30 people have signed up for the forthcoming WebCamp “Social Networks” day of talks and discussions on Wednesday, 7th March. Again, this was organised on very short notice (just announced last Monday) but the response has been amazing, in part due to the high quality of speakers we will have and also because of the topic relevance and scope. Oh, and it’s free!

So, here is a bit about each of our speakers. If anyone has any ideas of what they’d like to discuss in the afternoon, please post them here.

Valdis Krebs is a management consultant, researcher, trainer, author, and the developer of InFlow software for social and organisational network analysis (SNA/ONA). InFlow maps and measures knowledge exchange, information flow, emergent communities, networks of alliances and other connections within and between organisations and communities. Since 1988, Valdis has participated in almost 500 SNA/ONA projects. His clients have ranged from IBM to Shell, and his work has been covered in major media from Business Week to the New York Times.

Jill Freyne is a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Computer Science in University College Dublin. She received her PhD and BSc degrees from UCD, and worked as part of the I-SPY research project which was funded by Enterprise Ireland. Dr. Freyne specialises in the area of social search, and also has research interests in personalisation, social networks, web search and folksonomies.

Conor Hayes is a senior researcher at the Digital Enterprise Research Institute at NUI Galway. He previously worked at the Centre for Scientific and Technological Research (ITC-IRST) in Italy. Dr. Hayes’ interests include online recommender and advisory systems, case-based reasoning, collaborative filtering, user profiling, knowledge discovery in databases, information retrieval and machine learning systems, and trend discovery in online communities (such as the online music or blog domains).

Des Traynor is co-creator of Bigulo, an enhanced search and rating system for users of social networking services (such as Bebo). He works as a lecturer and PhD scholar in the Department of Computer Science, NUI Maynooth and is an expert on computer science education and social networks. Please note that Des may be replaced on the day by Bigulo colleague Andrew Page.

Gabriela Avram is a blogger, researcher, and educator, currently working at the Interaction Design Center in the University of Limerick. She is involved in a major project at UL on globally-distributed software development. Dr. Avram’s research interests include social software, online communities, blogging in corporate environments, knowledge-based systems, learning elements in education, and open source communities.