Zann Gill received her M. Arch. from Harvard University Graduate School of Design. Her research for Buckminster Fuller on lightweight, collapsible tensegrity configurations was followed by a DAAD Research Fellowship in Germany (work published in the IL series, Architectural Design, and l’Architecture d’Aujourd ‘hui). She has studied how design method can transform cross-disciplinary teams into effective problem-solving ecosystems. As a Research Scientist for RIACS (Research Institute for Advanced Computer Science) at NASA Ames Research Center, Gill proposed a series of NASA collaboratories as technology platforms and cross-disciplinary, self-improving ecosystems, harnessing principles of self-organization and collaborative intelligence found in living ecosystems. This research informs the catalyZer method used by MetaVu Network. At NASA she developed program plans for an Institute for Advanced Space Concepts (IASC), a collaboratory BEACON (Bio-Evolutionary Advanced Concepts) and an astrobiology program for NASA University (Incentive Award for Outstanding Performance). Her entry to the international competition, Kawasaki: Information City of the 21st Century, sponsored by the Japan Association for Planning Administration and Mainichi News, with cooperation of ten ministries and three agencies of the Japanese government, tied with Panasonic (then Matsushita Corp.) for first place and won the Award of the Mayor of Kawasaki. She proposed sixteen diverse interlinked initiatives comprising an Innovation Network, designed to evolve as a collaborative ecosystem. Through ECOdesyn Lab she consults on projects ranging from the Smart Systems–Eco-Cities initiative of Australia’s ICT Center of Excellence to World Class Execution and decision support for sustainable remediation — applications for the new field of collaborative intelligence. More at her website.

Dennis Britton has extensive experience improving the effectiveness of technology development projects. This includes servant leadership, agile project shepherding, product vision alignment, feature prioritization, feature deconstruction and prototype construction. After over a decade of witnessing the tragic waste of human brilliance typical of software development projects, large and small, he was eager to find more effective methods. He trained in agile and lean methodologies 7 years ago with Ken Schwaber and Mary and Tom Poppendieck. In 2006 he spent a year at HP as an agile coach, transitioning a 50 developer distributed team towards more agile and lean practices resulting in greater fidelity with marketing, closer collaboration, higher morale and an on-time, on-budget results. He has continued to work in lean-agile consulting roles in finance, government and eCommerce. He also has been active as an organizer in the agile community, recently founding a well-attended meetup for agile leaders in Silicon Valley.   Shepherding the emergence of enthusiastic, value-delivering teams makes him smile. See MetaVu Network for more on method.

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