Midcoast Forum on Foreign Relations

Tom DeMarco

Monday, December 5, 2011

Topic: Cyberwar: Science or Science Fiction?

Tom DeMarco is a Principal of The Atlantic Systems Guild, a systems think tank with offices in the U.S., Germany and Great Britain.  He is a past  winner of the Jean-Dominique Warnier Prize for “lifetime contribution to the information sciences,” and the Wayne Stevens Prize for his contributions to the “methods and techniques of software engineering.”  He is one of the founders and a past-president of the Pop!Tech Conference and a Fellow of the Cutter Consortium.

Tom is the author of eight books on computer systems, software development, management, and organizational design, plus three works of fiction.  His most recent book is called Adrenaline Junkies and Template Zombies: Understanding Patterns of Project Behavior written with five other members of the Guild.  His best known work is Slack: Getting Past Burnout, Busywork, and the Myth of Total Efficiency, published by Random House.  It addresses the question, Why are we all so damned busy? and offers some unsettling answers.

Our speaker’s first work of mainstream fiction, a comic novel called Dark Harbor House, was published in the Spring of 2001. His short story collection, Lieutenant America and Miss Apple Pie was published in 2003.  He makes his home in Camden, Maine.