Tom Malone. He is a professor at MIT Sloan School of Management. He talks a good deal about decentralized organizations and the promise that it can provide. I think if he knew about bitshares and DAC's he would fully support the movement and speak at the conference. I don't know if he's the guy thats going to pump you up, but I think it is very important to get support of academics.
Here are three short clips from youtube that illustrate his like minded approach to organization theory and harnessing the wisdom of the crowd for collective decision making.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xI3fHkGNOpc
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J9fXbOkmlN0
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DV3GSaU9PVM
My opinion is we definitely want a focus on academia and to try to avoid the political theater atmosphere. Politics are a point of attack and to foster a political atmosphere this early could come back to haunt the Bitshares community as the media will present it like we are all birds of a feather.
Try to be inclusive of everyone with good ideas, promote an inclusive atmosphere from the first conference because one of the arguments we hear is that these sorts of conferences always have the same people or same sort of demographic.
You need media reps, you need academics, you need professionals and entrepreneurs, you need some artists. Avoid mixing any specific flavor of politics with distributed finance.
Do we know any artists who want to make use of this technology? I'm sure we can find at least one artist if there is going to be Bitshares Music. If we can't then how about we start approaching them now?
John Mackey founder of Whole Foods and Conscious Capitalism
http://www.consciouscapitalism.org/aboutus
http://youtu.be/5CXrrwOktmQ
Jack Mackey, a very politically controversial figure. If the goal is to foster a feeling of broad acceptance of future Bitshares products if you're going to invite Jack Mackey you could end up in a situation where you're preaching to the choir in a sense while alienating Bitshares from all of the people who disagree with what Jack Mackey has said.
The person you want to invite is the CEO of Overstock Patrick M. Byrne, he's politically controversial but in a far more populist way. He's taking on Wall Street, people can relate to that and he's come out saying he's a Bitcoin user.