Dan Gillmor keynote speaker

Dan Gillmor is a noted American technology writer and former columnist for the San Jose Mercury News. He was one of the leading chroniclers of the Silicon Valley dot com boom and its subsequent bust. Gillmor is also the author of a popular weblog covering technology news and the Northern California technology business sector, criticizing rigid enforcement of copyrights, and commenting on politics from a frequently left-wing perspective.

Gillmor worked at the Detroit Free Press and the Kansas City Times before moving to the San Jose Mercury News in 1994. He left the Mercury News in January 2005 to work on a grassroots journalism project, called Bayosphere, launched in May 2005. After closing Bayosphere, Gillmor moved on to a new project, the Center for Citizen Media, a non-profit organization affiliated with the University of California, Berkeley's Graduate School of Journalism and the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University Law School.

In 2007, Gillmor co-founded Dopplr, an online travel application project.

In November 2007, Gillmor was named founding director of Arizona State University's new Knight Center for Digital Media Entrepreneurship at the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication. Dan Gilmor is a board member of the Global Editors Network since its creation in April 2011.

Gillmor won the EFF Pioneer Award in 2002 and the World Technology Award for Media & Journalism in 2004.

He is also the author of a book, We the Media, published in August 2004, chronicling how the Internet is helping independent journalists combat the consolidation of traditional media. He has released the book under a Creative Commons license.