JC Spender migrated to the US in 1982 after serving in the Royal Navy in experimental submarines, doing engineering at Oxford, and going on to Rolls-Royce to help design and build nuclear power plant for the UK submarines. He also did time with IBM (UK) on large experimental banking systems. Then his PhD thesis "Industry Recipes" (Blackwell, 1989), which examined managers' uncertainty handling procedures in three different industries, won the US Academy of Management's 1980 AT Kearney Prize. After several years at UCLA he went back into business as Marketing and Strategy VP with Enigma Logic, computer security specialists, now part of the Secure Computing Corporation (SCUR). 4 years on the road world-wide and then new opportunities beckoned in academe - so on to Glasgow, Stevens Institute of Technology, and Rutgers. Now retired after seven years as a Business School Dean and building a new full-time career as a consultant, researcher, writer, lecturer, and generally itinerant academic.

His principal work is on Knowledge Management and Corporate Strategy. The focus, as always, is on the management and industry responses to uncertainty - meaning (a) the absence of key strategic data, and (b) difficulties with making actionable sense of the data available. This complements work on risk analysis and risk management with an exploration of how groups (teams, firms, industries, and nations) work together, often without realising it, to develop heuristics to help resolve the business uncertainties they face. The drivers are both functional (we need an answer - now!) and emotional. Emotion is little considered by decision-making researchers, and most managers are reluctant to talk about it. Yet it is the immediate and unavoidable consequence of our exposure to uncertainty - that is why 'emotional intelligence' (EQ) is so important, it relates to our ability to handle uncertainty without blocking reasoned action. New research could involve the use of rich simulations to expose us to uncertainty, generate emotion, and so help us develop EQ skills and personal uncertainty-resolving heuristics. These are more pervasive and important in our professional lives than superstitious habits like making sure to put one's left boot on first when going to play a big football game!

JC's has supported the Digital Space Commons experiment with counsel about basing our organizational development on some of his principles of uncertainty and EQ and the response to it as a driving factor in how communications flows and trust structures emerge. We hope that as the Commons grows and evolves it will in turn serve as a living model for Dr. Spender to use in his research.

Thomas A Furness III Ph.D., Founding Director and Research Scientist of the Human Interface Technology Laboratory, Professor of Industrial Engineering, University of Washington. Dr. Furness is a pioneer in the development of interfaces between humans and complex machines. He has been a crusader for over the past 24 years for building aircraft cockpits which take into account the perceptual organization of the human. Most of his work has centered on the concept of virtual interface technologies which prove a circumambience of three dimensional spatial information to the human using the visual, auditory and tactile sensory modalities.
Advisory Capacity: Dr. Furness advises The Digital Space Commons on business and community structure, how they can work together to move research-based innovation in virtual environments out to a larger public.

Jan Hauser is currently a Visiting Professor at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterrey, California. He is a former Principal Architect at Sun Microsystems and was responsible for Sun's membership in Santa Fe Institute (SFI). Jan is responsible for Sun's membership in The Santa Fe Institute (SFI) and has been the catalyst for a workshop at The Institute For The Future (IFTF) - Growing At the Edge: The New Corporate Structures for Innovation and the Challenge of Governance. Jan has also worked with Dee Hock, The founder of VISA International on new forms of self-organizing institutions governance. Jan also has promoted the idea that Complexity Science may offer breakthroughs in the area of self-organizing computer systems. One of his early efforts to marry Complexity Science and Jini was chronicled in July 1998 in the Wall Street Journal: "Looking to Give Executive A Living Computer"

Advisory Capacity: Mr. Hauser advises The Digital Space Commons on a number of strategic fronts, from the scientific fields of complexity theory, the technology base of distributed computing and open source licensing, and from the art of innovative business structures and process, notably those springing from the writings of Visa International founder D. W. Hock and the work of his Chaordic Allicance.

Holding degrees in Economics and Sociology,Dr. De Bruin was during his active academic life primarily focused on Political Science and public policy. He combined these three disciplines in his thesis on the conceptual foundations of Policy Science for which he obtained his Ph.D. degree with honors. Because of the connections between Policy and Future Studies, Jan is also a longstanding member of the Dutch Network of Future Studies.
As a pioneer of Policy Science in the Netherlands, Jan developed Policy Science curriculum proposals for Maastricht University and Tilburg University, which university invited him to implement this curriculum in the period 1986-2000.
After his early retirement in 2000, he continued as an emeritus to do research on Inhabited Virtual Worlds (IVWs). Jan is interested in social complexity of IVWs and the composition of the social movement of persons and organizations trying to create more social complex IVWs and to amplify the range of their societal useful applications. He is also occasionally working as a policy scientist: for instance, Jan was a guest professor of Masaryk University in the Czech Republic in 2002.
Advisory capacity: Jan de Bruin advises Digital Space Commons primarily on social science topics related to the content of IVWs and the production processes of designing and implementing societal useful IVWs.

See the following page for a description for the work of Jan de Bruin and his son Dirk-Jan de Bruin (note: this page is in Dutch).