Hi! I am Dimitri Glazkov and I am the Chief Technology Officer of Estrada, a software development company hailing from Birmingham, AL.

My journey into the social networking began in 1999, when at University of Alabama at Birmingham, a bunch of us built wow.uab.edu, a site that was created as a conversation between scientists, travelling in remote parts of the world (Antarctica, for instance) and those interested in science.

This was kind of a big deal back then, considering that the site offered tools for open, two-way communication: scientists wrote entries (with pictures) in their journals, and readers commented at the end of each post. We ought to have named it then. Perhaps something more elegant than the now ubiquitious moniker -- blog, but we didn't know better. We were excited about the elementary school kids, coming back daily to check on the replies from the team on the frozen continent. We were watching the online community form around something as boring-sounding as chemical ecology.

What am I bringing to the conference?  Open ears.  Open mind.  Closed mouth.  Okay.  I won't keep my mouth closed for the whole time, but I intend to do a lot more active listening than monologuing.  I'll do the monologue here:

What else will I bring?  Some book knowledge of the Millennial generation and a little experience in marketing to them in a higher education setting.

My experience? I have a little volunteer experience.  Some experience in building and maintaining online communities.  Some experience enabling citizen journalism (circa 1997).  Some exeperience in the .Gov world; some in the .Edu world.  I have ZERO experience in real programming, but I've been living and working online since 1993.