Introducing 4 new members

From India

Yazad Jal is CEO of Praja Foundation (www.praja.org) which works in the area of good governance, largely with the local government in Mumbai (Bombay), India. Praja has developed citizens charters, conducted various performance surveys of the municipal corporation and jointly run an online complaint management system with the local governemnt.

Yazad studied economics and political science at St. Xavier's College

(www.xaviers.edu) and at the University of Bombay (http://www.mu.ac.in/). He was President of the Association of Youth for a Better India from 1997-98 and worked as Research Associate with the Centre for Civil Society (www.ccsindia.org), New Delhi from 1999-2001. Early on in his career, he worked in marketing with the Indian Market Research Bureau and Swastik Surfactants. Yazad has been involved with Praja from inception, and was a volunteer with Praja when it was a pilot project within AYBI.

Apart from Praja, Yazad runs a blog -- AnarCapLib (www.yazadjal.com) and is also active on various social networking sites like ryze (www.ryze.com/go/yazad), orkut, linkedin and multiply. His interests vary from applying the principles of libertarianism and objectivism to daily life to a good game of chess or scrabble.

From Germany

Siegfried Hirsch is the technical brain behind hhS (http://www.hhs.de), a company estalished in the early eighties.

Doing software consulting for different companies and setting up his own software recently with two social community tools (www.newsbee.de and www.thinkingspace.de) he is very interested in the blogosphere and content syndication possibilities. His strongest interests are now in the areas of knowledge management and enterprise communications. As a member in different multi author blogging teams in germany (www.kmu-blog.de and http://vnude.typepad.com/itfrontal/) he is now trying to cross the borders to learn and blog with international ceos.

From USA

John S Flowers was the lead architect of the InQuisit news clipping service, a former developer at Microsoft, and the founder of Hiverworld (now nCircle Network Security). He is the founder and CEO of kozoru, a next-generation search engine focusing on answers to questions instead of links to results based on keyword queries. He spends his time between his family, his company, liberal arts [writing, painting, being a philosopher) and his personal Journal at www.johnsflowers.com

From France

Eric Briys used to be Financial teacher in the USA, Canada, France, also working as business-banking (Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch, Deutsche Bank), he is co-founder and CEO of www.cyberlibris.com and he blogs at http://cyberlibris.typepad.com .

(Eric, feel free to post a comment with some more precisions on your profile as I don't have lots of information...)