where the term was coined, Communities of Practice: Learning, Meaning, and Identity (Cambridge University Press, 1998), where he lays out a theory of learning based on the concept of communities of practice, and Cultivating Communities of Practice: a Guide to Managing Knowledge (Harvard Business School Press, 2002), addressed to practitioners in organizations.

Etienne is also a founder of CPsquare, a cross-organizational, cross-sector community of practice on communities of practice. His work is influencing a growing number of organizations in the private and public sectors. Indeed, cultivating communities of practice is increasingly recognized as the most effective way for organizations to address the knowledge challenges they face. Etienne helps organizations apply these ideas through consulting, public speaking, and workshops, both online and face-to-face. His new research project, Learning for a small planet, is a broad, cross-sectoral investigation of the nature of learning and learning institutions at the dawn of the new millennium.