Melinda Cooper is a theorist who lives in Sydney. She is the author of Life as Surplus: Biotechnology and Capitalism in the Neoliberal Era. She is currently working on two book projects: Turbulence - Between Ecological and Financial Crisis and Clinical Labour: Human Research Subjects and Tissue Donors in the Global Bioeconomy, the latter co-authored with Catherine Waldby

Soenke Zehle teaches transcultural literary and media studies at Saarland University and the Saar Academy of Fine Arts [tmsp.org].

Brian Wyrick (brian@pseudoscope.com) is an artist and web developer. He makes films with the artists' collective, Group 312 Films, in Chicago.

Steve Wright works in the Caulfield School of Information Technology at Monash University. He is the author of Storming Heaven: Class Composition and Struggle in Italian Autonomist Marxism (London: Pluto Press, 2002).

Simon Worthington is the co-founder, co-director and publisher of Mute Publishing Ltd. He studied art at the Slade School (London) and CalArts (Valencia, California). As co-director of the Mute organisation, he has been involved in a number of projects, including Mute - The Metamap, conceptualisation, research (HAL2001) and artwork [www.metamute.org/en/node/5678] including Mute - YouAreHere

In late 1986, sensing the coming data storm, Ben Watson took a course in COBOL, RPGII and Systems Analysis at Control Data Institute in Leeds. Over the next decade, work with Relational Databases and Structured Query Language on the Unix operating system (mostly accounts software) granted Watson an unclouded view of the economic imperatives behind ‘open' systems. A contract to write a book about Frank Zappa saved him from a lifetime of IT drudgery.

Pauline van Mourik Broekman is the publisher and co-founder of Mute, which she and Simon Worthington edited until 2004 and continue to work with as contributing editors. In addition to working on Mute projects, she has written and spoken widely on culture and technology, the politics of institution-building and publishing magazines in the ‘digital era'. She also co-authored Mute Magazine Graphic Design (2008), a companion volume to Proud to be Flesh, published by Eight Books.

The University of Openess (UO) was a user-led facility of learning and research with its first campus at Limehouse Town Hall, London, and its first online presence at [http://uo.twenteenthcentury.com].