Ross Mayfield is co-founder, Chairman and President, and former CEO of Socialtext Incorporated

Socialtext

Socialtext Incorporated is a company based in Palo Alto, California that produces enterprise social software, comprising an integrated suite of web-based social software applications including microblogging, user profile, directories, groups, personal dashboards using OpenSocial widgets, and shared...

, an enterprise social software

Enterprise social software

Enterprise social software , comprises social software as used in "enterprise" contexts. It includes social and networked modifications to corporate intranets and other classic software platforms used by large companies to organize their communication...

 company based in Palo Alto, California

California

California is a state located on the West Coast of the United States. It is by far the most populous U.S. state, and the third-largest by land area...

.
He now is Vice President of Business Development of SlideShare

SlideShare

SlideShare is a Web 2.0 based slide hosting service. Users can upload files privately or publicly in the following file formats: PowerPoint, PDF, Keynote or OpenOffice presentations. Slide decks can then be viewed on the site itself, on hand held devices or embedded on other sites. Launched on...

.
He is also a regular blog

Blog

A blog is a type of website or part of a website supposed to be updated with new content from time to time. Blogs are usually maintained by an individual with regular entries of commentary, descriptions of events, or other material such as graphics or video. Entries are commonly displayed in...

ger and public speaker.

Mayfield received a BA in Political Science

Political science

Political Science is a social science discipline concerned with the study of the state, government and politics. Aristotle defined it as the study of the state. It deals extensively with the theory and practice of politics, and the analysis of political systems and political behavior...

 from the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) and completed the Management Development for Entrepreneur

Entrepreneur

An entrepreneur is an owner or manager of a business enterprise who makes money through risk and initiative.The term was originally a loanword from French and was first defined by the Irish-French economist Richard Cantillon. Entrepreneur in English is a term applied to a person who is willing to...

s (MDE) program at the UCLA Anderson School of Management.

He began his career in the non-profit sector with the U.S.-Baltic Foundation, after which he moved to Estonia

Estonia

Estonia , officially the Republic of Estonia , is a state in the Baltic region of Northern Europe. It is bordered to the north by the Gulf of Finland, to the west by the Baltic Sea, to the south by Latvia , and to the east by Lake Peipsi and the Russian Federation . Across the Baltic Sea lies...

 and served as a scriptwriter for, and advisor to, the Office of the President of Estonia

President of Estonia

The President of the Republic is the head of state of the Republic of Estonia.Estonia is a parliamentary republic, therefore President is mainly a symbolic figure and holds no executive power. The President has to suspend his membership in any political party for his term in office...

. He also served as Marketing Director of Levicom, one of the largest privately held telecom groups in Eastern Europe

Eastern Europe

Eastern Europe is the eastern part of Europe. The term has widely disparate geopolitical, geographical, cultural and socioeconomic readings, which makes it highly context-dependent and even volatile, and there are "almost as many definitions of Eastern Europe as there are scholars of the region"...

 where he also started an Internet Service Provider

Internet service provider

An Internet service provider is a company that provides access to the Internet. Access ISPs directly connect customers to the Internet using copper wires, wireless or fiber-optic connections. Hosting ISPs lease server space for smaller businesses and host other people servers...

 and a web design

Web design

Web design is the process of planning and creating a website. Text, images, digital media and interactive elements are used by web designers to produce the page seen on the web browser...

 company.

In 1998 he co-founded RateXchange, a business-to-business commodity exchange for telecom, where he quickly progressed from Vice President of Sales and Marketing to Chief Operating Officer and then to President. With the collapse of the dot-com bubble

Dot-com bubble

The dot-com bubble was a speculative bubble covering roughly 1995–2000 during which stock markets in industrialized nations saw their equity value rise rapidly from growth in the more...

, the company, which had yet to earn any revenue, saw its billion dollar valuation vanish overnight. Ross left in August 2000.

He then served as VP of Marketing for Lucida Inc., a Fujitsu

Fujitsu

is a Japanese multinational information technology equipment and services company headquartered in Tokyo, Japan. It is the world's third-largest IT services provider measured by revenues....

 spinout, before co-founding Socialtext

Socialtext

Socialtext Incorporated is a company based in Palo Alto, California that produces enterprise social software, comprising an integrated suite of web-based social software applications including microblogging, user profile, directories, groups, personal dashboards using OpenSocial widgets, and shared...

 in 2002.

Ross hosted the first Barcamp

BarCamp

BarCamp is an international network of user-generated conferences . They are open, participatory workshop-events, the content of which is provided by participants. The first BarCamps focused on early-stage web applications, and were related to open source technologies, social protocols, and open...

 in 2005.

External links

• Ross Mayfield's Blog
• Company website
• Many2Many, a group blog on social Software that Mayfield contributes to
• 71MB and 24MB Quicktime movies of Ross Mayfield lecturing on emergent democracy
  Emergent democracy
  Emergent democracy refers to the rise of political structures and behaviors without central planning and by the action of many individual participants, especially when mediated by the Internet...
  
   and group forming networks at Stanford in 2005, licensed under Creative Commons
  Creative Commons
  Creative Commons is a non-profit organization headquartered in Mountain View, California, United States devoted to expanding the range of creative works available for others to build upon legally and to share. The organization has released several copyright-licenses known as Creative Commons...
  
  , hosted by the Internet Archive
  Internet Archive
  The Internet Archive is a non-profit digital library with the stated mission of "universal access to all knowledge". It offers permanent storage and access to collections of digitized materials, including websites, music, moving images, and nearly 3 million public domain books. The Internet Archive...