Chrys Wu, a journalist and user engagement strategist, works with businesses interested in deepening connection to their audiences through research, community-building strategy and user-centric design.

Her early work online gave rise to some of the Web’s first Web pages and databases used to share and exchange information. Since then, she’s worked on award-winning, traffic-driving projects for LATimes.com, NYTimes.com, the Knight Foundation, KCRW.com and WNYC.org, among others. Her work in community-building strategy crosses online, mobile and real-world boundaries and helps people with common interests stay connected. Her blog, Ricochet, is where ideas for online news bounce around.

Chrys is a universal and local organizer of Hacks/Hackers, a rapidly expanding international group that brings journalists, technologists and designers together to reinvent news and civic information.

Since 2007, Chrys has directed community and social media outreach for the annual Online News Association conference, which has grown nearly twofold since her involvement. She also founded NYC Ruby Women, which encourages women of all skill levels to improve their programming skills in a friendly and non-competitive setting.

Chrys is a consultant to the Knight Foundation and has been a judge for its Knight News Challenge, 5-year program that invests significant funding toward bold community news and social media experiments. Her unconference session on “Managing and Maintaining Online Communities” was voted Best of the Barcamps at the 2010 Future of News and Civic Media Conference @ MIT.

In addition to news and technology, Chrys’s passions include architectural photography, cultural philanthropy, food, fencing (the sport, not the crime) and fashion.

She’s active on Twitter @MacDiva and Delicious.
(Old school. Yes. We know.)

By the way, if you’re not using Dropbox, you should be.

Got a project? Have a question? Contact Chrys.

The short bio:

Chrys Wu is both a hack (journalist) and a hacker (developer). When she’s not meeting, greeting and connecting journalists and technologists as a co-organizer of Hacks/Hackers NYC, she is a user engagement strategist and a consultant to the Knight News Challenge. Talk with her on Twitter @MacDiva.