About Us

Annie Maxfield's experience in communication is diverse. She has been a local marketing director for an international furniture company, a program manager for a women's employment organization, a consultant to a university department to develop a strategic communication plan, and a marketing and development consultant to a museum. Additionally, she has helped plan, promote, and produce fundraising events for various non-profits. In 2009-2010, she was the public relations manager for Next Stop Design, a federally funded experiment in crowdsourcing for transit planning. She was central to the development and launch of the project and helped bootstrap an online community of more than 3,000 in the span of a few months. She was responsible for Next Stop Design receiving coverage on the official blog of the White House, in the Deseret News, on Transit Wire, and in other opinion-leading news venues. She has completed a B.S. in speech communication, a B.S. in philosophy, an M.S. in communication, and the integrated marketing communication certificate program, all at the University of Utah. She continues her commitment to college education as an associate instructor at the University of Utah and adjunct faculty at Westminster College and Salt Lake Community College.

Daren Brabham was among the first to public research on the crowdsourcing model, an online, distributed problem solving and production method utilizing the collective intelligence of online communities. He has published more than a dozen scholarly articles and book reviews in journals such as Convergence, Planning Theory, First Monday, The Review of Communication, and Information, Communication & Society, and he has presented internationally at scholarly and professional conferences. He has worked in public relations, development, and Web design and usability for a variety of organizations and clients, including a public television station, a non-profit arts foundation, and an IT research firm. He was the project leader for Next Stop Design in 2009-2010, a federally funded experiment in crowdsourcing for public transit planning. He has a B.A. in communication and religion from Trinity University and an M.S. in communication from the University of Utah. He is currently a Ph.D. candidate in communication at the University of Utah, where he also teaches courses in mass communication and new media.