Clay Shirky

Expert in all things web-based, Clay Shirky has written extensively about the Internet for the past 12 years. His articles have been published in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and the Harvard Business Review, among other places. He has worked as a consultant to organizations such as Nokia and the Library of Congress and lectured on emerging technologies at conferences and forums. In 1996, he testified as an expert witness on Internet culture in a court case that helped strike down the Communications Decency Act. Clay’s consulting practice emphasizes the rise of decentralized technologies, such as peer-to-peer web services and alternative wireless networks. He serves as adjunct professor in New York University’s graduate interactive telecommunications program. In February 2008, he published Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations. “If I had to describe what I write about,” Clay states, “it would be ‘systems where vested interests lose out to innovation.’ Or maybe ‘systems where having good participants produces better results than having good planners.’”