About Alan Lenton

Alan has extensive management, publishing and software design experience, having worked as the manager of a bookshop, a graphic designer, and the production editor of a London listings magazine and manager of a rock band. He was for three years general manager of the UK's first commercial consumer network Compunet, before leaving to concentrate on writing IB's award-winning massively multi-player game Federation.

Alan designed and wrote the underlying networking and encryption code for the ground breaking 3D online poker client produced by Pokerwise (formerly Bits Studios) and worked as game server architect at SkillGaming Ltd, where he was responsible for all the functional and non-functional aspects of the forthcoming third person online shooter, Mettle. He is currently the technical team lead at Digital Governance.

Alan has a degree in sociology from Leeds University, which is probably one of the reasons why Interactive Broadcasting's games create true communities, so that IB's multi-player games become real cyberspace societies. Alan has been known to refer to himself as the world's only practicing sociologist!

Alan's current professional interests include information technology security, online privacy, C++ programming, and on-line games design.

Alan lives in London, and is a member of the British Standards Institute C++ panel and was member of the Institute's C language panel at the time of the production of the original ANSI/ISO C standard.

A long-standing member and former secretary of the Association of C & C++ Users, he has acted as a mentor for programmers learning C++ on their own. He is the former chair of a local housing cooperative, a former chair of governors of the local primary school and a former trustee of Hounslow and Isleworth United Charities. Alan is currently involved in a number of voluntary local community bodies.

Alan is a regular speaker at conferences and seminars, discussing issues affecting multi-player games, open source software, and the Internet. He is the specialist track organiser for the ACCU's Conference Organising Committee, and has organised one and two day tracks on topics as diverse as security programming, dynamic languages, open source development, distributed collaboration, and functional programming. Alan's CV is available on request (alan@ibgames.com - please include the word 'fed2' in the subject line).