Joline Blais, Associate Professor of New Media at UMaine, is a mother, educator, writer, permaculture practitioner, ecovillage founding partner, competitive rower, avid hiker, and alpine ski coach. She co-directs Still Water, and co-founded LongGreenHouse, a “communiversity” project integrating the Wassokeag K-8 school, UMaine classes, permaculture practices, and Wabanaki Longhouse traditions. Her subsequent work at the Belfast Ecovillage spanned 8 years and involved permaculture design, art projects and workshops, land use governance, restorative justice facilitation, dynamic governance, non-violent communication and transition town training, and initial development of food forest orchards, as well as design, construction and research of a net-zero, solar energy "passive haus."

Her 2006 book At the Edge of Art investigates how new media art puts the power of networks and distributed creativity into the hands of ordinary citizens in a variety of non-art contexts. Her other publications and creative work explore the overlap of digital culture, indigenous culture and permaculture. Currently she is working on Wild Difference, a project with community partners to prevent the extinction of Wild Maine blueberries and the local culture that support them via a virtual and physical Wild Blueberry Museum. Her time in the forests, and on and in the water (liquid or frozen) help maintain her own wild connection to her homeland.

The recipient of Tiffany, Lannan, and American Foundation awards, Jon Ippolito is a new media artist, writer, and curator. At the Guggenheim he curated the first art museum exhibition of virtual reality and the 2000 Nam June Paik retrospective with John G. Hanhardt. As Associate Professor of New Media at the University of Maine, Ippolito founded a peer-to-peer digital badges initiative and a graduate Digital Curation program. At the Still Water lab co-founded with Joline Blais, he helped build social software such as the Variable Media Questionnaire, The Pool, ThoughtMesh, and the Cross-Cultural Partnership. In over 100 presentations, Ippolito has spoken out on copyright maximalism, academic insularity, and technological obsolescence. He has published articles in periodicals ranging from the Art Journal to the Washington Post and chapters in over 20 books. Ippolito co-authored the book At the Edge of Art (Thames & Hudson 2006) with Blais and Re-collection: Art, New Media, and Social Memory (MIT 2014) with Richard Rinehart.