Bruce Damer, MSEE

Bruce Damer, MSEE is CEO and founder of The Digital Space Commons and a founding director of the Contact Consortium, two organizations dedicated to the use of virtual worlds and virtual communities for positive societal change and scientific advancement. Digital Space is an innovative "Corporate Commons" which has a non-shareholder "chaordic"-style structure consisting of individual licensee/members working with a pool of shared intellectual and social capital. Since 1995 Digital Space has provided virtual world platforms, content and virtual community infrastructure for a large number of innovative client projects including recent work for NASA (a virtual habitat on Mars) and Adobe Systems Inc. (Adobe's Atmosphere community).
 
The Consortium has an extensive individual and institutional membership and hosts several conferences and colloquia annually on topics of advanced virtual communities and their applications. Consortium projects since 1995 have included a 3D virtual town (Sherwood Forest), a virtual university and architecture competition (The U), a virtual garden world (Nerve Garden), development of virtual learning spaces (Vlearn3D.org), the Digital Biology Project and Conference (Biota.org) and the global "Avatars" cyber-conference series: Avatars98-Avatars2002.
 
Education and Past Work
 
Bruce holds an MSEE from the University of Southern California and a BSc from the University of Victoria in Canada. He formerly served as chief technologist at Elixir Technologies Corporation and as a member of the Charles University (Prague) Math/Physics Faculty. He also served as a member of the staff of San Francisco State University Multimedia Studies Program and a visiting scholar at the University of Washington Human Interface Technology Laboratory.
 
Prior to founding Digital Space and the Contact Consortium in 1995, Bruce was in the field of optical computing beginning in 1984 at the IBM Canada Toronto Laboratory and at the IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center and then continuing as a graduate student at the USC Optical Materials and Devices Laboratory. In 1987 he entered a career in software engineering at Elixir Technologies Corporation where he built some of the original personal computer GUI systems based on the Xerox Star workstation. He was awarded the "Xplorer of the Year" award in 1992 by Xplor International for his contributions to the field of high speed electronic printing and document composition. In 1994-95 he advised Xerox Corporation on document standards strategies.
 
Lectures and Publications
 
Bruce has lectured extensively around the world including a speaking tour for his book Avatars sponsored by Borders books. His writings and work have appeared in numerous media outlets and scientific journals including: the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, San Jose Mercury News, Los Angeles Times, Leonardo, CNNfn, CBS Morning News Sunday, CNET, Wired Magazine and Wired News, Suddeutchland Zeitung, Ars Electronica's CyberArts, Kybernetes, 3D Design, SIGGRAPH, COMDEX, Info World, Knowledge Management, The Encyclopedia of Community, The Chronicle of Higher Education, ACM SIGCHI, Computer Graphics, CSCW, and elsewhere.
 
Other Interests
 
Since his work with Xerox and Elixir in the 1980s he developed an interest in the history of computing and the evolution of the graphical user interface. In 2002 he cofounded the DigiBarn Computer Museum a 5,000 square foot facility housed in his barn at Ancient Oaks in the Santa Cruz Mountains. The DigiBarn features hundreds of working personal computers dating back to the kit systems of 1975. Extensive documentation telling the story of computing has been made available at the DigiBarn web site. Also at Ancient Oaks he is currently developing a community garden and raising pigs with his love Galen Brandt. He has long had an interest in drawing, as a cartoonist and sketch artist sometimes turning to surreal themes. He has also enjoyed photography and created an extensive collection of Burning Man images. Bruce sometimes writes poetry and hopes to work on another book or two, themes yet to be determined.
 
For more interest in his life and work please see his personal home page.