About Steven

Steven Stone is the Founder and Head Distiller at Sound Spirits, Seattle’s first craft distillery since Prohibition. Steven moved to Seattle in 1997 to work in engineering for Boeing (he still has his day job there). Plans for the distillery started taking shape in 2007 and Sound Spirits finally opened it doors to the public on September 17, 2010.

You’ve procreated and now your spawn has entered the education system. How can you help support your kid reach their superhero potential without being the overbearing helicopter parent that teachers talk about in the staff room?

Elementary Gifted/Talented teacher Shannon Houghton will detail the top three actions you can take to help navigate the world of parent-educator relations. You’ll be ready to strap on your jetpack in no time.

About Shannon

Shannon Houghton
Shannon Houghton is an energetic and intense elementary school teacher in the Federal Way School District. A metro Detroit native and public school graduate, Shannon believes all students have the right to a rigorous and relevant education that will prepare them to do what they love for the rest of their lives.

You can find Shannon on Twitter @MsHoughton.

UPDATE: The Ignite Seattle Challenge mentioned in Shannon’s Ignite talk was fully funded in two weeks. Thank you everyone who contributed.

Climbing one of the seven summits takes more brains than brawn.

Find out how this self-proclaimed Keyboard Athlete, non-camper, and non-hiker put her research and Energy Bank manipulation skills to work to out-think Kilimanjaro and make it to the summit with energy to spare.

About Jen

Jen Waak is a wellness coach in Seattle, WA and author of Keyboard Athletes Guide to Pain Relief and Prevention. A recovering management consultant herself, Jen loves teaching entrepreneurs and other crazy-busy professionals how to have more energy, relieve common aches and pains, alleviate computer eyes, and genuinely feel AWESOME.

You can find Jen on Twitter @jenwaak.

“I expose the secret world of parenting that nobody ever tells you about.”

About Hillel

Hillel Cooperman is co-founder of Jackson Fish Market, a user experience consultancy, and software startup in Seattle, WA. You can find him on Twitter (@hillel).

Almost all of the medical advances we enjoy today were first tested in mice. Most what we know about human physiology was first studied in mice. However, the general public’s understanding of lab mice is usually limited to a few characteristics – they’re white, and they’re probably trying to take over the world.

In truth, all mice are not created equal (many of them aren’t even white!). Over the past century an entire industry has developed that is devoted entirely to the creation and production of lab mice. My talk will cover the factors that make some mice more useful than others, and the mouse-industrial complex that exists to meet the needs of modern science.

About Molly Nixon

You can find Molly on Twitter @thebeastieswee.

Crowd sourcing has always been around but with the current technologies, its capabilities have grown tremendously. This presentation will focus on the use of these tools in an environment vastly growing by the number catastrophic events around the world. The month of September is National Preparedness Month and with that CrisisCommons, a volunteer technical community that connects people and organizations who use open data and technology to innovate crisis management and global development, will be going on a road trip. (ROAD TRIP!!!)

About Pascal Schuback

You can find out about Crisis Commons here and find Pascal on Twitter @schuback).

About George Dyson

From his TED bio page:
A member of the fabulous Dyson clan, George Dyson is sometimes defined as a son-of and a brother-of, but he has found his own voice as a chronicler and a philosopher of science and the future. The son of physicist Freeman Dyson, George grew up inside one of the most fervid hotbeds of scientific research in the Atomic Age. He spent his early adulthood living in a treehouse, and designing and building Aleutian kayaks (chronicled in his book Baidarka: The Kayak). While he maintains his kayak business now, his parallel interest in science and the future has brought him to the fore.

My full-time job is working on software to help people in get around Internet censorship in countries like China and Iran, where the government filters what people can access on the Web. I can talk about the history of methods used by repressive government to censor the Web, and the parallel history of the tools for users to defeat that censorship. I will address some of the misconceptions that people have about the nature of circumvention software and the battle between the censors and the circumventors. And finally I will pose some of the (as-yet-unsolved) problems faced by the developers of circumvention software — problems that perhaps the geeks in the audience would enjoy taking home and thinking over.

About Bennett Haselton

Bennett Haselton has been developing workarounds for Internet censorship since 1996. He is the webmaster for Circumventor.com, a distribution network for tools to evade Internet blocking. He has also worked as a professional security tester and published research on Internet security and privacy. He gets a kick out of describing himself in the third person.

You can find his work at Peacefire.org

Now that many of my geek friends are having children (I had mine in my early twenties, somewhat “early”) I want to share some shortcuts and musings that my partner and I have discovered on the way.

About Amber Straub

Amber works at Swedish, and dreams of someday helping make healthcare simple stupid. She enjoys not being crazy, cooking, snowboarding, multitasking, and tracking down her 10 year old daughter. She can be found on twitter @shadalicious

As a professional one-armed juggler and inspirational speaker, I strive to make every show about an important aspect of being human in relationship with other humans. I am a juggling geek, a relationship geek, and a circus freak who loves to juxtapose the tragic with the comic in order to bring the audience to a new balance within the dialectics that define our lives: comfort and pain, self and community, task and maintenance, love and fear…I will make of these five minutes something you will never forget.

About Jason Quick

Jason is a performing artist, inspirational speaker and circus arts teacher. There is very little that he likes more than overcoming interesting obstacles that challenge the ways that people limit themselves; in this endeavor his handicap becomes a fortunate gift. You can find out more about his work at jasonquick.net.

Amanda (aka Sirin) will talk of the hooping sub-culture and how this modern take on an old fitness craze has taken a very new and different look. It’s become such an addiction to some that they’ve built careers out of hooping, branched off the sub-culture into sub-sub-cultures such as fire hooping, hoop yoga, hoop aerobics and hoop dancing.

About Amanda Straub

Amanda is a software developer who fell in love with this big circular toy over two years ago while she was looking for a fun new fitness regiment. Hoop dance has become a permanent past time for her, and you can usually find her in the parks around Seattle when the weather is nice with a big stack of hula hoops to share. As a Seattle “hoop ambassador,” Amanda teaches hoop dance classes, makes hoops in her spare time, and generally loves spreading hoop love in her wake.

You can find her on Twitter @amandahoops.

When I was originally invited to speak at Ignite, I was asked if I could somehow do my presentation while performing an aerial act. My response: “You’re crazy! I don’t know how I would do that.” I suggested that instead I just stay on the ground and talk about how I left the software industry to run away and join the circus. But then a funny thing happened when I was writing that talk: I realized that an aerial act and a timed talk are not that different! Thus, two weeks before the event, I totally rewrote my talk – and choreographed an act to go with it.

About Bev Sobelman

In 2003, Beverly Sobelman walked away from her 18-year career in software development to find something new. That new thing turned out to be a career as a professional circus aerialist. In 2007, she founded Versatile Arts, Seattle’s first full-time aerial studio. You can find her on Twitter @bev_sobelman

Working in Cranium’s editorial department for 8+ years, I got hooked on Dr. Howard Gardner’s multiple intelligence theory, and I still find it to be a uniquely powerful tool for inspiration and general perspective-broadening. And in the current educational climate, when just about everything revolves around reading and math scores, I also think it’s incredibly important for the kids (and grown-ups!) in the crowd to hear these messages:

1. There are lots of ways (beyond just “reading” and “math”) to be smart!
2. We’re naturally inclined toward some of the intelligences, but we can improve and develop in any of them.
3. If something seems tedious or difficult to you, you can use the multiple intelligences to change your perspective.

About Catherine Carr

After leading Cranium’s editorial team for 8+ years, Catherine Carr runs her own consulting business, focusing on the intersection of brand and content and authentic consumer engagement. Through speaking gigs and client work (including projects for Giant Thinkwell, Wonder Forge, and PhotoRocket, among others), Catherine loves communicating ideas in creative ways. She also makes a mean homemade Bolognese.

In a world of Twitter and blogs, scientific peer review takes on a new meaning. From press releases, to TV appearances, to controversy in the blogosphere, this talk will dive into the history of one of the more interesting hashtags that Twitter has seen. The #arseniclife controversy portends the future of peer review, and it continues to be great sideline viewing.

About Deepak Singh

Deepak is the Principal Product Manager for Amazon EC2. Records music as the “Dual Nature of Matter”. Denizen of the interwebs. More at mndoci.github.com

While everyone (of a certain age) remembers the first record they bought as a kid, only a small number of us end up loving the spinning slab of vinyl as much as the music itself.

Drawing on my own experience both as a longtime music geek and onetime used record store clerk, I’d like to present a High Fidelity-style Top Five List covering the most common habits and characteristics of that odd breed known as the record collector. Through a few profiles of collectors I have known and loved, I’ll cover such mysteries as:

- Why people own multiple copies of what appear to be the same record
- What is the proper record fair etiquette
- The sanctity of the first pressing

About Jen Matson

Almost from the moment she started buying records sometime in the early eighties, Jen Matson was just as interested in the format as the sound, creating her very first record database on the family PC to catalog her small crate of vinyl. While her love of music led her through a series of jobs as a record store clerk, college radio music director, music journalist and record label webmaster, she eventually put that organizational streak to use in her current career as a user experience architect. You can find her on Twitter @nstop

Large events like parades, conventions, and conferences often require large private security forces to maintain order and security. In a post 9/11 world, we’re told that this is required for our safety. It’s possible to control large crowds, effectively and safely, by applying modern psychology instead of barricades.

The Fremont Solstice Parade draws tens of thousands of spectators, but the parade is secured with fewer than 25, unpaid, volunteers with no security background and less than 20 minutes of training.

Security is often a boring subject, but keeping the Fremont Solstice Parade secure, safe, and (barely) a good show are the essence of hacking and good geekery — it’s also surprisingly funny.

Letterpress printing was a dying art in the 1980s and nearly dead in the 1990s. Technology has revived it. You can now design on a computer, print out a plastic plate, and use 500-year-old technology that reconnects you to the mess and smell of ink, paper, binding, and industrial-age machines. Letterpress is messy, each print is unique, and it’s the antidote and complement to the perfection-with-abstraction of the Web, ebooks, and the rest. People crave real connection that the screen doesn’t provide. Letterpress puts you right up to the metal and pushes.

About Glenn

Glenn Fleishman is a technology journalist that writes about where technology crosses with people’s lives, as well as exhaustive technology explanations. You can find him every week under the initials G.F. at the Economist’s Babbage blog; at TidBITS, a Mac publication for which he’s an editor and programs the backend; and at Macworld, where he’s a senior contributor. He’s also a freelance columnist for The Seattle Times, and contributes regularly to Ars Technica.

At the age of 9, Gwen is ready to share her favorite ways to beguile parents and others in charge. It is much easier to convince grand parents to do what you want. A simple please with a cute look goes a long ways But the real big challenge comes in when you need to convince parents or other adults not already enamored with you to do what you want. This talk is full of techniques explained by a kid that can be used to charm and convince nearly anyone.

From merging on I-5 to the snowpocalypse, we have proven, year after year, that our driving skills as a city are wanting. We are surprised by rain, confused by four way stops and baffled at how to turn two lanes into one. Here is a fun but ranty plan for teaching Seattle how to drive right.

About Scott Berkun

Scott Berkun is the best selling author of The Myths of Innovation, Confessions of a Public Speaker, and released just this week, Mindfire: Big Ideas for Curious Minds. His work as a writer and public speaker have appeared in the The Washington Post, The New York Times, Wired Magazine, Fast Company, Forbes Magazine, and other media. He has taught creative thinking at the University of Washington and has been a regular commentator on CNBC, MSNBC and National Public Radio. His many popular essays and entertaining lectures can be found for free on his blog at Scott Berkun.

See Scott in action or read his popular blog on his main site: www.scottberkun.com

geeks have lead the most recent evolution of our society and some do it better than others. i’ve been incredibly curious about how geek praxis outside of a professional setting has contributed to geek success and would like to share a few ways i’ve found that geeks harness their obesssions and obsessive natures for fun and profit.

As a young geek i know said “feel free to make fun of me now, i’ll forgive you and maybe even hire you when we’re adults”.

About Sarah Novotny

Sarah is constantly seeking ways to promote Seattle as a technology mecca. She is a founder of and evangelist in open source databases for Blue Gecko. She is additionally a Program Chair for OSCON and the Chair of the IOUG’s MySQL Council. For Twittery things, check out @sarahnovotny and to connect with her on LinkedIn wander over to linkedin.com/in/sarahnovotny.