Being old enough to remember when people used to be dispersed points of local BBSs, asynchronously sharing information during the nighttime over long-distance calls, Andrea is actively involved with the ongoing Italian IA community-making effort.
Andrea holds a Master Degree in Architecture and Industrial Design from the Politecnico di Milano, where he graduated with full honors in 1995 with a sperimental paper on chaos theories and morphogenetic design.
He has been a teaching assistant at the Politecnico di Milano, Faculty of Architecture, where he worked on generative design and helped develop one of the first online didactical labs for students, and a freelance information designer throughout the second half of the Nineties.
In 2001 Andrea founded exea with G. Orsi (CEO, Ososoft), a small IT consulting firm providing web services to SME and with a penchant for free and open source software solutions, where he was Technical Lead and Information architect all through January 2007.
After an unfinished PhD. in History and Computer Sciences at the Department of History, University of Bologna, he has finally moved in and settled at CIRSFID, Department of Law and Computer Science, University of Bologna, where he took on a new PhD. and works on issues relating to Information architecture, classification, topic maps and their use for better access to historical and juridical online databases.
He teaches CMS and WebUML at the European Institute of the Design (IED), Master in Communication and Web Design.
A system administrator on mainframes, Unix, Windows and Linux networks since 1989, Andrea occasionally writes for online and paper IT magazines and speaks about his favourite geeky subjects or about F/LOSS, CMS and IA pets at conferences. He shares a certain keen interest in folksonomies with a bunch of smart Italian guys and this has led him into being one of the core developers working on the FaceTag project.
Andrea is serving as a Board Member at OSCOM, the International Association for Open Source Content Management and as a TIA member for the IA Institute. He is also on the Italian IA Summit Board where he acts as Board Coordinator for the upcoming Second Italian IA Summit.
He speaks Italian and English (although some may beg to differ) and is currently quite busy trying to handle Svenska. He is married with Cristina, the father of seven-years-old Gaia, and probably the first and only Italian who actually went and sued Microsoft (but he was younger then).
