Suw Charman-Anderson
Suw Charman is a leading social software expert, specialising in the use of blogs and wikis in business. She works with companies around the world, from sectors as diverse as technology, finance and public relations, to help them understand how social software can be used both behind the firewall and for customer communications.
Suw is also the co-founder - alongside Lloyd Davis and Leisa Reichelt - of Fruitful Seminars, a series of intimate Web 2.0 workshops covering topics such as the adoption of social tools in business and the reduction of email through the use of social tools.
After a short stint working as a freelance music journalist in the late 90s, Suw became a freelance web designer and project manager, designing websites and intranet sites for companies such as PricewaterhouseCoopers and Hutchison3G (now 3). In 2002, she launched her own internet start-up which she ran for two years.
That same year, she began her personal blog, Chocolate and Vodka, (chocolateandvodka.com), through which she became a part of worldwide a community of bloggers. Over the next couple of years she developed a passion for blogging, and later other social tools such as wikis, and the opportunity they provide to radically improve people's lives. This eventually became the basis of her successful consultancy.
A passionate digital rights advocate, Suw co-founded the Open Rights Group in July 2005, with the aim of raising awareness of digital rights issues, running campaigns and supporting grass roots activism. As Executive Director, Suw was responsible for ORG's responses to the APIG public inquiry into Digital Rights Management and the Gowers Review of Intellectual Property.
Suw writes about social software, the media, publishing, and other related subjects at Strange Attractor (strange.corante.com, with her husband Kevin Anderson).