Our speaker this month will be Maggie Duval. Maggie is a technology, web, marketing, strategy and development consultant, educator and event producer whose work supports holistic, personalized approaches to learning. She is an expert in creating, curating, and producing unique, immersive workshops and conferences where business, technology and arts dialogue in innovative ways. Her work includes research, development, creation and production of multimedia, participative learning approaches and projects for experiential education such as the SXSW-related events, Plutopia (The Future of Play, The Science of Music, Living Systems) and Cyberpunk 2014: A Retrospective, as well as The Spectral Panopticon, Showdown at Unobtainium: Tesla vs. Edison, STEAM3: The Future of Experiential Learning, and NextECon. Maggie brings her multidimensional vision and expertise in both virtual (website and user interface) and physical (events, workshops, happenings) experiential design. A gifted connector, she also serves to foster collaborative alliances between the Austin community, and beyond.

Maggie will take us on a rollicking journey through her pre “dot.com” days at a logic synthesis software design startup based in Berkeley, California (across from Fantasy Records, Creedance Clearwater Revival’s record label). At the epicenter of the confluence of emergent tech and the World Wide Web, counterculture, art, and social activism, she shows us how the unique corporate culture she moved in, cultivated by an enlightened CEO (a brilliant computer research scientist and ‘60s activist) set the stage for and encouraged her to pursue an entrepreneurial path. She highlights her years as her own web development start up and mom (complete with baby on hip as she met with clients) in a small town in West Virginia, and ending on her move to Austin in 2005, helping foster “Jelly Coworking” culture, which laid the rich ground of being for numerous coworking, apps dev, and other businesses to emerge. Spiced with copious amounts of meticulously curated materials from the era(s), including her stint as co-manager of media relations at Burning Man in 1996, it is designed to provide an enjoyable experience of the promise and possibilities of entrepreneurial life.