Aung San Suu Kyi, a Noble Peace Laureate of 1991, was cited by the Nobel Committee as "one of the most extraordinary examples of civil courage in Asia in recent decades." She was educated at Delhi University and Oxford University. She has won numerous awards and honors in addition to the Nobel Peace Prize, most notably the Rafto Human Rights Prize and the Sakhorov Prize. She is the general secretary and leader of Burma's National League for Democracy and was placed under house arrest by the military junta in July of 1989 for her activities.She has spent around 10 of the past 15 years either in prison or under house arrest.

Author Paul Green (1894-1981) was one of the South's most revered writers, and one of America's most distinguished. The first playwright from the South to gain national and international recognition, he was part of that remarkable generation of writers who first brought southern writing to the attention of the world. His best known achievements were as a playwright, but he is most renowned as a writer both from the South, as well as a writer of dramatic material about the South. Equal to his literary influence has been his influence on human rights in the South and internationally.

Eric Raymond is an observer-participant anthropologist in the Internet hacker culture. His research has helped explain the decentralized open-source model of software development that has proven so effective in the evolution of the Internet. He is editor of "The New Hacker's Dictionary", the author of "The Cathedral and the Bazaar", and the creator of one of the Internet's most widely used email transport programs, fetchmail.

Lawrence Lessig is a Professor of Law at Stanford Law School and founder of the school's Center for Internet and Society.He is the author of The Future of Ideas and Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace. He also chairs the Creative Commons project. Professor Lessig is a boardmember of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and a Board Member of the Center for the Public Domain. Lessig was named one of Scientific American's Top 50 Visionaries, for arguing "against interpretations of copyright that could stifle innovation and discourse online."

Jimmy 'Jimbo' Wales setup the Wikipedia project in early 2001. The project has now grown into the largest freely available online encyclopedia and is available in more than 100 languages. In mid-2003, Wales set up the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation, to support Wikipedia and its sister projects. Wales is the foundation's president and chairman of the board. Wales is a fellow of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at the Harvard Law School.

Doc Searls is a writer, speaker, and a senior editor at Linux Journal. He also runs the new Doc Searls' IT Garage, an online journal. He is co-author of the international bestseller, The Cluetrain Manifesto: The End of Business as Usual. He also writes Doc Searls Weblog. J.D. Lasica of Annenberg's Online Journalism Review calls Doc "one of the deep thinkers in the blog movement." Doc's blog is consistently listed among the top few blogs on the internet.

Dan Gillmor, founder of Grassroots Media Inc., is devoted to the discussion of the issues facing grassroots journalism as it grows into an important force in society. Dan is author of We the Media: Grassroots Journalism By the People, For the People, a 2004 book that is widely credited as the first comprehensive look at way the collision of technology and journalism is transforming the media landscape.