The Next Us was founded by Mark Gibson. The following peers and friends have been and continue to be integral to its evolution.
Andrea Saveri
Andrea is an independent consultant, located in Berkeley, California. She works at the intersection of foresight and strategy helping organizations adapt to a world of unexpected change. For more than 20 years Andrea has worked in Silicon Valley and around the world with businesses, foundations, and public institutions applying insights from futures research and emerging technologies to develop strategy and market opportunities. She currently focuses on the convergence of technologies of cooperation, strategies for collective action and commons building, platforms for enabling resilience, and amplified communities. This nexus of disruption and creativity offers unprecedented opportunity to regenerate community life, flexible institutions, and our capacity for wellbeing. www.andreasaveri.com
Natalie Linden
Natalie Linden will find the heartbeat of your story. With strategic thinking and creative collaboration as her touchstones, she helps organizations build powerful narratives across every touchpoint, from positioning and messaging to naming, taglines, ad campaigns, websites, social media, packaging, print collateral, speeches – even the occasional poetic stanza. Her expertise also crosses industries, from Silicon Valley giants like Google and Cisco Systems to plucky start-ups like Alter Eco and consumer favorites like Perricone MD and Peet’s Coffee. She has a particular passion for companies who make it their business to leave the world a little better than they found it. www.wordsforrentorsale.com
Thomas Kriese
Thomas runs Pathbreaker Consulting, located in Redwood City, California, where he helps organizations to create strategies that identify and harness the power of their online networks, to build platforms and applications to support those networks and to provide guidance to staff on how best to communicate with their networks. Thomas has worked with the leadership teams at the Alliance for Financial Inclusion, Ashoka Changemakers, and Making Cents International. Thomas was previously an executive producer at Omidyar Network, focusing his talents on social capital and networks. Thomas managed omidyar.net, Omidyar Network’s online community, through its three-year lifespan from July 2004 to September 2007. Prior to Omidyar Network, Thomas worked for America Online and AOL Time Warner. At AOL, he created content programming models for short-duration network programming and then went on to launch AOL Hometown, the home pages community where members publish their own webpage content. Thomas later joined the AOL Time Warner Foundation, where he worked with nonprofits like MENTOR and PowerUP to provide easy and innovative access to their content for online audiences. You can find Thomas blogging about the many benefits of keeping flocks of chickens in your backyard over at www.urbanchickens.net
Dan Ancona
Political organizer and technologist Dan Ancona builds and evangelizes online tools that strengthen democracy. He helped create and build interest in numerous products in fifteen years at several startups and in academia (with a research focus on visualization), but since 2006 has been accelerating the shift from top-down, broadcast style politics to a more networked and person-to-person system at California VoterConnect. His other interests include urban design, economics, strategic communications, DJing and sailing. He lives in San Francisco with his wife and fellow organizer Jenifer Fernandez Ancona, their son Marco, and their extraordinarily large and friendly cat, Oscar. danancona.blogspot.com
