Chris Messina arrived in San Francisco in 2004 as a volunteer for the Mozilla Foundation, leading the Spread Firefox community marketing project in raising over $220,000 in microdonations to launch Firefox to a worldwide audience with an ad in the New York Times.

He went on to co-found the Flock web browser and helped to organize the first-ever BarCamp in Palo Alto in 2005. Later, he co-founded Citizen Agency with Tara Hunt, opening a shared work environment called Citizen Space, giving rise to the coworking movement.

Chris now works on DiSo, an effort that he co-founded with Steve Ivy, to facilitate the development of building blocks for the open, social web. He is also a board member of the OpenID Foundation and works part-time for Vidoop, a Portland-based provider of secure internet identity technologies.

He has spoken at numerous conferences around the world and has been quoted in national publications such as The New York Times, Business Week, LA Times, MIT Technology Review and Wired. Chris is well-known in the Web 2.0, open source, and startup worlds for his community advocacy and work on open standards initiatives like microformats, OpenID, OAuth, and Activity Streams.