Mike Malone is an infrastructure engineer at SimpleGeo. Previously he was a software engineer at Six Apart, where he worked on new ways to power online conversation and build interactive communities. Mike is an advocate for open source and open standards technologies. He contributes regularly to Django, is active in the OAuth and Activity Streams standards efforts, and is a member of the Open Web Foundation Open Web Foundation, an organization whose goal is to develop best practices for creating community-driven specifications. Before joining Six Apart, Mike helped build the microblogging web site Pownce, where he learned a lot about the technical and social difficulties of scaling an online community. He’s currently focused on building tools and technologies that will address some of these difficulties, which he hopes will create a more open social web ecosystem.