Jeff Beck
Jeff Beck is the Program Head for Literature at the National Center for Biotechnology Information at the US National Library of Medicine. He has been involved in the PubMed Central project since it began in 2000. He has been working in print and then electronic journal publishing since the early 1990s. Currently he is co-chair of the NISO Z39.96 JATS Standing Committee and is a BELS-certified Editor in the Life Sciences.

Elisa E. Beshero-Bondar
Elisa Beshero-Bondar explores and teaches document data modeling with the XML family of languages. She serves on the TEI Technical Council and is the founder and organizer of the Digital Mitford project and its usually annual coding school. She experiments with visualizing data from complex documentstructures like epic poems and with computer-assisted collation of differently encoded editions of Frankenstein. Her ongoing adventures with markup technologies are documented on her development site at newtfire.org.

Geert Bormans
Geert Bormans has long been an angle-bracket jack-of-all-trades. He loves the beauty of a well-architected solution or a pure and simplified process. Geert makes a living as an independent consultant providing XML or Linked Open Data solutions, mainly to the publishing industry. He does so with a broad geographical flexibility. Presently, Geert dedicates a significant portion of his professional time to the publication platform for legislation and official publications of the Swiss Federal administration. Geert likes an interesting challenge. By preference such challenges involve alpine ground, six strings, or markup.

John Chelsom
John Chelsom is CEO of Seven Informatics Ltd in the UK and Director of the Applied Health Informatics program at Fordham University, New York. He trained as an electrical engineer before gaining a PhD in artificial intelligence in medicine. As Managing Director of CSW Group from 1993 to 2008, John was responsible for the implementation of XML workflow and production systems for many major organisations, including the British Medical Journal, Jaguar Cars and the Royal Pharmaceutical Society.

CSW later developed Case Notes — an electronic health records product, using XML and other open standards. In 2003 the UK government chose Case Notes as the primary clinical system in a national architecture for a shared electronic health record covering the 55 million citizens in England.

Since 2010 he has been the lead architect of the open source cityEHR product — an XRX (Xforms, REST, XQuery) health records system currently used in a number of hospitals in England.

In 2000, John founded the XML Summer School and continues as a board member and lecturer in this annual event.

Ash Clark
Ash Clark (e/em/eir) is the XML Applications Developer for the Northeastern University Women Writers Project. Ash has studied Writing, Computer Science, and Library and Information Science. Now, e is part web developer, part metadata consultant, part XQuery enthusiast, and all focused on thoughtful data design and accessible tech. Eir specialties are drawing data from TEI-encoded documents; using XML databases to power websites; and creating exploratory interfaces out of compiled metadata. A genderqueer individual and a casual gamer, Ash lives in Massachusetts with eir magnificently floofy Pomeranian, Frisk.

M.Joel Dubinko
M.Joel Dubinko is an independent technical consultant, AI generalist, and problem solver. He edited the W3C XForms requirements and specification. He's also worked on electronic forms systems, XML databases, and consumer search applications including one of the first public semantic search deployments at Yahoo! SearchMonkey. You can find more of his work at https://dubinko.consulting.

Patrick Durusau
Patrick Durusau has been an advocate for markup since June, 1992. That was, as many of you will recall, the InfoGlut issue of Byte magazine. In addition to using DynaWeb to host an academic journal (in the distant past), Patrick has advocated for TEI (Text Encoding Initiative), OSIS (Open Scripture Information Standard), Topic Maps, ODF (Open Document Format), and has played a number of roles in standards bodies.

Patrick may, you decide, have finally heeded Tommie Usdin's admonishment at every Balisage: Listen! (I'm still an advocate for markup but with a slightly different nuance.)

Phil Fearon
Phil Fearon is a senior software engineer at DeltaXML; he has worked with them on XML comparison solutions for the last ten years. Phil started his working life as an analyst in the field of electronic engineering. After ten years in this increasingly digital field, he switched career paths to become a full-time programmer. As a programmer and later a systems engineer, he worked for a UK government department, specialising in the publication of XML-sourced reports. In the final few years before joining DeltaXML, Phil was a self-employed software developer working on XSLT-based solutions; the last year of this period was spent working with the team at Saxonica on their Saxon-CE XSLT Processor. Phil also now works on XSLT related projects in his spare time; a highlight is DeltaXML’s XSLT/XPath extension for Visual Studio Code.

Tony Graham
Tony Graham is a Senior Architect with Antenna House, where he works on their XSL-FO and CSS formatter, cloud-based authoring solution, and related products. He also provides XSL-FO and XSLT consulting and training services on behalf of Antenna House.

Tony has been working with markup since 1991, with XML since 1996, and with XSLT/XSL-FO since 1998. He was Chair of the Print and Page Layout Community Group at the W3C and previously an invited expert on the W3C XML Print and Page Layout Working Group (XPPL) defining the XSL-FO specification, as well as an acknowledged expert in XSLT. Tony is the developer of the 'stf' Schematron testing framework and also Antenna House's 'focheck' XSL-FO validation tool, a committer to both the XSpec and Juxy XSLT testing frameworks, the author of "Unicode: A Primer", and a qualified trainer.

Tony's career in XML and SGML spans Japan, USA, UK, and Ireland. Before joining Antenna House, he had previously been an independent consultant, a Staff Engineer with Sun Microsystems, a Senior Consultant with Mulberry Technologies, and a Document Analyst with Uniscope. He has worked with data in English, Chinese, Japanese, and Korean, and with academic, automotive, publishing, software, and telecommunications applications. He has also spoken about XML, XSLT, XSL-FO, EPUB, and related technologies to clients and conferences in North America, Europe, Japan, and Australia.

Amanda Galtman
Amanda Galtman is an independent XML software developer who contributes to the XSpec infrastructure and a couple of other open source projects. Previously, she was an XML software developer at MathWorks.

Mark Gross
Mark Gross is a recognized authority on XML implementation and digital transformations. Mark’s experience and leadership focuses on developing and delivering technology-driven solutions. Under his direction, DCL uses the latest innovations in artificial intelligence, including machine learning and natural language processing, to help businesses structure data and content for modern technologies and platforms. He is a frequent speaker on the topics of XML, DITA, AI in scholarly publishing, and content reuse strategies.

Mary Holstege
Mary Holstege spent decades developing software in Silicon Valley, in and around markup technologies and information extraction. She has most recently been pursuing artistic endeavours. She holds a Ph.D. from Stanford University in Computer Science, for a thesis on document representation.

Jessica Hymers
Jessica Hymers is the Metadata Production and Electronic Access Specialist with OCUL Scholars Portal at the University of Toronto where she is also a student in the Master's of Information program.

Joel Kalvesmaki
Since 2019, Joel Kalvesmaki has been a software developer for the United States Government Publishing Office (GPO). At GPO he is part of the XPub project, which is modernizing publications for Congress and federal agencies, both by converting legacy formats to XML and by streamlining the publishing process. Joel is also an active scholar in early Christianity and digital humanities, serving as editor for Christianity in Late Antiquity (University of California Press, in partnership with the North American Patristics Society), the Guide to Evagrius Ponticus, and the Journal of the Text Encoding Initiative.He is founder and developer of the Text Alignment Network, an extensive customization of TEI XML that focuses on cross-project interoperability and exposing TEI texts and their annotations to stand-off linked open data. When not programming, writing, reading, or editing, Joel is frequently busy with his family tending the goats, chickens, turkeys, and fields of Many Years Farm in central Virginia.

Gursheen Kaur
Gursheen Kaur is a software developer at DeltaXML. She completed her masters degree in computer science and is currently working on front-end projects for DeltaXML.

Michael Kay
After a PhD in database technology (which had only just been invented) at the University of Cambridge (UK), Michael Kay spent 24 years with the British mainframe manufacturer ICL: the first 12 years designing database software, the next 12 attending meetings. His escape in 2001 coincided with the emergence of XML and XSLT. He started the development of the Saxon software initially as a proof of concept for a project with Oxford University Press, then discovered that it bore some resemblance to an XSLT processor, and quickly turned it into one of the first conformant implementations. Having written the Wrox/Wiley XSLT Programmers’ Reference book, he was invited to join the XSL Working Group and soon took over as editor, continuing in that role throughout the development of the XSLT 2.0 and 3.0 specifications. He formed Saxonica in 2004 to turn the Saxon software into a business, and has grown the company slowly but steadily ever since. The W3C XSL working group closed down after finishing version 3.0 in 2017, but he decided there was unfinished business, and assembled an informal community group to define version 4.0; his talk at Balisage 2023 is about one small piece of that project. He has a croquet handicap of 4, and sings bass in two amateur choirs.

Eliot Kimber
Eliot Kimber is an XML practitioner currently working for ServiceNow. He has been involved with SGML and XML for more than 30 years. Eliot has contributed to a number of standards, including SGML, HyTime, XML, XSLT, DSSSL, and DITA. While Eliot’s focus has been managing large scale hyperdocuments for authoring and delivery, most of his day-to-day work involves producing online and paged (or pageable) media from XML documents. Eliot maintains a number of open-source projects including DITA for Publishers, The Wordinator, and the DITA Community collection of DITA-related tools and other aids. Eliot is author of DITA for Practitioners, Vol 1: Architecture and Technology, from XML Press. When not trying to retire the technical debt in his various open-source projects, Eliot lives with his family in Austin, Texas, where he practices Aikido and bakes bread.

Guy van der Kolk
Guy van der Kolk first got hooked on publishing after using Pagemaker, Photoshop and an Apple Quicktake 100 camera to help create his school yearbook. After many hours of hard work, while holding the final printed product, he knew this was an industry he wanted to be a part of. Guy is currently Product Manager at Typefi, where he works with the product and engineering teams to improve Typefi's leading automated publishing software and develop new features. He also continues to apply his deep product knowledge in a Professional Services capacity, working on projects with new and current customers.

Deborah A. Lapeyre
Debbie is a Senior Consultant for Mulberry Technologies, Inc., a consulting firm specializing in helping their clients toward better publishing through XML, XSLT, and Schematron solutions. She works with Tommie Usdin as architects and Secretariat for JATS (ANSI NISO Z39.96-2019 Journal Article Tag Suite), NISO STS (NISO Z39.102-2022, STS: Standards Tag Suite (Version 1.2)), and BITS (Book Interchange Tag Suite). She has taught hands-on XML, XSLT, DTD and schema construction, and Schematron courses as well as numerous technical and business-level introductions to XML and the JATS family of tag sets. Debbie has been working with XML and XSLT since their inception and with SGML since 1984 (before SGML was an ISO standard). In a previous life, she wrote code for systems that put ink on paper as well as programmed in, taught, and documented a proprietary generic markup system named “SAMANTHA”. Hobbies, besides Balisage, include pumpkin carving parties.

Qinqin Lin
Qinqin Lin is an Application Programmer/Analyst at OCUL Scholars Portal. She received her BSc from University of Toronto, with a specialty in Software Engineering in 2008. Since 2012, she has been working at Scholars Portal on various projects.

James David Mason
James David Mason, originally trained as a mediaevalist and linguist, became a writer, systems developer, and manufacturing engineer at U.S. Department of Energy facilities in Oak Ridge since the late 1970s. In 1981, he joined the ISO’s work on standards for document management and interchange. He chaired ISO/IEC JTC1/SC34, which is responsible for SGML, DSSSL, Topic Maps, and related standards, for more than 20 years. Dr. Mason has been a frequent writer and speaker on standards and their applications. For his work on SGML, Dr. Mason has received the Gutenberg Award from Printing Industries of America and the Tekkie Award from GCA. He recently retired from working on information systems to support manufacturing and documentation at DOE’s Y-12 National Security Complex (Y-12) in Oak Ridge, Tennessee.

Ari Nordström
Ari Nordström is an independent markup geek based in Göteborg, Sweden. He has provided angled brackets to many organisations and companies across a number of borders over the years, some of which deliver the rule of law, help dairy farmers make a living, and assist in servicing commercial aircraft. And others are just for fun.

Ari is the proud owner and head projectionist of Western Sweden’s last functioning 35/70mm cinema, situated in his garage, which should explain why he once wrote a paper on automating commercial cinemas using XML.

Charles O'Connor
Charles O'Connor is a Lead Product Manager at Aries Systems. He has spent the last 15 years automating XML-based scholarly article production workflows. Currently working on Aries' LiXuid Manuscript solution, he previously led the team that built ArticleExpress for Sheridan (now KGL). His approach to creating tools is informed by his prior experience as an indexer, proofreader, copy editor, and production editor. He is a member of the NISO Information Creation and Curation Committee.

Uche Ogbuji
Uche Ogbuji explores emerging technologies, and develops systems to integrate them with more traditional ones. He’s been doing so since markup and the web came together back in the late 90s; while people were claiming that no serious business would ever be done in the Python programming language, he was contributing to the language’s initial XML libraries. Most recently he founded Zepheira and The Library.Link Network (now Bibliograph, by EBSCO, post acquisition), bringing library catalogs to the web for indexing. He is a prolific writer and speaker on tech (and many other) topics, and also a poet, spoken word performer and DJ with 2 award-winning poetry books, Ndewo, Colorado (Colorado Book Award, Westword award) and Ńchéfù Road (Christopher Smart Prize). Born in Calabar, Nigeria, Uche settled near Boulder, Colorado after much world wandering.

Jean Paoli
Jean Paoli is the Founder of Docugami Inc., a startup that uses AI to transform the unique document business processes of individual companies, making frontline users more efficient while giving COOs better compliance and insights — inspired by his deep belief that openness and interoperability raises all boats. He was formerly President of Microsoft Open Technologies, Inc., and one of the co-creators of the XML 1.0 standard with the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). Throughout his career, Jean has worked in startups: before Microsoft, with Inria, the renowned French research Labs (Gipsi S.A. and Grif S.A.); and within Microsoft creating four new startups: XML, InfoPath, opening the Office formats and MS OpenTech (Microsoft’s open source subsidiary). The startups he built created breakthrough platform technologies used today by millions. He is the recipient of multiple industry awards for his work on XML, semi-structured data, the convergence of documents and data and openness at large. In addition to core technical design, Jean takes deep care at building healthy ecosystems at worldwide scale. He is credited as one of the key leaders responsible for shifting in a fundamental way, under the guidance of the CEO, Microsoft’s strategy to embrace and love open source.

Allen H Renear
Allen H Renear is a Special Advisor for Strategic Initiatives, Office of the Provost and a Professor at the School of Information Sciences / ischool.illinois.edu at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

C. M. Sperberg-McQueen
C. M. Sperberg-McQueen studied comparative literature but strayed into computing as a graduate student and never found his way back out.

While working at university computer centers in Princeton and Chicago, he also worked as editor in chief of the Text Encoding Initiative. He was drafted to be a member of the XML 'editorial review board' when someone else declined their invitation, and served as co-editor of the XML 1.0 specification. Later he was a member of the technical staff at the World Wide Web Consortium, where he worked on (among other things) the specifiations for XSLT 2.0 and later, XQuery, XPath 2.0 and later, and the XML Schema Definition Language (XSD).

He is the founder of Black Mesa Technologies LLC and a consultant specializing in the use of descriptive markup, XML, and related technologies.

Srikanth Venkata Subramanian
Srikanth is a Front End Developer at Cognizone, a leading software development company specializing in Semantic Technologies and Linked Open Data, based in Belgium. Srikanth is a creative and self-starting Front End Developer with 6 years experience in building and maintaining responsive applications in a fast-paced, collaborative environment. He is proficient in HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Angular and React plus modern libraries and frameworks. Srikanth is versed in working in an Agile environment.

Zubin Rustom Wadia
Zubin Rustom Wadia is a product manager at Docugami Inc., a startup that uses AI to transform the unique document business processes of individual companies, making frontline users more efficient while giving COOs better compliance and insights. Zubin has worked with numerous Fortune 500 and Government organizations to unlock the full value of their content repositories. He is a former member of the Java Content Repository 2.0 expert group, and co-author on three books about software programming and architecture. In 2009, he founded a critically acclaimed startup that raised the standard for public safety alerting in the United States: CiviGuard. He holds an MBA from MIT Sloan.

Norman Tovey-Walsh
Norm Tovey-Walsh is currently a senior software developer at Saxonica Ltd, working out of his home in Swansea Wales. Previously, he was employed by MarkLogic Corporation, Sun Microsystems, Arbortext, and O’Reilly Media (then O’Reilly & Associates).

B. Tommie Usdin
B. Tommie Usdin is President of Mulberry Technologies, Inc., a consultancy specializing in XML for textual documents. Ms. Usdin has been working with SGML since 1985 and has been a supporter of XML since 1996. She chairs the Balisage conference. Ms. Usdin has developed DTDs, Schemas, and XML/SGML application frameworks for applications in government and industry. Projects include reference materials in medicine, science, engineering, and law; semiconductor documentation; historical and archival materials. Distribution formats have included print books, magazines, and journals, and both web- and media-based electronic publications. She is co-chair of the NISO Z39-96, JATS: Journal Article Tag Suite Working Group and a member of the BITS Working Group and the NISO STS Standing Committee. You can read more about her at http://www.mulberrytech.com/people/usdin/index.html. and see some of her photos on: flickr.