David Woolley learned to program on PLATO III while still in high school. He joined the CERL system software staff in 1972 at age 16, and a year later created PLATO Notes, which gave birth to the world's first online community. During his five years at CERL he also wrote several PLATO games, and collaborated with Doug Brown to develop Talkomatic, PLATO's real-time group chat feature. In 1977 he moved to Minneapolis to continue PLATO development for another five years at Control Data. As Executive Director of Twin Cities Free-Net during the 1990's, David spearheaded the building of an online community designed to support the neighborhoods of the Minneapolis - St. Paul metro area. He is a founding board member of E-Democracy.Org, an international nonprofit organization that uses internet technology to engage citizens in discussions about community issues. As a software consultant, he has designed conferencing facilities for many applications and has published a number of articles and book chapters on the subject. He maintains a popular website at Thinkofit.com devoted to tools for online communities, online collaboration, and web conferencing.
