Cory Doctorow is a contributor to The Guardian, The New York Times, Publishers Weekly, and Wired, and co-editor of the popular blog Boing Boing. He was formerly director of European affairs for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a non-profit civil liberties group that defends freedom in technology law, policy, standards, and treaties. He is a visiting senior lecturer at Open University (UK) and previously served as the Fulbright chair at the Annenberg Center for Public Diplomacy at the University of Southern California.

In 2008, his novel, Little Brother, was a New York Times best seller. Tachyon Books published a collection of his essays called Content: Selected Essays in Technology, Creativity, Copyright, and the Future of the Future, and IDW published a collection of comic books inspired by his short fiction called Cory Doctorow’s Futuristic Tales of the Here and Now. Doctorow’s latest works include an adult novel, Maker, published by Tor Books/HarperCollins UK; For the Win, a young adult book about video games, labor politics, and economics; and a short story collection entitled Overclocked: Stories of the Future Present.

He has won the Locus and Sunburst Awards, and he has been nominated for the Hugo, Nebula, and British Science Fiction Awards. He co-founded the open-source peer-to-peer software company OpenCola, which was sold to OpenText, Inc. in 2003. He serves on the boards of the Participatory Culture Foundation, the MetaBrainz Foundation, Technorati, Inc., the Organization for Transformative Works, Areae, the Annenberg Center for the Study of Online Communities, and Onion Networks, Inc.

Photo: Jonathan Worth

Twenty years ago, large projects in computer graphics animation, game development, and visual effects typically involved a half-dozen artists and engineers working together in a single studio space. Ten years later, the size of project teams had grown to include sometimes hundreds of collaborators, but the work remained largely housed within a single campus. In 2011, many projects, large and small, are distributed across multiple locations and time zones. Facilitating creative problem solving among team members remains the key to success, but the tools and behaviors within the creative process are changing dramatically.

This panel discusses issues surrounding globally distributed projects in animation, games, and visual effects. Success in these ventures depends on unique production structures, review processes, universal tool sets, and adaptation of artists and engineers to technology-mediated communication. Topics include speculation on possible future work environments and how the rising generation of artists and engineers will influence the collaboration process. Each panelist brings a specific area of expertise to the general topic and represents an organization recognized for successfully advancing industry capability with distributed projects.