Jon Lebkowsky

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Jon Lebkowsky

Jon Lebkowsky is a consultant, author and activist who was cofounder of FringeWare, Inc. (with Paco Nathan). FringeWare, an early attempt at ecommerce and online community, published a popular "magalog" called FringeWare Review. Lebkowsky also has a history of activism, and was a co-founder of EFF-Austin, an organization formed to be a chapter of the national Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF). EFF-Austin became a separate organization with Lebkowsky as President. Lebkowsky has written articles and essays, is a contributing writer at Worldchanging and is co-editor of the book Extreme Democracy. He hosts the ongoing Virtual Communities conference on social software platforms and community behavior at the prototypic online community, The WELL. He is an active proponent of the Texas Digital Convergence Initiative and a member of the core team at Bootstrap Austin. He has a weblog, Weblogsky.com. He lives in Austin, Texas.

Lebkowsky joined the WELL in 1990, and became a host or co-host of several forums on the conferencing system, including forums devoted to Factsheet Five, where he had a brief stint as book review editor, and Mondo 2000, where he wrote several articles and formed friendships with editors RU Sirius and Jude Milhon. Through the WELL, he also became associated with Howard Rheingold and Whole Earth Review, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and boing boing, where he was Associate Editor. He had early associations with staff at Wired Magazine and was conducted a regular, weekly series of chats called Electronic Frontiers Forum at HotWired. He was a subdomain editor for the Millennium Whole Earth Catalog and, in 1996, he joined Rheingold's Electric Minds. In 1997, he was hired by Whole Foods Market to help lead their efforts web-based ecommerce efforts, which ended in 2000 with the collapse of the so-called "Internet bubble." Lebkowsky formed Polycot Consulting with Jeff Kramer and Matt Sanders on September 12, 2001. He led Austin's Wireless Future project for IC2 Insititute in 2003-2004, and has been a prominent figure within the Texas Digital Convergence Initiative. He is a close friend of author Bruce Sterling, whom he has interviewed many times, and he built and operates the web site for Sterling's Viridian Design Movement. He has been an advisor to the SXSW Interactive conference for many years, and he organized tracks on wireless in 2004 and digital convergence in 2006. He is currently a member of and contributor to Bootstrap Austin.