John Bell is a web appli­ca­tion devel­oper, data artist, and adjunct fac­ulty at the Uni­ver­sity of Maine New Media depart­ment. He has con­tributed to the devel­op­ment of The Pool, a sys­tem for fos­ter­ing and doc­u­ment­ing dis­trib­uted cre­ativ­ity in dig­i­tal arts; the Vari­able Media Ques­tion­naire, a tool used in the recre­ation of tech­no­log­i­cally obso­lete art­work; released sev­eral open-source web author­ing tools; and given birth to an arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence that acci­den­tally com­mit­ted sui­cide. Many of his projects focus on trust in online com­mu­ni­ties and main­tain­ing intel­lec­tual integrity in envi­ron­ments where there are few con­se­quences to ignor­ing it. His work has been fea­tured in Wired online and at Ars Electronica’s Elec­trolobby Kitchen.