I wanted a place of study in which every use of the personal pronoun, nos-otros, would truthfully refer back to the four of us, and be accessible to our guests as well; I wanted to practice the rigor that would keep us far from the “we” that invokes the security found in the shadow of an academic discipline: we as sociologists, economists, and so forth.

Ivan Illich, ‘The Cultivation of Conspiracy’

We hope to make New Public Thinking a hospitable home for all kinds of conversations, a place where we can think together as friends, not as professionals or competitors in a marketplace of ideas. Some of us were friends before this project, others have met through the site.

As we feel our way towards what this site and the project around it could become, we hope it will be a welcoming space for new voices, with room for surprise and intimacy, for being wildly wrong or quietly precise. If you would like to join us in this conversation by contributing to the site, or in other ways, please write to us at info@newpublicthinkers.org

Tim Concannon writes about oil and Africa for publications including ‘The Africa Report’. He spent most of the norties setting up this human rights organisation in the Niger Delta, Nigeria. He blogs about politics and midnight movies.

Peter Geoghegan is a writer, journalist and failed cricketer living in Edinburgh. Originally from Ireland, his interests include politics, sociology, history and cultural studies. He holds a PhD from the University of Edinburgh and is the editor of Political Insight magazine. He writes regularly for publications including The Guardian, The Irish Times, The Sunday Business Post and The Glasgow Herald.

Andy Gibson is a social entrepreneur and campaigner specialising in social technologies for social impact. He is founder of the social technology consultancy, Sociability, and co-founder of the “education 2.0″ start-up, School of Everything, and the “5-a-day for your mind” campaign, Mindapples. He is the author of Social by Social, a practical guide to social technologies for social good, and Local by Social, a guide to digital innovation in local authorities.

Vinay Gupta is a risk management consultant with a particular interest in natural disaster, poverty and worst case scenarios. He is best known for the hexayurt, a very cheap free/open source shelter technology. His work explores the terrain connecting Buckminster Fuller and Mahatma Gandhi.

Dougald Hine is a freelance thinker and doer. He puts social and political theory into practice through hands-on projects, creating organisations such as Space Makers Agency and School of Everything. With Paul Kingsnorth, he is the initiator of the Dark Mountain Project, a cultural movement for navigating times of global disruption.

David Jennings is an independent consultant on learning and discovery. His book, “Net, Blogs and Rock ‘n’ Roll: How digital discovery works and what it means for consumers, creators and culture” explored the patterns of largely feral activity by which we discover music. David’s current work extends this interest in how people organise their own learning, drawing on the resources of the commons. He is a Chartered Occupational Psychologist.

Keith Kahn-Harris is a sociologist, writer, music critic and Jewish communal activist. His website is www.kahn-harris.org, he occasionally blogs at Metal Jew and he runs the project New Jewish Thought.

Pat Kane is a father, musician, writer, theorist and activist. He is founder of The Play Ethic (book/consultancy/network) and runs the Scottish ideas blog www.thoughtland.info. He is also one half of ’80s pop group Hue & Cry whose new album will be out in 2011.

Joseph Kotrie Monson is a Director of Mary Monson Solicitors, a criminal defence firm based in Manchester and London. Throughout its history, the firm has acted in cases of national significance, from the Strangeways prison riots to the Hookway case of 2011, which brought the use of police bail throughout the UK into question. Joseph is particularly interested in the intersections between networked technologies and legal processes.

Bridget McKenzie has 20 years experience in managing and devising innovative cultural learning programmes. In 2006 she founded Flow Associates, a small cultural consultancy based in both UK and Delhi. Before this, she had been Head of Learning at the British Library and Education Officer for Tate (1993-1998). Bridget is a provocative thinker and blogger on the links between learning, culture, ecology and technology. She lives in South East London with her partner, artist Brian McKenzie and with her daughter Megan.

Alison Powell is a storyteller and scholar. She comes from Plains Cree country in Saskatchewan, and has recently reversed the colonial circuit to land in London.  She writes and researches at  the intersection of technology, art, and politics, focusing on how culture, politics, and networks are co-produced.  She is LSE Fellow in Media and Communications at the London School of Economics, where she teaches fabulous students and refuses to let them be bored.

Cassie Robinson is a designer, a positive psychologist and a partner at Agency. Through Our Intimate Lives, she is working to create a more honest and meaningful conversation around sexuality and intimacy.

Eleanor Saitta is a hacker, designer, artist, and writer. She makes a living and a vocation of understanding how complex systems work and fail and redesigning them to work, or at least fail, better. She works with architecture, technology, software, words, pixels, paint, and other, more durable media, and more specifically at the intersections between them, with an emphasis on the seamless integration of technology into the lived experience and the humanity of objects in the built environment. Eleanor is a co-founder of the Trike project, an open source threat modeling methodology and tool which partially automates the art of security analysis, and also of the Seattle Public N3rd Area space. She lives mostly in New York, and can be found at Dymaxion.org and on twitter as @dymaxion.

Mike Small writes about our emerging socio-ecological crises, and the problems of elite rule. He is exploring responses in democratic renewal and experimental culture. His focus uses the Scottish generalist tradition to examine ideas of deep citizenship in the face of hyper-capitalism and omnicide. His projects include the Fife Diet, Bella Caledonia and Rethinking the City and he edits the Journal of Civics and Generalism.

Nick Stewart has made performances, drawings, videos, publications and ephemeral art works over some thirty years. A wide range of interests and research informs his work but the question of place and identity is of particular concern to him. He has been the recipient of numerous awards, residencies and commissions including, The Canada Council, The British Council, The British Film Institute and the Royal Festival Hall in London. He is a Reader and runs the MA in Contemporary Art at Winchester School of Art. Originally from Ireland he now considers himself to be a Londoner. www.nickstewart.org.uk

Chris T-T is an English writer and musician. Since 1999, he has released seven LPs, a live collection and many singles and EPs. He also performs around the world, sells creative concepts to the TV and charity industries, is a piano accompanist and writes a weekly column on the arts for The Morning Star. Chris is married with no kids, no pets and no car, living in Brighton, UK.

Andrew Taggart is trying to lead a philosophical life: a fully integrated, meaningful, self-reflective existence. In 2009, he finished a PhD, soon after left the academy, and then began the slow, meditative process of thinking aloud and sorting things out. He has since trained as a philosophical counselor, and he is now writing a book on philosophy as a way of life. He lives in New York City.