THE JUDGES

Tom Cheesewright

Tom Cheesewright is a marketing and technology consultant and commentator. As Strategy Director of AND Digital he helps clients leverage the latest digital technologies to enhance their marketing. In an eleven year marketing career he has worked with major brands including Orange, LendLease, Church of England, Iceland, BT, HP, and IBM. He has recently been engaged by the Northwest Development Agency to provide training on social media marketing to businesses across the Northwest.

Tom is also a regular contributor to BBC programmes, appearing fortnightly on BBC Radio Manchester to explain gadgets and social media, and in the last year appearing on 5Live and BBC Radio Wales to discuss ITV’s digital strategy, and on BBC1’s The Big Questions to talk about the impact of social media on youth development.

Dave Carter

Dave Carter is the head of the Manchester Digital Development Agency (MDDA). Most recently, he has been involved with the “Fibre to the People” pilot project, which is the next generation broadband for Corridor Manchester. Dave’s work also stretches beyond Manchester and the UK. He is one of the founding members of Telecities, a project in the Eurocities network that promotes knowledge sharing on new technologies among European cities. Telecities has been running successfully for 15 years.

Last year Dave received the Intelligent Community Forum (ICF) Founders Award, from the global think tank based in New York, which aims to promote and share best practice in the use of digital technologies for economic and social development across the world. This award recognised the influence and impact Dave has within the digital industry in the UK and worldwide.

Kate Field

Kate Feld is a writer and editor based in Lancashire, whose work focuses on the intersection of the arts and online media. She is the creator and editor of Rainy City Stories (rainycitystories.com), a web project that publishes new writing set in Manchester on an interactive map of the city. The success of the project has recently led her to form Openstories, a non-profit organisation that will work specifically on innovative projects that involve literature and technology.

She is the director of the Manchester Blog Awards, now in its 5th year, which celebrates the best of the city’s online writing. She also writes The Manchizzle (themanchizzle.blogspot.com), a blog about Manchester life that the Guardian called “the pick of online writing and hub of cultural goodness.” She has led an extensive array of social media training workshops, and run a variety of social-media oriented projects for different arts and media organisations.

She has worked in journalism for several years. She was founding editor of Manchester arts and culture magazine eightytwenty, and has written for newspapers and magazines on both sides of the Atlantic including Art World, The Independent, and Newsday. She earned a master’s degree in journalism from Columbia University in 2003, where she was Lorana Sullivan fellow for investigative journalism.