Payal Arora was born in Bangalore, India, spent 16 years in the United States, mainly New York and San Francisco, before moving to the Netherlands. Her first book 'Dot Com Mantra: Social Computing in the Central Himalayas' captured some fascinating and provocative internet practices in rural India. Her second book, 'The Leisure Commons: A Spatial History of Web 2.0' on conceptualizing the internet today, won the EUR Fellowship Award in 2012. In 2010, she won the Best Paper award in Social Informatics by the American Society for Information Science and Technology.
Over the years, she has researched and consulted for a number of diverse private and public sector organizations including The Kellogg Foundation, World Bank, Hewlett Packard, National Health Foundation, Shell, General Electric, The Ministry of Education in Jordan, Sotheby's, and the Beirut Chamber of Commerce. She has been invited to speak by numerous universities such as Cornell, Duke, Michigan State and the University of Utah. She earned her doctorate in Language, Literacy and Technology from Columbia University in New York City, a Masters in International Policy from Harvard University, and a Teaching Certificate from the University of Cambridge. For more information, visit her website: http://payalarora.com/