We are happy to announce the following judges for the design challenge finale: 

Look forward to more announcements at http://designchallenge.phizzpop.com

Bill Scott - Director, UI Engineering - Netflix

Bill Scott recently joined Netflix, the world's largest online movie rental service, as the Director of UI Engineering.

Previously, Bill led engineering for Yahoo! Teachers, a web 2.0 community allowing teachers to gather, organize & share web resources and lesson planning. In addition, as an Ajax Evangelist at Yahoo! he focused on spreading the goodness of "rich and sane" Ajax design & development. Bill is a frequent speaker at conferences and workshops discussing the nuances of good design and the challenges of great engineering. At Yahoo! Bill was also the Design Pattern curator where he launched the public Yahoo! Design Pattern Library (http://developer.yahoo.com/ypatterns).

Before Yahoo! Bill led User Experience at Sabre Airline Solutions and co-founded Rico (an open source Ajax framework, openrico.org.) For 20 years Bill has bounced back and forth between design and engineering projects, creating products in areas as diverse as video games, widget libraries, war gaming, IDE tools, airline management and Web consumer sites. His musings can be found at http://looksgoodworkswell.com.

Peter Merholz – President/Founder – Adaptive Path

Peter Merholz is president and one of the founders of Adaptive Path. For more than six years, Peter has been instrumental in developing Adaptive Path's ability to provide world-class consulting, training, and public events.

At Adaptive Path, Peter began with a focus on information architecture, and over time expanded his knowledge to include product strategy, user research, and practice development. He has worked with a wide variety of clients from large multi-national companies to smaller, avant-garde firms and start-ups.

Past clients include Hallmark, Intel, Wells Fargo, United Airlines, Vanguard Financial.

Peter is an internationally recognized thought leader on user experience. His blogs and his essays for Adaptive Path demonstrate his foresight on issues of information architecture, organizational change, and product strategy. Peter's thought leadership is perhaps most dubiously demonstrated in his coining of the term "blog" in 1999 when it was a nascent genre.

Dan Burkhart – VP of Marketing – Flock.com

Dan Burkhart came to Flock from eBay, where he led eBay's Global Buyer Engagement team to build a set of products enabling user contributed content, identity creation and topic-based interactions. Dan also spent four years running key functional areas of eBay’s internet marketing group, responsible for Portals and Partners, Affiliates, and Natural Search.

Prior to his tenure at eBay, Dan worked for two startups and was a Sr. Director of Business Development for NBC Internet, where he played a key role in building the company from $20MM to $120MM in revenue.

Silona Bonewald – Founder – League of Technical Voters, ElecTech

Silona is currently focused on creating the League of Technical Voters.

Before this she started her own company, ElecTech that created specialized software for political campaigns, and ran a web consulting business where she was one of the first people to create websites for hire, and to successfully optimize her clients’ websites for usability and top search engine ranking. She has also worked in the gaming industry, creating high visibility web presences, content management systems, and large database back-end integrations. Silona volunteers for the ACLU and EFF on technology-based civil liberties issues, and has lobbied on various issues. The combination of her involvement in political activism, educational activism, psychometrics for gaming communities, lobbyist work, netizen activities and web design make her uniquely suited to envision the framework that will make the LoTV system all possible.