Staff Members

Alexander Rose

Hired as the first employee of The Foundation in February of 01997. Alexander has been an artist in residence at Silicon Graphics Inc., a project manager for Shamrock Communications, and a founding partner of Inertia Labs. Alexander has attended the Art Center College of Design and graduated with a bachelor of arts honors degree from Carnegie Mellon University in Industrial Design in 01995.

As the director of Long Now, Alexander has facilitated projects such as the 10,000 Year Clock with Danny Hillis, The Rosetta Project, Long Bets, Seminars About Long Term Thinking, Long Server and others. Alexander shares several design patents on the 10,000 Year Clock with Danny Hillis, the first prototype of which is in the Science Museum of London.

Alexander's personal interests include rock climbing, snowboarding, mountaineering, mountain bike riding, Bio Diesel vehicles, and travel. Alexander's combat robots have won over six world championship titles appearing in the TV show BattleBots. Alexander has also built large pyrotechnic displays for the Burning Man festival and other dangerous machines. Alexander is a nominating judge at the Webby's, and founded the Robot Fighting League. In his past he was also a world champion paintball player holding multiple world titles with his team the Ironmen from 1990 through 1995. At Carnegie Mellon University Alexander was the lead designer for a record setting human power vehicle team.

Some reviews, articles, appearances etc...

• Multiple product reviews in Kevin Kelly's Cool Tools
• Regular contribitor to the Long Now web log
• Appeared on History Channel pilot episode The ArchiTechs November 02006
• Winner on the Discovery Channel show Power Tool Drag Races (Feb-Apr 02005)
• Winner of the 02004 Popular Science design contest (July 02004 issue)
• Several reviews in The Whole Earth Magazine 02003 Winter Edition
• Listed in Richard Saul Wurman's "Who's Really Who, The most creative individuals in the USA"
• Review in the March 02002 Wired Magazine of Icosa Structures
• Review in the July 02001 Wired Magazine of the AFS Trinity Flywheel
• Review in the April 02001 Wired Magazine of a Honda Generator.
• Review in February 02001 Wired Magazine of Greg Bear's Darwin's Radio.
• Several reviews in The Whole Earth Magazine 02001 Tool Edition.
• Appeared on over 20 episodes of BattleBots

Some speaking engagements:

• Seeds of Change Y Conference March 27-29th 02008
• IDSA- Digging Deeper, San Francisco September 12th 02007
• Stanford Graduate Product Design Lecture, February 02007
• UC Berkeley, Archiving the Avant-Garde, January 02007
• Royal Observatory at Greenwich, Speed of Time Conference, (keynote) January 02007
• American Institute of Architechts Future Perfect Conference (keynote) 02006
• Received the Erdman Campbell Award, Altanta 02006
• Digits Fugit! Preserving Knowledge into the Future (keynote), Boston, Nov 3rd 02005
• Plan B Democracy Conference in Helsinki, Finland, January 26th 02005
• Stanford Lecture Series in Design October 28th 02004
• Time In Design Conference in Eindhoven Holland, October 16-17, 02003
• Time Symposium (NAWCC) in St. Louis MO, October 22-25, 02003
• Long Term Preservation Conference, in Florence Italy, December 14th 02002.
• Xerox PARC forum, in Palo Alto CA, December 6th, 02001
• TED11 conference in Monterey CA, February 22, 02001
• Open Minds Masterclass in Glasgow Scotland, January 30, 02001
• Doors of Perception Conference in Amsterdam, November 11, 02000
• Viper Conference in Basel Switzerland, October 28, 02000
• 10,000 Year Library Conference, June 30, 02000
• University of San Francisco, October 7, 01999 & May 3, 02000
• SETI Institute, September 25, 01999
• Long Island University, Turning 2000 conference, October 15th, 01999
• Stanford Graduate Product Design Lecture, March, 01998

Danielle Engelman

Danielle Engelman joined The Long Now Foundation in the summer of 02006 as Community Development Director to develop the new membership program, manage the Museum and Store at Fort Mason, and more.

Her background is in art, culture and education. She apprenticed to a master Scandinavian jeweller and showed and sold her work at several fine art galleries in San Francisco including Velvet da Vinci and the Virginia Breier Gallery.

She was Project Manager for the site-specific sculpture "Defenestration" by Brian Goggin in downtown SF, and co-produced the long running lecture series, The Tentacle Sessions, with partners Mikl-em, Scott Beale and John Law.

She also served as Creative Director for Montessori School of Los Altos, and continues to serve on the board of the Littmann Educational Foundation. She received her BA in Ancient Near Eastern Art and Architecture from U.C. Berkeley.

Danielle has produced events or been otherwise involved with such great Bay Area arts organizations such as the Burning Man Project, the SF Fringe Festival, 21 Grand, SomArts and the Lab.

She really loves to read - Stephenson, Reynolds, Stross and Banks are some favorite authors, and she enjoys entertaining, cats and collecting.

Laura Welcher

Laura Welcher is a linguist with research interests in endangered language documentation, description and revitalization, as well as the growing subdiscipline of computer-assisted linguistics. She received her Ph.D. in Linguistics from the University of California, Berkeley, where she learned first hand the importance of creating digital language resources that last in her field research on Potawatomi (a critically endangered North American language) and in her work as an archivist with the Survey for California and Other Indian Languages. She worked with the E-MELD project in developing FIELD, an ontology-based lexical database, and building Potawatomi resources for the School of Best Practice. Since then she has become involved with various projects in linguistics that are working towards developing standards for the creation and archiving of digital language resources and interoperable tools to support linguistic research, including the Open Language Archives Community, LINGUIST List, and the GOLD Markup Ontology.

Kurt Bollacker

Kurt is a computer scientist with a research background in the areas of machine learning, digital libraries, and electro-cardiographic modeling. He received a Ph.D. in Computer Engineering from The University of Texas at Austin and was co-creator of the CiteSeer research tool while a researcher at The NEC Research Institute . He was the technical director of The Internet Archive, and a research engineer at the Duke University Medical Center. His personal interests include vegetarian cooking, travel, and helping to build the community at spaceship.com. (list of speaking engagements.)

Benjamin Keating

Originally from Chicago, IL, Benjamin moved to San Francisco to become Long Now's first full-time System Administrator. Shortly after, Benjamin took on design responsibillities and has now done most of the graphic design work you see today, including this website. Also being a sound engineer, Benjamin was the lead A/V technician for the first year and a half of our Seminars About Long-term Thinking, encouraging (and maintaining) the foundation to host the seminars as digital download.

Through working here, Benjamin has contributed to the following software projects:
KDE, Rezound, Moonlight|3D, Gnome, Ardour, Freevo, GIMP, Gentoo, Pekwm, rdiff-backup, Bugzilla, Ubuntu, FreeBSD

Chris Rand

Chris began working with us in mid 01997 and has been an invaluable asset to the Clock project. Chris has been a machinest/builder for many Americas Cup racing syndicates, Survival Research Labs, Skellington Studios and Industrial Light and Magic.

Paolo Salvagione

Paolo is a world renowned bicycle designer and builder who joined our team in 02000. He is the principle engineer on almost all the Clock prototypes completed since then.

Stuart Candy

Stuart is a PhD candidate in political science at the University of Hawai'i at Manoa, and in media & communications at The European Graduate School. Originally from Australia, he holds a BA in the history and philosophy of science, and an LLB, from the University of Melbourne. He is a futurist and filmmaker, and has traveled widely, but is now based in Honolulu where he works at the Hawai'i Research Center for Futures Studies, one of the oldest and most renowned futures institutions in the world. His favorite word is the Hungarian eletmuvesz, a person who makes their own life a work of art. His other favorite word is aiglatson ("nostalgia" backwards), a yearning for things yet to be. Stuart contributes to Long Views (the Blog of the Long Now), and also maintains a blog about futures thinking and media called the sceptical futuryst.