O’Reilly Media, Thomson Reuters, Wired magazine, The Economist, NBC, RAND Corporation, Verizon Communications, Linden Lab, Institute for the Future, British Telecom, Qwest Communications, Raytheon, Adobe, Meetup, Craigslist, Ask.com, Intuit, MITRE Corporation, US Department of Defense, Department of State, Federal Communications Commission, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Social Security Administration, General Services Administration, British OfCom, World Wide Web Consortium, National Geographic Society, Benton Foundation, Linux Foundation, Association of Internet Researchers, Internet2, Internet Society, Institute for the Future, Santa Fe Institute, Yankee Group.
And experts from the world’s great universities, colleges, and institutes, including Harvard, MIT, Carnegie-Mellon, Yale, Georgetown, Oxford, Princeton, Pennsylvania, California-Berkeley, Columbia, Southern California, Cornell, North Carolina, Purdue, Duke, Syracuse, New York, Northwestern, Ohio, Georgia Institute of Technology, Florida State, Kentucky, Texas, Maryland, Illinois, Boston College, and many others.
Many of the respondents are at the pinnacle of Internet leadership, but some in the second wave of survey respondents are “working in the trenches” of building the Web. Most of the people in this latter segment of responders came to the survey by invitation because they are on the e-mail list of the Pew Internet & American Life Project. They are not necessarily opinion leaders for their industries or well-known futurists, but it is striking how much their views were distributed in ways that paralleled those who are celebrated in the technology field.
While a wide range of opinion from experts, organizations, and interested institutions was sought, this survey should not be taken as a representative canvassing of Internet experts. By design, this survey was an “opt in,” self-selecting effort. That process does not yield a random, representative sample. The quantitative results are based on a non-random online sample of 895 Internet experts and other Internet users, recruited by e-mail invitation, Twitter, or Facebook. Since the data are based on a non-random sample, a margin of error cannot be computed, and results are not projectable to any population other than the respondents in this sample.