Speaker Dale DOUGHERTY

Dale DOUGHERTY first identified “makers” when he founded Make: Magazine in 2005, and used the term to describe all kinds of people who created “hands-on” projects for fun and profit. He launched Maker Faire in the San Francisco Bay Area in 2006, which has spread to nearly 200 events in 40 countries, with over 1.5M attendees annually. Both Make: and Maker Faire were catalysts of the Maker Movement and Dale DOUGHERTY has been a leading advocate for making and its impacts on schools, libraries and local economies. At the core is empowering makers to learn and share projects with a community. He is President of Make: Community, which is a global association of makers that now publishes Make: Magazine and manages the Global Maker Faire network. He is a founding board member of Maker Ed, a non-profit dedicated to supporting professional development of teachers in maker-centered learning.

In 2011 Dale DOUGHERTY was honored at the White House as a “Champion of Change” through an initiative that honors Americans who are “doing extraordinary things in their communities to out-innovate, out-educate and out-build the rest of the world.” At the 2014 White House Maker Faire he was introduced by President Obama as an American innovator making significant contributions to the fields of education and business.

Dale DOUGHERTY is the author of “Free to Make: How the Maker Movement Is Changing our Jobs, Schools and Minds” with Adriane CONRAD. He is co-author of "Maker City: A Practical Guide for Reinventing American Cities" with Peter HIRSHBERG and Marcia KADANOFF.

Prior to Make:, Dale DOUGHERTY was a co-founder of O’Reilly Media where he was an editor of many early technical books. While at O’Reilly, he developed GNN, the first commercial website, which launched in 1993 and was sold to AOL in 1995. He coined the term "Web 2.0" He lives in Sebastopol CA.