Personal Democracy Forum 2014

Craig has led Free Press and the Free Press Action Fund since 2011. For more than a decade, he has been a leader in major campaigns to safeguard Net Neutrality, stop media mergers and consolidation, oppose unchecked surveillance, defend public media and sustain quality journalism. He works in Washington and speaks often to the press and the public on media and technology issues. His commentaries appear regularly in The Huffington Post, and he has written for The Daily Beast, The Guardian, The Hill, MSNBC, Politico, The Progressive, The Seattle Times, Slate and many others. Before joining Free Press, he was an investigative reporter for Public Citizen’s Congress Watch and the managing editor of In These Times magazine. He is the editor of two books, Appeal to Reason: 25 Years of In These Times and Changing Media: Public Interest Policies for the Digital Age. He is a graduate of Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism.

Nicole Aro is the AFL-CIO Digital Strategies deputy director. Before this, Nicole worked as the Organizing Director at the Sunlight Foundation, and as an online organizer at Organizing for America and the DNC. Prior to organizing, she taught middle school in Philadelphia and has a bachelor's degree in Interdisciplinary Studies from the University of Chicago.

Julian Assange is the founder of WikiLeaks, the Internet-based publishing organisation which makes headlines around the world by releasing suppressed information about corporate, government and military corruption and misconduct. In 2012 Assange co-authored the book Cypherpunks about the encroaching mass surveillance of the internet. When Edward Snowden, the former NSA intelligence contractor, revealed the detail and extent of mass US government surveillance, WikiLeaks stepped in with legal and logistical advice and successfully helped him avoid US extradition and gain political asylum.

Ben Balter is a gov 2.0 evangelist working to hack government from the inside out, a GitHubber making government better, one repo at a time, and an aspiring attorney passionate about the disruptive potential of technology.

Named one of the top 25 most influential people in government and technology and described by the US Chief Technology Officer as one of “the baddest of the badass innovators,” and by the White House Director of Digital Strategy as “lightning in a bottle,” Ben is a Government Evangelist at GitHub — the world’s largest software development network — where he leads the efforts to encourage adoption of open source, open data, and open government philosophies across all levels of government.

Previously, Ben was a member of the inaugural class of Presidential Innovation Fellows where he served as entrepreneur in residence reimagining the role of technology in brokering the relationship between citizens and government. Before that, he was a Fellow in the Office of the US Chief Information Officer within the Executive Office of the President where he was instrumental in drafting the President’s Digital Strategy, on the SoftWare Automation and Technology (SWAT) Team, the White House’s first and only agile development team, and as a New Media Fellow, in the Federal Communications Commission’s Office of the Managing Director where he played a central role in shaping the agency’s reimagined web presence. His paper, Towards a More Agile Government was published in the Public Contract Law Journal, arguing that Federal IT Procurement should be more amenable to modern, agile development methods.

Ben holds a J.D. and an M.B.A. from the George Washington University. When not trying to change the world, he enjoys tackling otherwise-impossible challenges to sharing information using nothing more than duct tape, version control, and occasionally a pack of bubblegum.

Andre Banks has spent most of the last decade harnessing the power of both storytelling and technology to build innovative social movements in the US and around the world. He is the co-founder and Executive Director of All Out (www.allout.org), which mobilizes millions of people to create a world where no person will have to sacrifice their family or freedom, safety or dignity because of who they are or who they love. Andre is also the Senior Advisor at Purpose (www.purpose.com), where he was formerly Partner and Director of Strategy. While leading strategy development on global movements to fight cancer and eliminate nuclear weapons, Andre also incubated All Out. His background in organizing (AFL-CIO and Africa Action), media and public affairs (Applied Research Center), and in publishing (ColorLines Magazine) informs his work. All Out's 1.9 million members, an unprecedented alliance of LGBT people and allies, inspire his work and his worldview.

John Perry Barlow is a retired Wyoming cattle rancher, a former lyricist for the Grateful Dead, and co-founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, an organization which promotes freedom of expression in digital media. He currently serves as its Vice Chairman. Since May of 1998, he has been a Fellow at Harvard Law School's Berkman Center for Internet and Society.

He has written for a wild diversity of publications, ranging from Communications of the ACM to The New York Times to Nerve°. He was on the masthead of Wired for many years. His piece for Wired on the future of copyright, The Economy of Ideas, is now taught in many law schools. His manifesto, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, has been widely distributed on the Net and can be found on more than 20,000 sites.

In recent years, he has devoted much of his time and energy helping to "wire" the Southern Hemisphere to the North and has traveled extensively in Africa. His Wired piece, "Africa Rising" describes the first of these journeys. More recently, he has been working with Brazil's Minister of Culture, Gilberto Gil, in an effort to get all of Brazil's music online.

In June of 1999, FutureBanker Magazine (an ABA Publication) named him "One of the 25 Most Influential People in Financial Services," even though he isn't in financial services. He was the first to apply William Gibson's science fiction term Cyberspace to the already-existing global electronic social space now generally referred to by that name. Until his naming it, it had not been considered any sort of place. He was called "the Thomas Jefferson of Cyberspace" by Yahoo Internet Life Magazine.

He was born in Wyoming in 1947, was educated there in a one room schoolhouse, and graduated from Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut with an honors degree in comparative religion in 1969. He lives in Pinedale, Wyoming (75 miles from the nearest stoplight or franchise), New York's Chinatown, San Francisco, Salt Lake City, On The Road, and in Cyberspace.

The Rockefeller Foundation awarded Erin Barnes and her co-founders at ioby the 2012 Jane Jacobs Medal for New Technology and Innovation. Erin met her co-founders while studying water economics and hydrogeomorphology in graduate school at the Yale University School of Forestry and Environmental studies. Before ioby, Erin Barnes was an environmental editor at Men’s Journal magazine, freelance environmental writer, and contributor to Al Gore’s book Our Choice. She conducted field research on socio-economic values of water in Nicaragua and the Amazon, and worked as a community organizer at the Save Our Wild Salmon Coalition. She has a B.A. in English and American Studies from the University of Virginia and an M.E.M from Yale University. Erin lives in Brooklyn and serves on the Board of EcoDistricts, Resource Media, the Steering Committee for EPIP-NYC, and as an advisor to ArtBridge, Charity Sub, Shared Squared, and the Social Innovators Collective.

Ben is a proud resident of New Haven, CT. The inspiration for SeeClickFix came from a desire to improve his own community with his neighbors and his government. At SeeClickFix he is CEO and a Co-Founder. Ben was named Huffington Post's 2010 Tech Gamechanger.

Jonathan Betz is the engineering manager for Crisis Response and Civic Innovation in Google's Technology for Social Impact team. These teams have launched products to help users affected by crises including Hurricane Sandy, the Boston Marathon bombings, and Typhoon Yolanda, as well as election information products to help voters in countries including India, Australia, Germany, and the United States.

Jonathan has previously worked in several areas of Google, most notably web search, where he developed and launched Google's first products for information extraction and retrieval over structured data. He has also held multiple engineering leadership roles in venture-backed startups in New York City.

Jonathan holds a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science, with University Honors, from Carnegie Mellon University.

Mike Bracken is the Executive Director of Digital in the Cabinet Office, which sits at the centre of Government and aims to make Government work better. He joined in July 2011, and spent the first several months in Government creating the Government Digital Service (GDS). The GDS includes GOV.UK, the digital transformation programme, the Identity Assurance programme, and the Data and Performance platform for public services.  In addition, the GDS has developed the Government digital strategy, and works as part of the Efficiency and Reform Group to reform public services.

Prior to joining the Cabinet Office, he worked as the Director of Digital Development at Guardian News & Media.

Catherine Bracy is a civic technologist and community organizer whose work focuses on the intersection of technology and political and economic inequality. She is the co-founder and Executive Director of the TechEquity Collaborative, an organization in Oakland, CA that seeks to build an inclusive and community-oriented tech ecosystem in California’s Bay Area.

She was previously Code for America’s Senior Director of Partnerships and Ecosystem where she grew Code for America’s Brigade program into a network of over 50,000 civic tech volunteers in 80+ cities across the US. She also founded Code for All, the global network of Code-for organizations with partners on six continents. Catherine built Code for America’s civic engagement focus area, creating a framework and best practices for local governments to increase public participation which has been adopted in cities across the US.

During the 2012 election cycle she was Director of Obama for America's Technology Field Office in San Francisco, the first of its kind in American political history. She was responsible for organizing technologists to volunteer their skills for the campaign’s technology and digital efforts. Prior to joining the Obama campaign, she ran the Knight Foundation’s 2011 News Challenge and before that was the administrative director at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society. She is on the board of directors at the Citizen Engagement Lab and the Public Laboratory.

Rhett Bradbury is a freelance graphic designer with a digital focus currently working as a front-end freelance designer for Verbal+Visual Interactive in NYC. Recently Rhett has worked as a freelance designer on the creative services team in The Wall Street Journal's sales and marketing department. Rhett graduated from the masters program at Pratt Institute with a MS in Communications Design in the spring of 2013. In his spare time, Rhett enjoys developing personal projects with focuses in civic engagement and Stanley Kubrick movies

Clara is the co-founder and CEO of Tumml, an urban ventures accelerator. A nonprofit, Tumml’s mission is to empower entrepreneurs to solve urban problems. Clara is responsible for Tumml’s partnership development, marketing, and fundraising.

In January 2014, Forbes listed her as one of its “30 Under 30” for Social Entrepreneurship. Clara has also been named a “Female Founder to Watch” by Women 2.0. Clara’s work energizing urban impact entrepreneurship has been featured in several publications, including Forbes, VentureBeat, Entrepreneur Magazine, and Silicon Valley Business Journal, among others.

Clara has a background in urban real estate and sustainability. She worked as an Associate with WestMill Capital, a real estate investment start-up focused on alternative financing and merchandising mixes authentic to the local area. Notably, she developed and edited content for two WestMill web platforms (Popularise.com and Fundrise.com) to interact with the community about local real estate projects. Prior to WestMill Capital, Clara worked at AECOM, GVA Advantis and Monument Realty. A LEED Accredited Professional, Clara earned her MBA from MIT Sloan and her BA from NYU.

Gale A. Brewer is the 27th Manhattan Borough President, taking office in January of 2014. Ms. Brewer previously served on the City Council for 12 years, where she was the founding chair of the Council’s Technology Committee in 2002, and successfully passed legislation requiring all City data be published online, among many other initiatives.

Her experience in City Government also includes four years as New York City Deputy Public Advocate; Director of Mayor Dinkins' Federal Office in New York City; Executive Director of the Mayor's Commission on the Status of Women; and Chief of Staff to West Side Council Member Ruth W. Messinger.

Immediately prior to her election to the City Council, Brewer served as Project Manager for the NYC Nonprofits Project at CUNY’s Graduate Center, and before that worked for the Telesis Corporation, a private firm that builds affordable housing in New York City.

Brewer has an MPA from Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, and did her undergraduate work at Columbia University and Bennington College.

Over the last decade, Jake has been generally obsessed with solving critical social problems at scale - though no problem more so than making citizens' voices have real impact in executive offices and the halls of government.

Today, Jake leads the External Affairs team at Change.org with the aim to remake the relationship between decision-makers (e.g. government or corporate leaders) and the 60 million Change.org users around the world impacted by their decisions. It's time for advocacy to allow citizens to work with decision makers, not just at them.

Jake also serves as co-founder and board chair of Define American with Jose Antonio Vargas, where their work has included reframing the narrative of the American immigration debate in media and culture - including the cover of TIME magazine and the recently released CNN Films documentary "Documented." Some of his other work has included leading the engagement division of the Sunlight Foundation, launching a first-of-its-kind White House initiative on Veteran employment with Code for America, helping create US Ignite - a national "gigabit" initiative to transform healthcare, education, transportation and more through next-generation Internet applications - and designing the national Civic Data Challenge, helping bring critical "civic health" data to civic decision-makers in ways they can actually use it.

Outside the office, Jake is a competitive triathlete, a widely published photographer, and serves in a variety of advisory and board roles with organizations building healthier democracy.

Rose is passionate about using the power of technology to create social change. She is the co-founder and CEO HandUp, a direct donation system for homeless people and neighbors in need. HandUp lets you donate to specific people, with 100% of donations go toward basics like food, technology, and housing. Previously, Rose served as COO at SuperBetter Labs and as a data manager for Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign. Rose is active in the community organizing groups like Science Hack Day and Food Not Bombs. She lives in San Francisco and loves street art.

Matthew Burton believes in the power of citizen-technologists to improve our democracy, but he prefers that they stop trying to "hack government" and instead refactor it as full-time civil servants. He recently finished his second stint of federal service in Washington, where he served as Acting CIO (among other roles) at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. While there, he led over 100 civil servant-technologists in the creation of highly acclaimed digital tools and web sites. He now lives in Brooklyn, where he advises various government agencies and other organizations. He writes at matthewburton.org.

Robyn Caplan is a Research Fellow at the GovLab, and a SC&I Fellow and PhD student at Rutgers University’s School of Communication and Information Studies. Her research focuses on information and technology policy, open data, medical informatics, and the social and ethical dimensions of legislating data. She earned her MA in Media, Culture, and Communication at Steinhardt’s School of Culture, Education, and Human Development, with a focus on Technology and Society where she worked with on determining jurisdictional issues emerging from remote data storage. She is the co-founder of AppAutopsy.com, an online application which uses data scraping and visualization to unveil the politics and values in digital applications.

Prior to accepting her fellowship at Rutgers, she worked as the Digital Editor for MAKERS.com, a PBS/AOL website on the history of the women’s movement in the United States. She has worked for numerous startups in multiple capacities, as a researcher, writer, and project manager. Robyn received her undergraduate degree from University of Toronto, and is originally from Ontario, Canada. She can be found on Twitter @RobynCaplan.

Michael is the Manager of Tech Policy and Programs at the international human rights organization Access. There he analyzes digital attacks on civil society organizations, supports the development of innovative secure communications technologies, and provides advice and resources to civil society organizations and human rights defenders to protect their privacy and secure their communications. Prior to Access, he explored the policy, international law, and regional implications of emerging information and communication technologies at the State Department and worked in the intersection of journalism and technology at a number of news organizations and nonprofits including the International Reporting Project. A native of the San Francisco Bay Area, Michael received his bachelor's degrees from the University of Chicago in Mathematics and East Asian Languages & Civilizations, studied in China at Capital Normal University, Zhejiang University, and the Hopkins-Nanjing Center for Chinese and American Studies, and completed his master's degree at Johns Hopkins University's School for Advanced International Studies in China Studies, International Economics, and International Law.

Beth S. Carpenter manages AARP's social marketing, reaching targeted audiences with the story of AARP's work helping 50+ Americans achieve their real possibilities. Since 2008, Beth has been an integral part of creating the legal and organizational framework for a social team that today reports over 100 million impressions in an average month. She has successfully led ambassador activation launches on social, and has made AARP's voice part of conversations ranging from Michael Jordan's 50th birthday to the Emmys. In 2013, her work was nominated for a Digiday "Best Facebook Marketing Campaign" award, a campaign that made its average viewer a third more likely to join AARP, according to Nielsen measurements.

Chris builds networks of advocacy leaders and develops campaigns around the causes they promote to generate support and move their desired change forward.

Chris joined Netcentric Campaigns in November 2011 and immediately oversaw the launch of the Moving Maryland Forward Network (MMFN), a project funded by the Robert W. Deutsch Foundation to support progressive change in the Old Line State. MMFN brings together advocates who work on a diverse array of issues in Maryland. Through collaboration and the use of online advocacy, these leaders generate grassroots support and advance their causes. The network has created strong, powerful connections among a growing group of Maryland’s most influential and effective advocates. MMFN campaigns have included successful efforts to promote marriage equality, increase the minimum wage and ban the death penalty, as well as pushes to address foreclosure reform and raise awareness of human trafficking.

In addition, Chris is currently charged with launching the new Halt the Harm advocacy network, which will connect and support advocates nationwide who are working to address the negative impacts of fracking. Leaders working in the field, as well as individuals who have been negatively impacted by fracking, will be able to share and develop needed resources to collectively enhance their efforts to address the dangers of fracking in their communities.

Chris long has been in a leader in the arena of online politics. In 1994, Chris helped Sen. Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.) become the first member of Congress to have a website. He then worked with the Democratic Technology and Communications Committee to bring the rest of the Senate Democratic Caucus online. In 2000, Chris left Capitol Hill to run his own successful Internet consulting business that helped Democratic candidates and officeholders to utilize the Internet. He then spent seven years as the Director of New Media Services at the political technology firm NGP VAN.

Chris’ work has been honored with industry awards such as Pollie, Golden Dot, and Reed. Website Magazine named Chris as one of “The 100 Most Influential People on The World Wide Web” in 1996, and Politics Online named him as one of “The 25 Who Are Changing The World of Internet and Politics” in 2000. He is the author of the book The Hill on the Net: Congress Enters the Information Age.

A Virginian by birth and a Californian by upbringing (Navy Dad), Chris graduated from the University of California at Santa Barbara in 1987 with a degree in political science. He enjoys researching his family tree, running, hiking, brewing and drinking beer, and spending time with his wife and three children (not necessarily in that order).

Andrea Chalupa is a journalist, author, and community organizer. Her work has appeared in TIME, The Daily Beast, and The Atlantic. Her first screenplay Man Made—the story of George Orwell struggling to publish Animal Farm, the book that made him famous—was a Sundance finalist optioned to Lars von Trier’s Academy Award-winning Zentropa Productions. In January 2014, when the mainstream media was more concerned with Justin Bieber’s arrest in Miami than covering police violence against protesters in Ukraine, Andrea launched #DigitalMaidan, a social media movement that made Ukraine trend globally within minutes and for the very first time; the movement grew into an international crowdsourcing network that fact-checks and exposes Kremlin propaganda. An expert on social media, civic activism, Ukraine and Russia, Andrea has spoken in the Council of Europe, the National Press Club in Washington, DC, and leading universities in the US and Canada. She is the author of Orwell and The Refugees: The Untold Story of Animal Farm.

Soraya Chemaly is a feminist media critic and activist whose work focuses on the role of gender in politics, religion and popular culture. Her writing appears in Salon, The Huffington Post, The Guardian, Ms. Magazine and CNN, as well as feminist-focused RHRealityCheck, Fem2.0, Role Reboot and The Feminist Wire. Ms. Chemaly is a frequent radio, television and online commentator and speaks regularly on the topic of sexualized violence and free speech. Last year, she was one of the primary organizers of a successful social media campaign demanding that Facebook recognize misogynistic content as hate speech. Ms. Chemaly, who sits on the board of the Women's Media Center, was the recipient of the 2013 Secular Woman Activist of the Year Award, as well as this year’s Donna Allen Award for Feminist Advocacy. She returned to feminist activism after a professional career in strategic planning in the media and technology fields. You can find her at @schemaly on twitter and on tumblr, where she shares ideas and her work.

Boaz Chen is the Director of DemOS, an innovative operating system for democratic communities of any size, that integrate public engagement as part of the board decision-making process. Using DemOS every community can gradually open its process, at its own pace, building trust while balancing between the desire to share and the need to operate efficiently.

Boaz was a consultant for the Israeli Government Internet Committee (1998), acted as a member of the e- government initiative board, and personally led its biggest projects.

He co-founder and managed Netwise and grew it to be the largest Internet and mobile systems integrator in Israel. In addition to his role as CEO, he continued to serve as strategic consultant, leading innovative award-wining projects for his clients. He recently sold the company to focus on DemOs. Boaz was lecturer on the MBA program at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, served on boards and advisory committees for several start-ups and is an executive in the Israeli chapter of YPO.

Tiffiniy Cheng is a co-founder and co-director of Fight for the Future. Cheng has spent eleven years building activism campaigns, organizations, and software applications for social change. During that time, she co-led Downhill Battle, a first-of-its-kind viral campaign operation; built Open Congress, the most popular government transparency site; and nearly moved legislation on breaking up too-big-to-fail -- her work is on art, culture and structural power issues. Fight for the Future is known for its visionary and massive viral organizing campaigns that changed Internet history both nationally and globally. Faced with the passage of Stop Online Piracy Act/SOPA and the Protect-IP Act/PIPA, Fight for the Future organized the largest and most visible online protest in history.

Denise Cheng lives at the intersection of civics, media, and work. She specializes in designing frameworks for meaningful participation, whether in media creation or workforce development. Denise received her masters in Comparative Media Studies from MIT, where she was funded by the Knight Foundation as part of the Media Lab’s Center for Civic Media. In past lives, she was a Tow-Knight entrepreneurial journalism fellow with CUNY J-School, the citizen journalism coordinator for The Rapidian, a hyperlocals community wrangler, strategist for involving marginalized groups in community media, and Peace Corps volunteer. She has appeared on NPR, Harvard Business Review, and The New York Times, and she has spoken at numerous conferences in both community-focused journalism and the future of work.

Brian is the co-founder and CEO at Airbnb. He drives the company's vision, strategy and growth as it provides interesting and unique ways for people to travel and changes the lives of its community. Under Brian's leadership, Airbnb stands at the forefront of the sharing economy, and has expanded to over 600,000 listings in 192 countries. Brian met co-founder Joe Gebbia at the Rhode Island School of Design where he received a Bachelor of Fine Arts in industrial design.

Audrey Choi is CEO of the Morgan Stanley Institute for Sustainable Investing and Head of the Global Sustainable Finance Group. In these roles, she oversees the Firm’s efforts to promote economic opportunity, community development, and global sustainability through the capital markets. In a career spanning the public, private and non-profit sectors, Ms. Choi has become a thought leader on how finance can be harnessed to address public policy challenges. She served in the Clinton Administration in senior policy positions, including as Chief of Staff of the Council of Economic Advisers and Domestic Policy Advisor to the Vice President. Previously, Ms. Choi was a foreign correspondent and bureau chief at the Wall Street Journal, covering German reunification and a wide range of industry beats. She serves on President Obama’s Community Development Advisory Board and the boards of several national non-profits focused on education, conservation, and impact investing.

Mishi Choudhary is the Executive Director of Software Freedom Law Center, India, a legal services organization based out of New Delhi that brings together lawyers, policy analysts, technologists, and students to protect freedom in the digital world. SFLC.IN promotes innovation and open access to knowledge by helping developers make great Free and Open Source Software, protect privacy and civil liberties for citizens in the digital world, educates and helps policy makers reach informed decisions on the use and adoption of technology. She is also the Legal Director Software Freedom Law Center, New York that provides pro-bono legal services to developers of Free, Libre, and Open Source Software. Mishi has a Masters degree in Law from Columbia University in the City of New York and a Bachelors in Law and Political Science from the University of Delhi.

Josh Cohen is a software professional, gay activist and the Founder and Chairman of the Open Supporter Data Interface Project (OSDI). Josh was involved for 20 years in the corporate software industry with a concentration in Open Standards Wonkery. Josh has lead or participated in standards efforts for Microsoft , Netscape, and UPS, among others. He first cut his teeth in the IETF Working Group for HTTP. Later he was the Vice Chairman of the Board for DMTF.org and has participated in ISO in efforts including SOAP (At least is wasn't CORBA), systems management, and Cloud Standards.

In 2012 Josh served as the Director of Technology for Washington United for Marriage, the 2012 campaign for Marriage Equality in Washington State. Since then he has provided technical consulting to a number of campaigns.

The OSDI effort seeks to define common API and data structures for interoperability among products in the progressive cause-based, campaign and non-profit marketplace. The existence of a common API will reduce customer costs related to moving data between different systems, lower integration costs and enhance the ability of innovators to create products for the marketplace.

Susan Crawford is the John A. Reilly Visiting Professor in Intellectual Property at the Harvard Law School (2014). She is a professor at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law, a fellow at the Roosevelt Institute, and a co-director of the Berkman Center. She is the author of Captive Audience: The Telecom Industry and Monopoly Power in the New Gilded Age, and a contributor to Bloomberg View and Wired. She served as Special Assistant to the President for Science, Technology, and Innovation Policy (2009) and co-led the FCC transition team between the Bush and Obama administrations. She also served as a member of Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s Advisory Council on Technology and Innovation.

Ms. Crawford was formerly a (Visiting) Stanton Professor of the First Amendment at Harvard’s Kennedy School, a Visiting Professor at Harvard Law School, and a Professor at the University of Michigan Law School (2008-2010). As an academic, she teaches Internet law and communications law. She was a member of the board of directors of ICANN from 2005-2008 and is the founder of OneWebDay, a global Earth Day for the internet that takes place each Sept. 22. One of Fast Company’s Most Influential Women in Technology (2009); IP3 Awardee (2010); one of Prospect Magazine’s Top Ten Brains of the Digital Future (2011); and one of TIME Magazine’s Tech 40: The Most Influential Minds in Tech (2013).

Ms. Crawford received her B.A. and J.D. from Yale University. She served as a clerk for Judge Raymond J. Dearie of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of New York, and was a partner at Wilmer, Cutler & Pickering (now WilmerHale) (Washington, D.C.) until the end of 2002, when she left that firm to enter the legal academy. Susan, a violist, lives in New York City.

Catherine D’Ignazio is the person behind that really cute baby. She is a Research Assistant at the MIT Center for Civic Media and Assistant Professor of Civic Media & Data Visualization at Emerson College. Her background is in visual art, writing software code, and rolling around in public spaces.

Her current research focuses on designing more equitable, open and playful news discovery systems and on launching the Open Water Initiative with Public Lab. Open Water seeks to create low-cost, participatory hardware and software tools to make water quality monitoring more accessible and legible to local communities.

Antony Declercq is a graduate of New York University’s College of Arts and Sciences and holds B.A.s in anthropology and political science. A Belgian citizen, he lived in China for 15 years before moving to New York City, and speaks fluent English, Chinese, and Dutch.

Antony is currently a Research Fellow with the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) as well as with The Governance Lab at NYU (The GovLab), where his research focuses on Internet governance, technology policy, and governance innovation.

Chuck DeFeo is a digital pioneer who is continually recognized for innovative digital grassroots and issue advocacy campaigns. He designed the first digital campaign for an incumbent President of the United States, oversaw data and technology projects for the U.S. Attorney General and the Department of Justice in 2001, built the largest conservative online community of its time, and organized an international Twitter campaign that helped free a political prisoner in Iran.

Today, as Deputy Chief of Staff and Chief Digital Officer for the Republican National Committee (RNC) he is building the new Digital and Data division and leading the effort to move the RNC to a data-centered organization and transform the Party’s digital marketing efforts.

Prior to the RNC he was a Senior Vice President for Edelman, where he led the Washington, D.C. office’s digital issues management and public affairs practice.

DeFeo was first nationally recognized for writing the strategic plan and managing the digital efforts for President George W. Bush’s re-election campaign. The tactics pioneered by that campaign have become standard in candidate digital efforts. Innovations included the first online activist “dashboard,” featuring volunteer managed door-knocking efforts, call-from-home, online voter registration & early vote tools, voting location look-up with map and driving directions, an integrated offline and online voter contact management system, and several word-of-mouth marketing tools.

While leading the RNC’s digital efforts during the historic Republican gains of the 2002 election, he executed the first online advertising buy that used voter and consumer data to target online advertising to voters.

After the 2004 election, he became Vice President and General Manager for Townhall.com and the Salem Communications network of news and opinion websites. The substantial profit growth under his leadership enabled the launch of Townhall Magazine in which DeFeo was the co-Publisher and Editor-in-Chief.

He later went on to build the digital division for the the American Center for Law and Justice (ACLJ), a free speech and religious liberty organization. The team and technical infrastructure DeFeo put in place, serves content and calls to action in multiple languages across seven Websites and numerous social media platforms around the globe. Innovations include the first one-click donation system by a not-for-profit, and was the first non-profit to integrate Facebook’s open-graph across multiple digital applications. It is at the ACLJ that he built the Tweet for Youcef campaign – part of the international effort that lead to the freeing of a pastor illegally imprisoned in Iran. The effort enabled over 14 million Twitter accounts across the globe to be reached daily with the same message in multiple languages.

DeFeo spent much of his career as a technology and legislative aide to Senator and Attorney General John Ashcroft. In 2001 and 2002 he managed priority information technology (IT) projects for the Attorney General, assisted in the realignment of IT expenditures towards Administration goals and the global war on terror, and helped set up the first Chief Information Officer (CIO)’s division for main Justice.

Other notable accomplishments include serving as a senior digital consultant to the McCain for President 2000 campaign, acting in a digital leadership role for two Republican National Conventions, and directing digital for the 2004 Presidential Inaugural Committee.

Colin Delany is a 17-year veteran of online politics, a digital strategy consultant and the founder and editor of Epolitics.com, a website that focuses on the tools and tactics of Internet politics and online political advocacy. He is the author of several ebooks, including the digital campaigning guide "How to Use the Internet to Win in 2014" and "Learning from Obama," the definitive overview of the groundbreaking 2008 online campaign for president. As a consultant, Delany works with advocacy organizations and political groups around the world to help them leverage digital tools to achieve their communications, activism, advocacy and electoral goals.

Delany is also a sought-after trainer and public speaker on topics related to digital advocacy and internet politics, and he has given presentations at conferences ranging from South by Southwest Interactive to CampaignTech to Search Engine Strategies. A former staffer in the Texas Legislature (where politics is considered a contact sport), Delany co-founded a targeted search engine for politics and policy during the original dot-com boom. Besides Epolitics.com, he also writes the "Technology Bytes" column for Campaigns & Elections magazine and is a Contributing Editor for the Digital Politics Radio show.

Charlie DeTar is a web developer and activist working on tools for democratic engagement. He earned his PhD from the MIT Media Lab in 2013 with work on InterTwinkles, a collection of tools to support consensus-based group decision making. He is also co-founder of Between the Bars, a blogging platform for people in prison. Charlie is currently working with the Unhangout project at MIT, which is developing a platform for online unconferences.

Shauna Dillavou is the executive director and co-founder of CommunityRED, whose mission is to improve the digital security of journalists and activists in conflict zones. Shauna previously worked as a global security analyst, focusing on the intersections of social media, politics, and transnational crime in Mexico and Latin America. Her work in security began with a National Security Education Program Boren Fellowship to research political tolerance in Beijing. Shauna has presented her work on Mexican drug cartels and their use of social media at SXSW and the Gatlinburg Law Enforcement Conference. Shauna speaks Spanish and Mandarin.

A co-founder of Public Laboratory for Open Technology and Science (publiclab.org), Shannon is based in New Orleans as President of the organization. Public Lab is a recipient of an Honorable Mention in the 2013 Buckminster Fuller Institute Challenge, a runner-up for the Ars Electronica Digital Communities prize and a two time Knight Foundation, Knight New Challenge winner.

With a background in community organizing, environmental education and anthropology, Shannon held positions with Louisiana State University as a Community Researcher and Ethnographer on a study about the social impacts of the BP oil spill in Louisiana and was Oil Spill Response Director at the Louisiana Bucket Brigade, conducting the first on-the-ground health and economic impact study in Louisiana post-spill. Shannon is specifically interested in infusing traditional organizing methods of the environmental sector with new media technologies and tools.

Shannon has an MS in Anthropology and Nonprofit Management and has worked with nonprofits for over fourteen years. She is a 2013 Environmental Leadership Program Fellow and current Senior Fellow, a 2012 Loyola University Institute for Environmental Communications Fellow, on the advisory board of Global Community Monitor, a current member of the Public Participation in Scientific Research web and communications steering committee, a member of the Louisiana Bar Association technology committee and a consultant for the New Orleans Food and Farm Network.

James Dunbar is a founder of WorkHands-the professional network for workers in the skilled trades. 10,000 carpenters, welders, mechanics and more have created profiles, shared projects, and applied for jobs on WorkHands since the site launched in September of 2013.

John Paul Farmer serves as Director of Microsoft’s Technology & Civic Innovation group based in New York City. Previously, John was the Senior Advisor for Innovation in the White House Office of Science & Technology Policy, where he co-founded and led the Presidential Innovation Fellows program, which brings top innovators and entrepreneurs from the private sector for tours of duty in government, in order to make game-changing progress on projects of national importance. He also served in the Administration as Senior Advisor for Healthcare, working on healthcare information technology such as Blue Button, delivery system reform and economic analyses. Previously, John worked in the investment industry for Credit Suisse and Lehman Brothers. He played professional baseball as a shortstop in the Los Angeles Dodgers and Atlanta Braves minor league systems. John holds an MBA with honors from the Graduate School of Business at Columbia University and a BA with honors from Harvard University.

Allison Fine is among the nation’s pre-eminent thinkers and strategists on networked leadership. Over the past ten years, she has written three books, keynoted conferences around the world, and coached hundreds of organizations. Her particular expertise is in developing efforts that combine the power of personal relationships with the scale of social media to enable efforts to grow exponentially. She is the author of Matterness: Fearless Leadership for a Social World, the award-winning Momentum: Igniting Social Change in the Connected Age, and co-author of the bestselling The Networked Nonprofit. She writes an advice column for the Chronicle of Philanthropy and serves on the boards of the Sunlight Foundation, NARAL, and Civic Hall.

Brian Forde has spent more than a decade at the nexus of technology, entrepreneurship, and public policy. He is currently the Director of Digital Currency at the MIT Media Lab where he leads efforts to mainstream digital currencies like Bitcoin through research, and incubation of high-impact applications of the emerging technology. Most recently he was the Senior Advisor for Mobile and Data Innovation at the White House where he spearheaded efforts to leverage emerging technologies to address the President’s most critical national priorities. Prior to his work at the White House, Brian founded one of the largest phone companies in Nicaragua after serving as a business and technology volunteer in the Peace Corps. In recognition of his work, Brian was named a Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum.

Nathan Freitas leads a team of open-source mobile security hackers-for-good at the Guardian Project. He is the lead developer of Orbot: Tor for Android, which has been downloaded around the world over two million times, and is very proud the app appeared on leaked NSA slides with the text "easy to use!" next to it.

Sue Gardner is the Executive Director of the Wikimedia Foundation, the non-profit organization behind Wikipedia – the world's largest and most popular encyclopedia, which is free to use and free of advertising. Wikipedia contains more than 20 million volunteer-authored articles in over 280 languages, and is visited by more than 476 million people every month, making it the number five most-popular website in the world.

Gardner, a seasoned journalist, was formerly head of CBC.ca, the website for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, one of Canada's most prominent and best-loved cultural institutions. Under her leadership, CBC.ca won many international awards for excellence, and grew to become Canada's most popular news site. Gardner started her career in 1990 as a producer with CBC's "As It Happens," an internationally-recognized groundbreaking news and current events radio program. She has worked in radio, television, newspapers, magazines and online.

Lea is the Director of Network Coordination for the Moving Maryland Forward Network. A former deputy director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Maryland and program director for the Association of Baltimore Area Grantmakers, in addition Gilmore has testified before local, state and federal commissions on issues ranging from immigration laws to the civil rights and liberties of women of color. Appointed by the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, she served for several years as a member of the Maryland Advisory Board to the United States Commission on Civil Rights.

Lea has been recognized as one of 25 women shaping the world by ESSENCE Magazine, one the Top 100 Women by The Daily Record for 2014, and 2013 Advocate of the Year by the Maryland Consumer Rights Coalition.

Gina Glantz is the founder of genderavenger.com Her career in politics and organizing has been distinguished by innovative use of technology. In 1974, Ms. Glantz ran the first congressional campaign to use computer technology in canvassing voters. She went on to manage state and national campaigns. In 1985, Ms. Glantz founded Martin & Glantz, a firm specializing in grassroots organizing and strategic communications. In 1989, the firm organized the largest Supreme Court amicus brief to date signed by governors and state legislators. In 1999, the Bill Bradley for President campaign, which she managed, successfully petitioned the FEC to allow Internet credit card matching contributions. Senator Bradley became the first candidate to raise a million dollars over the web. While serving as Senior Advisor to the President of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) from 2001 to 2009, Ms Glantz created sinceslicedbread.com, an online contest of ideas that attracted participation from every congressional district in the country.

Ms. Glantz was a Fall, 2009 Institute of Politics Fellow and a Shorenstein Center Visiting Adjunct Lecturer in 2011 and 2012. In 1981 she participated in the HKS program for Senior Executives in State and Local Government. Ms. Glantz graduated from the University of California at Berkeley in 1965. She serves on the boards of Oxfam-America and DEMOS, a progressive think tank, and was Chair of Planned Parenthood Action Fund from 2010-2013.

Joe founded FWD.us to organize and engage the tech community on issues of vital importance to America's global competitiveness. Previously, he founded Causes and co-founded NationBuilder to realize his belief that social networks enable community organizing at a previously unknown scale. These two successful companies combine the best of traditional organizing with new technologies, making the tools of democracy more widely available and empowering people to become leaders.

Joe started in local politics by winning election to his local school board while he was still in high school. He went on to work on several other political campaigns at the local, state and national level, including John Kerry's 2004 presidential campaign. He is a Board Member of the Salesforce Foundation.

Adam Greenfield is Senior Urban Fellow at LSE Cities, founder and managing director of the New York-based design practice Urbanscale, and author, most recently, of "Against the smart city" (2013).

Hailing from the suburbs of Chicago and now based in Melbourne, Australia, Eyal is a former college campus activist turned Fortune 500 company management consultant, and now works as an ‘activist in a suit.’ He is the CEO of OurSay, which helps leaders level with their communities using easy-to-use technologies which meet people where they are. OurSay has partnered with Google, Youtube, ABC, SkyNews, Fairfax and Crikey and worked with Prime Ministers, State Premiers and Local Government to ensure people's questions are answered and profiled at large in Australia, India, Indonesia and Malaysia.

Eyal is an Unreasonable Institute Fellow and 2009 Centre for Sustainability Leadership Fellow. OurSay has received a Crikey Media Innovation Award in 2011 and the International Association of Public Participation Core Values Award in 2013.

Marci Harris is co-founder and CEO of POPVOX, the award-winning online advocacy platform that meshes real-time legislative data with users’ personal stories and sentiment in a format optimized for Congress.

She jokes that her "first startup was a town." In 2004, an F4 tornado struck her town of Jackson, Tennessee, the night before an election for which she was running the campaign of the incumbent mayor. He directed her to "find out what people need and get it," which led to a position as Tornado Recovery Coordinator for the long process that followed.

This taste of public service led her to law school and eventually to the LL.M. program at American University, where she specialized in administrative law, with internships for the U.S. Attorney in Memphis, Chief Judge of the West TN U.S. District Court, and the House Ways and Means Committee.

In 2007, she became Tax, Trade, and Health Counsel to Pete Stark and managed Medicare program integrity and transparency issues for the Ways and Means Health Subcommittee.

She left the Hill in February 2010 to co-found POPVOX, which won the SxSW BizSpark Accelerator startup competition in 2011 and was named one of seven Top Open Government Websites by Read Write Web. Marci serves on the board of LaunchTN, public-private partnership focused on supporting the development of entrepreneurship and high-growth companies in Tennessee. She is also a mentor at the Code for America Accelerator in San Francisco.

David brings an international perspective and a deep passion for social justice to his roles as IFTF’s social change agent and member of the Ten-Year Forecast and Governance Futures Lab core teams. As social change agent, he works to bring a critical social activist perspective to IFTF’s work. He is responsible for strategically identifying and developing collaborations that contribute to IFTF research, with a special focus on social action organizations and initiatives. He also contributes regularly to the Technology Horizons, Health Horizons, and Global Food Outlook programs. His research across programs focuses on poverty and inequality, development, geopolitics, political economy, social movements, and new media technology.

A cross-disciplinary mediamaker, David founded the Global Lives Project, a growing video library of life experience; wrote and directed newscasts for CurrentTV; and penned articles and shot photos for the BBC, the Guardian, Adbusters, Focus on the Global South, AlterNet, and Grist. He has spoken publicly about his work to audiences at the Smithsonian, UC Berkeley, Harvard, Stanford, United Nations University, Apple, Google, Adobe, and numerous other venues around the world. He speaks English, Portuguese, Spanish, and French. David joined IFTF in 2008 and holds a BA in the political economy of development and environment, with a minor in forest science, from UC Berkeley and an MS in sociology from the University of São Paulo.

Hillary Hartley is co-founder and lead creative at 18F, a digital services agency inside the General Services Administration. She came to the GSA as a Presidential Innovation Fellow in 2013, where she worked on the development of MyUSA.gov. Hillary has been working to make government more accessible and available online for nearly two decades, starting as a web designer for Arkansas.gov in 1997. As Director of Integrated Marketing for eGovernment provider NIC, Hillary helped NIC's 30 state government partners embrace new technology and concepts for a 21st century government. She speaks at events across the country, educating and evangelizing “government 2.0” and customer service/community engagement best practices for government.

Hillary spends much of her free time on community-based movements such as BarCamp and Coworking, and has participated in or helped organize several government-focused unconferences: eDemocracyCamp, TranparencyCamp, Gov2.0Camp, CityCamp, etc. In 2008, after the passage of California’s Prop 8, she co-founded EqualityCamp – a pilot event bringing geeks who know the lessons of the web together with activists for marriage equality and LGBT equal rights. Her latest endeavor is Yes and Yes Yes (YxYY) – a summertime "geek retreat" in Palm Springs. The second annual event sold out in 48 hours and will bring more than 400 thinkers, futurists, nerds, and creatives together at the Ace Hotel for the ultimate experiment in planned serendipity.

Adam Harvey is an artist, technologist, and designer focused on privacy issues. His countersurveillance art projects have earned recognition in the New York Times, Washington Post, Wired, BBC, as well as a classified intelligence document. He is the recipient of a Core77 design award, a Rhizome art commission, and was recently nominated as a Future Great by Art Review magazine.

Adam lives and works in Brooklyn, NY where he runs the Privacy Gift Shop, an online marketplace for countersurveillance art and privacy accessories.

Amanda Hess is a staff writer at Slate covering women, culture, and technology. Her work has also appeared in ESPN The Magazine, Elle, T: The New York Times Style Magazine, the Los Angeles Times, WIRED, Tomorrow, the Washington City Paper, and the Village Voice. Her January Pacific Standard cover story, "Why Women Aren't Welcome on the Internet," won the Sidney Award for socially conscious journalism. She begrudgingly resides in Brooklyn.

For the last 15 years, "noneck" has explored the creative spaces and innovative technologies that link us together. His work has focused on entrepreneurial ideas that have changed the world. Currently, he is the co-founder and Executive Director of BetaNYC, the nation's largest open government and civic technology meetup.

Noel Hidalgo has a storied past in changing the world. In 2013, he joined the board of StreetsPAC, a political action committed to improving the safety, mobility and livability of one of New York City's greatest assets: its streets. He was a charter member of the the New York City Transparency Working Group (nycTWG), a group of NYC civic groups who advocate for greater transparency in city government. In 2012, nycTWG lobbied for the passing of NYC Local Law 11 of 2012, America's premier municipal Open Data law. In 2009, he forged the NYC cycling community in to using #BikeNYC, a peer-to-peer tool to organize and communicate. In 2005, he co-founded one of the first Drupal User Groups, the NYC's Drupal user group and hosted DrupalCamp.

He has journeyed around the world documenting communities that live on the Internet and documented the process of becoming a New York City Yellow Cab driver. In 2009, he traveled to Iraq to teach Government ministers about the power of open government. In 2008, he was awarded membership to Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce. At 18, he was awarded the Boy Scouts of America's Rank of Eagle Scout.

From 2009 till 2011, Noel served the New York State Senate as the Director of Technology Innovation where his team launched NYSenate.gov, one USA's premier state legislative portal. His team organized the first unconference inside a State house, CapitolCamp. From June 2011 till October 2012, he worked at the World Economic Forum building internal technology and launched the Global Shapers Community Website. From November 2012 till December 2013, he worked for Code for America's Brigade Program as NYC's program manager.

Ilyse Hogue has been the president of NARAL Pro-Choice America since January 2013.

She is an expert in both electoral and advocacy campaigns who has worked with a variety of nonprofit organizations, including Friends of Democracy, Media Matters for America and MoveOn.org. She has worked to organize constituencies in service of social-justice outcomes from environmental sustainability to human rights to media reform and representation. In her six years at MoveOn.org, Ilyse served as the director of communications and political advocacy, using cutting-edge online engagement strategies to mobilize around issues such as health care and financial reform, and to engage millions of Americans in grassroots lobbying and participation in federal elections. During Ilyse's time at MoveOn the organization grew by more than 2 million members. 

Ilyse is a frequent guest on network and cable news shows as an expert on the political and policy landscape for reproductive freedom. She writes regular commentary for CNN.com and The Nation, and has had dozens of opinion pieces published in local and national outlets.

She is the co-founder of the Center for Story-Based Strategy, which works to amplify the impact of grassroots organizing with new strategy and training resources, values-based communications and narrative campaigning. Ilyse serves on the board of Bend the Arc: A Jewish Partnership for Justice and on the editorial board for The Nation magazine, the country’s oldest progressive news publication. Ilyse holds a Master of Science in resource ecology management from the University of Michigan, where she studied the impact of resource constraints on politics and culture. Her Bachelor of Arts is from Vassar College.

David S. Isenberg spent 12 years at AT&T Bell Labs until his 1997 essay, "The Rise of the Stupid Network," was received with acclaim everywhere in the global telecommunications community with one exception–at AT&T itself! So Isenberg left AT&T in 1998 to found isen.com, LLC (an independent telecom analysis firm based in Cos Cob, Connecticut), to publish isen.blog, and to produce conferences such as F2C: Freedom To Connect.

Nigel Jacob is the co-founder the Office of New Urban Mechanics, a civic innovation incubator and R&D Lab within Boston’s City Hall. Nigel works to develop new models of innovation for cities in the 21st century. Prior to joining the City of Boston in 2006, Nigel worked for and launched a series of technology start-ups in the Boston area.

Nigel is also the Urban Technologist in Residence at Living Cities, a philanthropic collaboration of 22 of the world’s largest foundations and financial institutions, and is a board member at Code For America.

Nigel has received a number of awards for his ground breaking work in Boston, including being named a Public Official of the year in 2011 by Governing Magazine and the Tribeca Disruptive Innovation award for 2012.

New York City Council Member Ben Kallos was praised by the New York Times for his “fresh ideas” and elected in 2013 to represent the Upper East Side, Midtown East, Roosevelt Island and East Harlem along with all 8.4 million New Yorkers in the New York City Council. As an attorney and free and open source software developer he serves as Chair of the Governmental Operations Committee where he has sought to root out patronage, eliminate billions in waste, and to use technology to improve access to government. He has become a leading advocate for education, affordable housing, public health, sustainable development and transportation as well as Universal Broadband, Open Data, and Digital Democracy. He is also the founding co-chair of the Free Law Founders, a national coalition of leaders in and around government to set the law and legislative process free. His office is open and transparent, with constituents invited to decide on how to spend one million dollars on local projects in the district as well as to join him in a conversation at First Fridays each month.

Allyson has been named one of "Top Tech Titans" by the Washingtonian, one of the Most Influential Women in Tech by Fast Company, and one of the top 30 Women Entrepreneurs to Follow on Twitter by Forbes for her leadership role in technology and social media. Allyson is the co-author of the nonprofit best selling book Social Change Anytime Everywhere that serves as a nonprofit practitioners guide to spark advocacy, raise money, and build community across online channels.

Allyson has spearheaded web campaigns for organizations ranging from Planned Parenthood Action Fund to Union of Concerned Scientists. Her campaigns have been recognized with several prestigious web awards and featured on several top media networks ranging from CNN to NPR and the Daily Show with Jon Stewart. She has also been a featured speaker on web design, online marketing and social media trends at national conferences such as SXSW, Personal Democracy Forum, and the American Marketing Association and on news networks such as CNN and MSNBC.

In 2007 Allyson founded Women Who Tech: A Telesummit for Women in Technology working in the non-profit and political campaign world featuring Arianna Huffington of HuffingtonPost.com and Joan Blades of Moveon.org. As the founder of Women Who Tech she champions women who are inspiring change and transforming technology. She also serves as an expert for news reporters who are writing about women in technology.

Allyson is also the co-founder of the Nonprofit 2.0 Unconference and sits on several Advisory Boards including the Anita Borg Institute, the New Organizing Institute, the Green It Consortium and the Planning Committee for NTEN's NTC conference. She is the Blogger-In-Chief for one of the top-ranked nonprofit communications blog Care2's Frogloop.

Dave Karpf is an Assistant Professor in the George Washington University School of Media and Public Affairs. He teaches and conducts research on the Internet and political advocacy organizations. He is the award-winning author of The MoveOn Effect: The Unexpected Transformation of American Political Advocacy and is currently working on a book about analytics and activism. Dave blogs regularly at ShoutingLoudly.com and tweets as @davekarpf.

John Keefe is the Senior Editor on WNYC's Data News Team, which helps infuse the public radio station's journalism with data reporting, visualizations, crowdsourcing and sensor projects. Keefe was WNYC's news director for nine years, has been an adjunct instructor at several NYC colleges and universities, and is an adviser to CensusReporter.org. He tweets at @jkeefe and blogs at johnkeefe.net. The team blog is datanews.wnyc.org.

Sina is an entrepreneur who's been working on activism around copyright and privacy issues for the last year and a half. He's founder of Taskforce.is, a group of volunteer developers, designers and technologists, and has worked on activism campaigns for Stop Watching Us, The Day We Fight Back, and Restore the Fourth. He's currently working with the EFF on a new set of activism tools including contact-congress, an open toolset for emailing legislators.

Ben Knight is a co-founder of Loomio, an online tool for collaborative decision-making built by a team of open-source developers, facilitators and activists in New Zealand. Ben has an academic background in the evolution of collective intelligence, a practical background in grassroots community organising, and a passion for the potential of technology to spur positive social change. He was closely involved with the Occupy movement in 2011, which exposed him to the massively empowering results of collective decision-making on a large scale, and the possibility that online tools could make participatory democracy a part of everyday life.

Kate Krontiris is a social scientist, strategist, and facilitator working to transform civic life in America. In pursuit of a society where more people assert greater ownership over the decisions that govern their lives, she uses ethnographic tools to design products, policies, and services that enable a more democratic future. As a consulting user researcher for the United States Digital Service, Kate is currently exploring improvements to the experience of applying for an immigrant visa to the United States. She is has just completed an embedded ethnographic investigation of what motivates everyday Americans to take civic actions, and what holds them back, in collaboration with Google. For the 2014-2015 academic year, she holds a fellowship at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society, at Harvard University.

Rachel LaBruyere is the Deputy Director of Digital Strategies at the AFL-CIO. She started her career in digital organizing with the Center for Community Change when - as the resident young person - she was told to "go figure out that social media stuff". After falling in love with the immigrant rights movement, and digital tools that put power directly in the hands of the community, she worked with the Reform Immigration for America campaign and then Mobile Commons. At Change.org she stopped dozens of deportations, helped win healthcare for wildland firefighters, took on companies like Verizon and Sprint's policies towards domestic violence survivors and learned both the power (and the limitations) of digital-driven campaigning. She has trained with Organizing 2.0, the New Organizing Institute, Netroots Nation and Democracy for America. She grew up in the mountains of North Carolina (go Heels!) and is a proud Harry Potter nerd. You might also know her as @raylab and she lives in DC with her partner and her adorable rescue dog, Tonks.

Emily is a Director of Engineering at Causes, where she focuses on data and metrics infrastructure, experimentation, and coordination between the engineering and product teams. Previously, Emily was the lead engineer at Votizen, a startup close to her heart for it's vision of "fix democracy" and work to help voters leverage their personal networks to elect candidates they believe in. Prior to Votizen, Emily was an engineer at RapLeaf.

Julie is the co-founder and President of Tumml, an urban ventures accelerator. A nonprofit, Tumml’s mission is to empower entrepreneurs to solve urban problems. Julie is responsible for Tumml’s day-to-day operations, programming, and financial planning.

Tumml was named “The Next Urban Innovation” by Dr. Michael Porter’s Initiative for a Competitive Inner City, and Julie has spoken about her work in energizing urban impact entrepreneurship at conferences around the country. Julie and the Tumml cohort companies have been featured in several publications, including Forbes, CSpan, VentureBeat, Entrepreneur Magazine, and Silicon Valley Business Journal, among others.

Julie has a background in polling and political consulting. Prior to founding Tumml, she worked as an Education Pioneers Fellow with Revolution Foods, a healthy school meals provider for schools. Previously, she was the Lead Analyst and first employee at Tulchin Research, a start-up strategic polling and consulting firm in the Bay Area. Julie has an MBA from MIT Sloan and a BA from Stanford.

A digital strategy consultant, and manager of media & technology systems for DigitasLBi, a global PR firm in Boston, Massachusetts, Christy Lewis offers a wide-ranging, and nuanced online marketing perspective.

For the last two years, Christy Lewis has been at the forefront of Republican politics as a driving force behind the digital strategy for of two of the highest-profile, statewide campaigns. As Digital Director, Christy planned and implemented online campaign strategies for Ken Cuccinelli’s campaign for Governor of Virginia in 2013, as well as Scott Brown’s campaign for Senator of Massachusetts in 2012. Christy Lewis has worked on multiple innovative projects – planning highly targeted online ad campaigns across multiple platforms, developing web applications, and leveraging data to augment GOTV efforts.

Mario Lugay is an Impact Advisor at the Kapor Center for Social Impact, managing partnerships at the intersection of tech and social impact. He is the the co-founder of the New American Leaders Project, the country's first and only organization dedicated to training first- and second- generation immigrants to run for elected office. Prior to this, Mario served as the program director of the Funders’ Committee for Civic Participation, providing leadership around new philanthropic investments in both integrated voter engagement strategies and for a fair and accurate 2010 census count. He has built significant experience in organizing as the National Coordinator of Racial Justice 911 and at CAAAV Organizing Asian Communities. Mario is a long-time philanthropic and nonprofit consultant, trainer, and speaker, and is a graduate of Columbia University. In addition to serving on the boards of the American Prospect and Resource Generation, Mario is a life long NYer who has found a physical home in Oakland and a political home at Asian Pacific Environmental Network, where he serves as board chair.

Rebecca MacKinnon is a co-founder of the citizen media network Global Voices Online, where she's also a blogger. In addition, she's director of the Ranking Digital Rights project at the New America Foundation, developing a methodology to rank Internet, telecommunications, and other ICT sector companies on free expression and privacy criteria. A pilot study will be conducted in 2014, then an annual index or ranking of companies will be launched in 2015.
 
MacKinnon is also a visiting affiliate at the Annenberg School for Communication’s Center for Global Communications Studies and was a 2013 adjunct lecturer at the University of Pennsylvania Law School.  Previously a senior research fellow and Bernard L. Schwartz senior fellow at the New America Foundation, MacKinnon is author of Consent of the Networked: The Worldwide Struggle For Internet Freedom (Basic Books, 2012). She serves on the boards of directors of the Global Network Initiative and the Committee to Protect Journalists.
 
Fluent in Mandarin Chinese, MacKinnon was CNN’s Bureau Chief and correspondent in China and Japan in the late 90s and early 00’s.  In 2007-08 she taught online journalism and conducted research on Chinese Internet censorship at the University of Hong Kong’s Journalism and Media Studies Centre. She has held fellowships at Harvard’s Shorenstein Center on the Press and Publicy Policy, the Berkman Center for Internet and Society, the Open Society Foundations, and Princeton’s Center for Information Technology Policy.
 
MacKinnon received her AB magna cum laude from Harvard University and was a Fullbright scholar in Taiwan. She lives in Washington D.C.

Joe Mansour leads the digital practice at FP1 Strategies, a full service public affairs firm that combines political expertise, advertising and innovative digital marketing that moves the needle and wins races.

Most recently, as the Digital Director at Public Notice, later known as Freedom partners chamber of Commerce, Joe built and managed an eight-person team. Together, they ran all digital marketing for the organization and its numerous allied groups.

At Public Notice, Joe masterminded the launch of Spendopedia.org, a Wikipedia-like resource of wasteful government spending whose unveiling was featured in The Washington Times. Spendopedia was referred to as “a new sheriff in town... going after the big, wasteful spenders” by Citizens Against Government Waste.

Prior to this, Joe lead digital efforts for a variety of clients and causes including No Labels, PhRMA, the Retail Industry Leaders Association (RILA), Senator Marco Rubio, then-Congressman Jeff Flake and The Heritage Foundation, among others.

Cas Marburger is the social media specialist for truth, the nation’s largest youth smoking prevention campaign. She builds strategies and sets goals around effective ways to reach the truth demographic and measure changes in knowledge, attitudes and beliefs. She has a grandmother with COPD who keeps her motivated. Ham sandwiches creep her out.

Emily is an international leader in the anti-harassment movement. In 2005, at the age of 24, she co-founded Hollaback! (iHollaback.org) in New York City, and in 2010 she became the first full-time executive director. Hollaback!’s mission is to give women and LGBTQ folks an empowered response to harassment in public space, and ultimately, to end it. Emily has a Master’s Degree in Social Policy from the London School of Economics, is an Ashoka Fellow, a Prime Movers Fellow, and has won over ten awards for her work including the TEDCity 2.0 Prize. She recently co-founded HeartMob, an online platform designed to provide support for people being harassed online.

Sean Martin McDonald is the CEO of the Social Impact Lab (SIMLab) CIC, the makers of FrontlineSMS and FrontlineCloud. He is the Founder of the Capture the Ocean and FrontlineSMS:Legal Projects. Sean joined SIMLab in 2010 and works with organizations all over the world to figure out how to use mobile technologies to increase their social impact. SIMLab was recently named the #1 Technology NGO in the world by the Global Journal. Frontline products have been downloaded over 200,000 times and is being used by thousands of organizations in more than 135 countries to reach tens of millions of people. Sean leads day-to-day operations, strategic vision, and business development for SIMLab.

Sean has worked in and written about the connections between international development, data, technology, political communications, conflict resolution, and legal services for the last 10 years. He currently serves on the Board of Directors of International Peace Park Expeditions, the Social Impact Lab Foundation, and the Social Impact Lab Community Interest Company. He is a Trustee of the Awesome Foundation DC and an affiliate with Harvard University's Berkman Center. Sean is an advisor to Clinton Global Initiative, Digital Democracy, DoSomething.org, ECPAT USA, the Law Without Walls Program, TechChange, and UNDP.

Sean is a lawyer, barred in New York. He holds a J.D. and an M.A. in International Peace and Conflict Resolution from American University. He earned his bachelor’s degree in Magazine Journalism at the University of Maryland, College Park.

Michael McGeary is the co-founder and Chief Political Strategist of Engine Advocacy, a non-profit based in San Francisco, working to connect startups with government to effect change on issues important to high-growth entrepreneurial tech businesses. Previously, he worked with Silicon Valley startup TuneIn as their social brand ambassador and evangelist, as well as stints with two Presidential campaigns, and work with a leading California law firm specializing in political compliance and disclosure. A Gloucester, Massachusetts native, he holds a bachelor's degree in political science from Tufts University, and resides with his wife, Sarah, and son, Jack, in Alameda, California.

Ms. Angela McKay is Director of Cybersecurity Policy and Strategy in the Global Security Strategy and Diplomacy (GSSD) team at Microsoft. As part of GSSD, she leverages her 15+ years of experience to address complex global challenges and drive strategic change, both within Microsoft and externally, to advance trust in the computing ecosystem. Ms. McKay leads Microsoft’s cybersecurity policy work in the U.S. She also engages internationally with industry, governments, and civil society to improve security and stability of the computing ecosystem for users around the world. Ms. McKay combines her technical expertise and public policy acumen with insights on demographic and technological trends to develop policies that support development, growth, and innovation, and advance security, privacy, confidence, and trust in the Information Age.

Ms. McKay also serves as Chair of the Information Technology (IT) Sector Coordinating Council, the public private partnership for the IT industry to work with the U.S. Government on critical infrastructure protection and cybersecurity, and Microsoft’s Point of Contact for the National Security Telecommunications Advisory Committee (NSTAC), which provides the President advice and expertise to help maintain secure and resilient communications. Before returning to Washington D.C., Ms. McKay’s focus was increasing cybersecurity capacity in developing and emerging economies.

Prior to joining Microsoft in 2008, she served in several key roles at Booz Allen Hamilton supporting the Department of Homeland Security’s Office of Cybersecurity and Communications for over five years. From 1999 through 2003, Ms. McKay served as an outside plant engineer for BellSouth Telecommunications, developing process and performance improvements for engineering voice and data communication services and testifying on behalf of the company before public utilities commissions. Ms. McKay holds a Bachelor’s of Industrial and Systems Engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology.

Dan is a public-minded coder passionate about cities, urban affairs and civic action. Currently, he works on new products and APIs as Deputy CTO for Granicus, a government transparency company with over a 1,000 clients in North America and Canada. Previous gigs include CTO of Code for America and CEO of npT Labs. Hailing from the midwest, he received his masters in Public Administration and doctorate in Public Affairs and Economics from the Henry Bloch School of Business and Public Administration at the University of Missouri-Kansas City.

Erie Meyer is a co-founder of United States Digital Service, a new team working to transform how the federal government works for the American people. She’s on the headquarters team in the White House, and helped establish, and now works with, the digital service teams at the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, and the U.S. Department of Education.

Before joining the United States Digital Service, she was Senior Advisor to the U.S. CTO at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, where she worked on the President’s Open Data Initiatives and setting up the Digital Service. Erie is a serial public entrepreneur, having served on the implementation team to stand up the new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), where she was a member of the founding Tech + Innovation Team. She worked to create a system to collect consumer complaints about financial products and services, such as students loans and credit reporting, and then to publish the data.

She also launched one of the first open source websites in government, when she stood up the first digital office for the Ohio Attorney General. She has also been part of the strategy team at Blue State Digital, working on student loan issues for Senator Ted Kennedy and campaigns like She Should Run, a nonpartisan effort to get more women in elected office.

Erie is a co-founder of Tech Ladymafia, a group of women living everywhere from San Francisco to Shenzhen, China, working on anything from DIY circuit boards to theoretical physics. She was named one of Forbes’ “30 under 30” for technology, and her work has been featured in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Wired, The National Journal, Elle, and more.

An Xiao Mina is a research affiliate at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society, and was a 2016 Knight Visiting Fellow at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism. She was a contributing editor for Ai Weiwei: Spatial Matters.

David Moore is the Executive Director of the Participatory Politics Foundation (PPF), a non-profit organization with a mission to increase civic engagement. At PdF 2015, PPF is announcing its new project: NYC Councilmatic, a free & open-source engagement platform for city government legislation and local issues. From 2006 through 2013, PPF created & operated OpenCongress.org, including the first-of-its-kind Contact-Congress feature set. In 2014, PPF launched AskThem.io, a free questions-and-answers platform for every U.S. elected official and any verified Twitter account, with over 80 participating elected officials nationwide. David is interested in the potential of more-digital legislatures to rehabilitate public trust in government. He's based at Civic Hall. Contact him anytime for more info on how to bring Councilmatic to your city - email: [email protected]

As a senior policy counsel for the Open Technology Institute at New America Foundation, Sarah Morris assists in the research and development of policy proposals related to open technologies, broadband access, and emerging technological issues.

Prior to joining New America Foundation, Ms. Morris served as a Google Policy Fellow with the Media Access Project, where she assisted with research and drafting of FCC comments on issues including media ownership, the open Internet and retransmission consent. She earned a B.A. in Political Science and English from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, and a J.D. and LL.M. in Space and Telecommunications Law from the University of Nebraska College of Law, completing her thesis on privacy and security concerns related to Smart Grid technology.

Jason Q. Ng is a research fellow at The Citizen Lab, an interdisciplinary laboratory at the University of Toronto exploring the intersection between technology, global security, and human rights, and author of Blocked on Weibo: What Gets Suppressed on China’s Version of Twitter (And Why). He is also a research consultant at China Digital Times where he helps develop censorship monitoring tools. His writing has appeared in The Wall Street Journal’s “China Real Time” blog, The Atlantic, ChinaFile, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and Foreign Affairs. Ng was previously a 2013 Google Policy Fellow and has worked as a book editor at The New Press and Metropolitan Books. He graduated from Brown University and studied East Asian Studies at the University of Pittsburgh.

Laura Olin is a veteran digital campaigner who ran social media strategy for Obama 2012 and helped set the editorial voice for the campaign's digital communications.

Laura's social media team ran everything from the @BarackObama Twitter account to the Joe Biden Facebook page and the Barack Obama Tumblr. They grew the campaign’s social media followings by 40 million; raised millions of dollars over social media; pioneered the use of Tumblr, Instagram, Spotify, and Pinterest for presidential campaigns; and created the most-retweeted and most-liked Twitter and Facebook posts in both networks’ history.

Prior to joining the Obama campaign as its first digital staffer in April of 2011, Laura got her online campaigning chops at Blue State Digital, People For the American Way, and the Center for American Progress. She has degrees in political science from the University of Virginia and the London School of Economics.

A native of Finland, she became an American citizen in 2008. Her first vote was for Barack Obama.

Ordonez currently serves as Outreach Manager for OpenITP, an organization that supports the community behind FLOSS anti-censorship, anti-surveillance, and humanitarian tech tools. Through her consultation business, Collaborative Nation, she provides organizations with collaborative management, community management, digital strategy and cross-cultural services and trainings. Currently, she is helping Journalism that Matters improve diversity in the newsroom, as well as increase the number of women in technology.

Recipient of the US Latino Award by the Spanish Government and Fundacion Carolina, which included a week to Spain to meet government and private leaders. Maynard Institute named her as one of 30 hispanics to celebrate for Hispanic Heritage Month in 2012. She was also nominated as a SXSW Revolucionaria 2013.

Previously, Ordonez served as Wikipedia's first professional director of communications. She served on the Board of Joomla, one of the top three open source CMSs in the world, and was the director of Girls in Tech New York. A native New Yorker, she is bilingual in Spanish and an avid hiker.

Jerry Paffendorf is the CEO of LOVELAND, a tech firm based in Detroit and the San Francisco Bay Area. LOVELAND works with governments, neighborhood groups, development, and conservation projects to gather and present public information about properties (the physical space and legal subdivisions that define the world) in clearer, more actionable ways. This helps to address issues like foreclosure prevention, blight identification and reduction, the reuse of vacant space, and the preservation of community assets.

Jerry loves developing new ways for the super powers of the web to impact the realities of the world. The challenges of Detroit have become an endless inspiration, leading to the property mapping, crowdsourcing, and open data work at makeloveland.com. He has deep experience in the world of social technology startups, art and media, and a Masters of Science in Studies of the Future from Houston-Clear Lake.

Sharon Paley is a leading organizer of Baltimore’s innovation and civic hacking communities. Working with the federal, state, and local governments, Sharon has organized hackathons focused on healthcare, parks and recreation, and Baltimore’s chapter of the National Day of Civic Hacking.

She recently cofounded Hack Baltimore, a nonprofit that helps the people who improve Baltimore make better connections, identify available resources, and find support and like-minded folks.

As Chief Operating Officer for Greater Baltimore Technology Council, Sharon spearheaded numerous events like BmoreFail, a discussion of the importance of risk taking, and unWIREd, an unconference that explored out-of-the-box ideas for improving quality of life in Baltimore. She also provided mentorship and connections to early-stage startups, helping move them toward real, sustainable revenue.

Sharon oversees operations of DreamIt Health Baltimore, an accelerator designed to speed the growth and success of early-stage health IT companies in Central Maryland.

Emily Parker is the author of Now I Know Who My Comrades Are: Voices from the Internet Underground, as well as a digital diplomacy advisor and senior fellow at the New America Foundation. Previously, Ms. Parker was a member of Secretary Clinton's policy planning staff at the U.S. Department of State, where she covered 21st century statecraft, innovation and technology. While at State, she advised on issues related to Internet freedom and open government. Ms. Parker is the co-founder of Code4Country, the first open-government codeathon between the United States and Russia. She spent over five years working She spent over five years working for the Wall Street Journal, first as an editorial writer in Hong Kong and later as a New York-based editor.She was also a staff op-ed editor for The New York Times. Ms. Parker graduated with Honors from Brown University and has a Master's from Harvard in East Asian Studies.

Katy E. Pearce is an assistant professor in the Department of Communication at the University of Washington. She researches social and political uses of technologies and digital content in non-democratic contexts, specifically in the semi- and fully-authoritarian states of former Soviet Union. Her current research areas include digital divides and inequalities; the affordances of information and communication technologies for social and opposition movements; and online impression management. Pearce also holds an affiliation with the Ellison Center for Russian East European, and Central Asian Studies.

A certified media junkie, Latoya Peterson provides a hip-hop feminist and anti-racist view on pop culture with a special focus on video games, film, television, and music.

One of Forbes Magazine's 30 Under 30 rising stars in media for 2013, she is best known for the award winning blog Racialicious.com - the intersection of race and pop culture. She is currently the Senior Digital Producer for The Stream, a social media driven news show on Al Jazeera America. Previously, she was a John S. Knight Journalism 2012-2013 Fellow at Stanford University focusing on mobile technology and digital access.

Her work has been published in Essence, Spin, Vibe, Marie Claire, The American Prospect, The Atlantic Blog, Bitch Magazine, Clutch Magazine, the Women's Review of Books, Slate's Double X, The Poynter Institute, The Root.com and the Guardian. She was a contributor to Jezebel.com. Her essay, "The Not Rape Epidemic" was published in the anthology Yes Means Yes: Visions of Female Sexual Power and a World Without Rape (Seal Press, 2008). She also contributed "The Feminist Existential Crisis (Dark Children Remix)" to the anthology Feminism for Real: Deconstructing the Academic Industrial Complex of Feminism (CCPA, 2011).

As a digital media consultant, Latoya Peterson has worked with brands like NPR, Wikipedia, and Weber-Shandwick to provide demographic analysis, ideas on improving user experience, and specialized outreach. She was also a guest host for WEAA’s Michael Eric Dyson Show and a contributor/substitute digital producer for Al-Jazeera International's version of The Stream.

She was also a Harvard Berkman Center Affiliate, a Poynter Institute Sensemaking Fellow, and one of the inaugural Public Media Corps fellows.

Andrew Rasiej is a civic and social entrepreneur, technology strategist, and the founder of Personal Democracy Media focusing on the intersection of technology, politics, and government. In addition to co-founding Civic Hall earlier this year, he is the Chairman of the NY Tech Meetup, a 40,000+-member organization of technologists, venture funders, marketers, representing start up and more mature companies using technology to transform themselves, New York City, and the world. He is the founder of MOUSE.org which focuses on 21st century public education and senior advisor to the Sunlight Foundation a Washington DC organization using technology to make government more transparent. Andrew lives and works in New York City.

As Global Head of Sustainability, Curtis Ravenel leads Bloomberg’s sustainability initiatives - a Chairman’s Office effort and the result of his 2006 Bloomberg Global Leadership Forum proposal. The program aggressively integrates sustainability considerations into all firm operations and leverages the Bloomberg Professional Service to evaluate sustainability-related investment risks and opportunities for its 315,000 customers.

Curtis has worked for Bloomberg in multiple roles. He was the Financial Controller for Asia managing accounting, tax, treasury and audit services for 23 legal entities with combined annual revenues exceeding $1 billion USD. This was preceded by various roles in the Capital Planning and Financial Analysis Groups.

Prior to his work with Bloomberg, L.P., Curtis co-managed a small real estate development group, founded a micro-brewery and worked with the Recycling Advisory Council in Washington, DC conducting Full Cost Accounting and Life Cycle Analysis work.

He currently serves as a board member at US SIF, The Forum for Sustainable and Responsible Investment, and is an advisor to the Sustainability Accounting Standards Board (SASB), the Global Initiative for Sustainability Ratings (GISR) and the USA Advisory Board to the G8 Social Impact Investment Taskforce. Curtis was awarded a David Rockefeller Fellowship with the Partnership for New York City in 2011. He earned an MBA from Columbia Business School and a BA in History from Davidson College.

Rainey Reitman serves as director of the activism team at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. She is particularly interested in the intersection between personal privacy and technology, particularly social networking privacy, network security, web tracking, government surveillance, and online data brokers. She also works on issues related to financial censorship, free speech, and software patents.

Reitman is the Chief Operating Officer and co-founder of the Freedom of the Press Foundation, a nonprofit organization that defends and supports unique, independent, nonprofit journalistic institutions. She, along with co-founders Daniel Ellsberg, Trevor Timm, and J.P. Barlow, received the 2013 Hugh M. Hefner First Amendment Award in Journalism.

Reitman is a founder and steering committee member for the Private Manning Support Network, a network of individuals and organizations advocating for the release of accused WikiLeaks whistleblower Private Chelsea Manning. Additionally, Reitman serves on the board of the directors for the Bill of Rights Defense Committee, a nonprofit whose mission is to organize and support an effective, national grassroots movement to restore civil liberties guaranteed by the Bill of Rights. She is also a steering committee member of the Internet Defense League, a netroots coalition working to fend off threats to the free and open Web.

Prior to joining EFF, Reitman served as Director of Communications for the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse, a nonprofit advocacy and education organization promoting consumer privacy. She earned her BA from Bard College in Multidisciplinary Studies: Creative Writing, Russian & Gender Studies.

Steven Renderos is the National Organizer at the Center for Media Justice. He is passionate about the role of media and communications in building movements for social change. He's been a community organizer for the past 10 years leading campaigns for affordable housing, immigrant rights and most recently media policy fights. He helped lead CMJ's advocacy and organizing efforts including the Campaign for Prison Phone Justice, a national campaign fighting to lower the high costs of prison phone calls.

Previously, Steven led the Media Justice program at Main Street Project in Minneapolis, MN where he helped jumpstart a local collaborative that will be applied for a radio license in the fall 2013. Steven aka DJ Ren is also the co-founder of Radio Pocho, a collaborative of [email protected] radio DJs in Minneapolis who's mission is to explore the musical roots of [email protected] raised in the United States.

Steven grew up in from Los Angeles, CA before attending college at Hamline University in St. Paul, MN and now resides in Brooklyn, NY.

Ethan was Data Director for the Obama presidential campaigns in 2008 and 2012, pioneering the use of a large-scale data operation to support individualized, relationship-based organizing. His experience also includes local and federal political campaigns as well as pro-labor and gay rights advocacy. Ethan has also done extensive work in Election Administration including managing the Voting Information Project in partnership with Pew and Google in 2010. Ethan is currently the Executive Director of the New Organizing Institute.

Sharon Rubinstein is a lawyer and former journalist with extensive communications and advocacy experience in the non-profit world. For nearly a decade, she was Communications Director at Advocates for Children and Youth in Baltimore, where she was also a lobbyist. She has been a communications consultant for numerous clients, including Medicaid Matters Maryland, Health Care for All, the Maryland Budget and Tax Policy Institute, and New York's Teaching Matters, Inc. In 2012, she was certified as a Licensed Consultant by the Standards for Excellence Institute, and she was named one of ten "leaders" by the Moving Maryland Forward Network.

Some of Ms. Rubinstein's writing credits include BusinessWeek Magazine; Newsweek International; CNN; CBS News, and the Baltimore Sun. Much of her writing has concerned social issues. She has been active in academia as well, and was a Senior Fellow at the University of Baltimore School of Law's Center for Families, Children and the Courts, which operates a Truancy Court Program that addresses student attendance problems. Ms. Rubinstein taught child advocacy courses at the University of Maryland's College Park Scholars program, and taught law and education policy for the George Washington University Graduate School of Education. Much earlier in her career, she was a federal law clerk. Ms. Rubinstein has a J.D. from the University of Michigan's School of Law, and a B.A. from Cornell University.

Felicity Ruby is the ThoughtWorks Director of Global Internet Policy. From 2008-2013 she was Senior Advisor to Australian Greens Senator Scott Ludlam who held the Communications portfolio and successfully fought data retention and internet censorship proposals, as well as supporting Australian citizen Julian Assange. Prior to this she headed the UN Office for the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom, was a policy adviser at the UN Development Fund for Women and at Greenpeace International.

Patrick Ruffini is the president and founder of Engage, a leading digital agency that partners with Fortune 500 companies, technology disruptors, and candidates and causes across the nation and around the globe.

Patrick was one of the first digital organizers in American politics, starting at the Republican National Committee in the 2002 cycle, for President Bush’s victorious 2004 re-election campaign, and returning to lead the RNC’s digital strategy in 2006. He is a veteran of three Presidential election campaigns, and in 2013 oversaw outside web and technology efforts for Australia’s Liberal Party as they achieved their biggest election victory in 107 years.

In these roles, Patrick has led the development of technology to engage millions of supporters that would later become the standard for national campaigns.

Known for his involvement in causes that unite his passion for bare-knuckle politics and technology-driven disruption, Patrick helped shape the strategy behind the come-from-behind defeat of the SOPA and PIPA Internet censorship bills and co-edited Hacking Politics, a book chronicling the fight. He is a fierce believer in the power of the Internet to change political campaigns and government for the better.

Named a “Tech Titan” by Washingtonian magazine in 2011 and 2013, and a Rising Star in American Politics by Campaigns and Elections magazine in 2008, Patrick has written for numerous publications including theWashington Post and National Review, and he has appeared on Fox News, HBO’s Real Time with Bill Maher, and NPR. He is a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania.

Shruti H. Sannon is a Research Assistant at The Governance Lab, a MacArthur and Knight Foundation-funded center that explores ways in which technological advances can be used to re-imagine governance structures and solve intractable social problems.

Shruti has conducted qualitative research in multiple countries, including consumer research and ethnographic fieldwork to inform brand strategies and communications campaigns across a variety of media platforms. During her time in advertising, she developed communications strategies for multinational clients across a range of industries (including financial services, consumer goods, and non-profit) in Singapore, Dubai, and New Delhi.

She holds a Master of Arts degree in Media, Culture, and Communication from New York University, with a specialization in Technology and Society. Her interests include technological innovation, human rights and development, Internet governance, and women’s advocacy.

Marietje Schaake (Twitter: @MarietjeSchaake) is a Member of the European Parliament for the Dutch Democratic Party (D66) with the Alliance of Liberals and Democrats for Europe (ALDE) political group. She serves on the Committee on Foreign Affairs, where she focuses on neighborhood policy, Turkey in particular; human rights, with a specific focus on freedom of expression, internet freedom, press freedom; and Iran. In the Committee on Culture, Media, Education, Youth and Sports she works on Europe's Digital Agenda and the role of culture and new media in the EU´s external actions. In the Committee on International Trade she focuses on intellectual property rights, the free flow of information and the relation between trade and foreign affairs.

Marietje is a member of the delegation for relations with the United States and a substitute member on the delegations with Iran and the Western Balkan countries. She is also a founder of the European Parliament Intergroup on New Media and Technology. Marietje is a Member of the European Council on Foreign Relations and vice-president of the supervisory board of Free Press Unlimited.

Before joining the European Parliament, she worked as an independent advisor to governments, diplomats, businesses and NGO's, on issues of transatlantic relations, diversity and pluralism, civil and human rights.

Scooter Schaefer is a graduate of George Mason University with a degree in political science. After college Scooter began his career in public policy, interning in the office of Congressman Tom McClintock, and things have gone downhill from there.

He previously served as the Director of Communications for ProEnglish, and currently serves as the Assistant Director of Marketing and Digital Communications at the Media Research Center.

Scooter once risked his life to swim to an uninhabited island in Croatia during a backpacking trip around Europe. Now he lives in the suburbs near a Home Depot, drives a Toyota Corolla, and enjoys changing diapers in his free time.

Bruce Schneier is an internationally renowned security technologist, called a "security guru" by The Economist. He is the author of 12 books -- including Liars and Outliers: Enabling the Trust Society Needs to Thrive -- as well as hundreds of articles, essays, and academic papers. His influential newsletter "Crypto-Gram" and his blog "Schneier on Security" are read by over 250,000 people. He has testified before Congress, is a frequent guest on television and radio, has served on several government committees, and is regularly quoted in the press. Schneier is a fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School, a program fellow at the New America Foundation's Open Technology Institute, a board member of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, an Advisory Board Member of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, and the Security Futurologist for BT -- formerly British Telecom.

Seth Schultz is the Director of Research, Measurement & Planning at C40 Cities Climate Leadership Group. In this role, Seth is responsible for organizational accountability and visibility through implementing a comprehensive and cohesive research strategy. Seth works to ensure that global best practices are applied locally through specific data analysis. He is also a frequent speaker about the breadth and depth of climate actions being taken by C40 Cities and their impact around the world. Prior to this role, Seth helped create the Climate Positive Development Program (CPDP) -- developed in partnership with the Clinton Climate Initiative and the U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC). CPDP supports the development of large-scale urban projects striving to reduce the amount of on-site CO2 emissions to below zero. Seth’s background includes more than 10 years of consulting experience in the environmental field, in which he was responsible for managing multiple contracts and clients at the city, state, regional and federal level. He has managed nationwide U.S. federal contracts with EPA and NOAA and overseen research projects on emergency response work conducted at the World Trade Center cleanup, Hurricane Katrina and others. He holds a bachelors degree in Environmental Science from Binghamton University and oversees C40's office in New York City.

Natalie Sedletska is an investigative journalist based in Kyiv, Ukraine and a Fellow at Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty. She is part of Yanukovych Leaks, a team of Ukrainian journalists preserving and publishing the documents left behind in ousted Ukranian president Viktor Yanukovych's residence.

Rinku Sen is the President and Executive Director of Race Forward: The Center for Racial Justice Innovation and the Publisher of the award-winning news site Colorlines. Race Forward brings systemic analysis and an innovative approach to complex race issues to help people take effective action toward racial equity through research, media, and practice.

Under Sen’s leadership, Race Forward has generated some of the most impactful racial justice successes. One example is the groundbreaking Shattered Families report, which changed the immigration debate with research on how record deportations of parents were leading to the placement of thousands of children in foster care, often separating them permanently from their families. Sen was the architect of Drop the I-Word, a campaign for media outlets to stop referring to immigrants as “illegal,” resulting in the Associated Press, USA Today, LA Times, and many more outlets dropping the i-word, affecting millions of readers every day.

A visionary and a pragmatist, Sen is one of the leading voices in the racial justice movement, building upon the legacy of civil rights by transforming the way we talk about race, from something that is individual, intentional, and overt to something that is systemic, unconscious, and hidden. Prior to her work at Race Forward, Rinku served in leadership roles for over a decade at the revolutionary Center for Third World Organizing (CTWO), where she trained new organizers of color and crafted public policy campaigns. Sen’s cutting edge book Stir it Up, read widely by community organizers and taught on campuses across the country, theorized a model of community organizing that integrate a political analysis of gender, class, poverty, sexuality, and other issues.

Sen’s second book The Accidental American: Immigration and Citizenship in the Age of Globalization told the story of Moroccan immigrant Fekkak Mamdouh, who co-founded the Restaurant Opportunities Center of New York in the aftermath of September 11 and is currently being made into a film.

Rinku is the Co-Chair of the Schott Foundation for Public Education and sits on the boards of the Restaurant Opportunities Centers United, Working America, and the Philanthropic Initiative for Racial Equity. A highly sought-after keynote speaker for colleges Sen has spoken at Harvard, Brown, University of Michigan, Penn State, and was the Commencement Speaker at Antioch New England.

Sen received a B.A. in Women's Studies from Brown University and an M.S. in Journalism at Columbia University. A native of India, Rinku grew up in the northeastern factory towns, and learned to speak English in a two-room schoolhouse.

Clay Shirky teaches theory and practice of social media at NYU, where he is an Associate Arts Professor in the Interactive Telecommunications Program and a Distinguished Writer in Residence at the Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute. He is the author of three books on social media: Cognitive Surplus (2010), Here Comes Everybody (2008), and Voices from the Net (1994). His writings on the internet and media can be found at shirky.com.

Heidi Sieck is the founding Chief Operating Officer of Civic Hall, the new community center for civic technology launched in New York Flatiron District in February 2015. Heidi has a 25+ year career in political action and civic technology, devoting her career to implementing foundational solutions to transform society. Before joining the Civic Hall team, Heidi was the Chief Operating Officer of Democracy.com, a political technology platform she founded with classmates from the Harvard Kennedy School. She has led many complex projects including the award winning San Francisco 311 Customer Service Center establishing the foundation of the open government movement and ResilientSF, one of the first post-disaster recovery programs in the U.S. An innovator of political action and devoted to elevating women to positions of leadership, Heidi worked on five presidential campaigns and dozens of state and local races. She serves on the Boards of Directors of NARAL Pro-Choice New York and the Center for Partnership Studies, a research institute focused on economic and political systems. She serves on the Advisory Board of VoteRunLead and pm the founding leadership team of CTZNWELL, a new values-based well being movement. She holds a Bachelor of Arts in Communications from the University of Nebraska and a Masters in Public Administration from the Harvard Kennedy School where she was awarded the prestigious Holly Taylor Sargent Award for Advancement of Women in Leadership.

Micah L. Sifry is a writer, editor and democracy activist. Since 2004, he has been the co-founder and editorial director of Personal Democracy Media. In addition to co-founding Civic Hall last year, he is also a senior adviser to the Sunlight Foundation and serves on the boards of Consumer Reports and the Public Laboratory for Open Technology and Science. He is the author or editor of eight books, most recently A Lever and a Place to Stand: How Civic Tech Can Move the World (Personal Democracy Media, 2015) and The Big Disconnect: Why the Internet Hasn’t Changed Politics (Yet) (OR Books, 2014), and in the spring of 2012 taught “The Politics of the Internet” at Harvard’s Kennedy School. He lives with his family in Hastings-on-Hudson, NY.

Samantha H. Simpson is a Product Director at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Her interest in using technology to help keep financial markets fair for the American people is what brought her to the CFPB. Previously, she was the Communications and Policy Manager at the Ohio Attorney General’s Office. Samantha was born and raised on the South Side of Chicago, Illinois, and is a proud graduate of The Johns Hopkins University with a degree in Spanish. In her free time, Samantha is involved in philanthropy efforts supporting urban communities.

Andrew Slack is the Civic Imagination Fellow at Civic Hall, and also an Ashoka Fellow. He is a practitioner of cultural acupuncture and the founder of Imagine Better, where he has directed campaigns around Star Wars and money in politics, Back to the Future and imagination, Superman and immigration, the Hunger Games and economic inequality, and begun to remix holidays with projects like #TeachMeYouDid and assisting in Esther Day.

He started his work on Imagine Better in creating the Harry Potter Alliance (HPA) where he served as Executive Director, Movement Director, and Board of Directors president for 10 years. While at the HPA, he helped direct campaigns that have sent five cargo planes to Haiti, allowed all Harry Potter chocolate to be either Utz or Fair Trade certified, and started a chapters program that now boasts close to 300 chapters in over 30 countries on six continents.

Anne-Marie Slaughter is the President and CEO of New America and the Bert G. Kerstetter ’66 University Professor Emerita of Politics and International Affairs at Princeton University. From 2009-2011 she served as the director of Policy Planning for the United States Department of State, the first woman to hold that position. Prior to her government service, Dr. Slaughter was the Dean of Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs from 2002–2009 and the J. Sinclair Armstrong Professor of International, Foreign, and Comparative Law at Harvard Law School from 1994-2002. She has written or edited six books, including “A New World Order” and “The Idea That Is America: Keeping Faith with Our Values in a Dangerous World”, and is a frequent contributor to a number of publications, including The Atlantic and Project Syndicate. In 2012, she published “Why Women Still Can’t Have It All,” in The Atlantic, which quickly became the most read article in the history of the magazine and helped spark a renewed national debate on the continued obstacles to genuine full male-female equality. She is married to Professor Andrew Moravcsik; they live in Princeton with their two sons.

Tom Slee writes about the intersections of technology, politics, and economics. He has a PhD in theoretical chemistry, a long career in the software industry, and his 2006 book "No One Makes You Shop at Wal-Mart" is a left-wing game-theoretical investigation of individual choice and its problems that has been used in university economics, philosophy, and sociology courses.

Recently, Tom has commented extensively about issues surrounding open data, the sharing economy and digital reputation, including pieces in The New Inquiry, Jacobin, and The Literary Review of Canada, as well as on the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.

James Slezak is a social entrepreneur and co-founder of Peers.org, a new member-driven organization to support the sharing economy. By day, he is Director of Strategy at the New York Times (although any views he expresses will be solely his own).

James was previously a founding executive team member and partner at Purpose, an affiliate at Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet and Society, and consultant at McKinsey & Company, where he led projects on sustainability, technology and economic development. He is also co-Founder and managing partner of New Economy Lab, a consultancy that builds new business strategies for social good, recently working with Richard Branson to develop a strategic framework for his B Team initiative.

Originally from Sydney, Australia, James’s background is in physics, and he remains a science geek at heart. He moved to the US to study high temperature superconductivity, and after completing his PhD decided he needed to spend more time outside of labs.

Brad Smith is Microsoft's general counsel and executive vice president, Legal and Corporate Affairs. He leads the company's Department of Legal and Corporate Affairs (LCA), which has approximately 1,100 employees located in 55 countries and is responsible for the company's legal work, its intellectual property portfolio and patent licensing business, and its government affairs and philanthropic work. He also serves as Microsoft's corporate secretary and its chief compliance officer.

Since becoming general counsel in 2002, Smith has overseen numerous negotiations leading to competition law and intellectual property agreements with governments around the world and with companies across the IT sector. He has helped spearhead the growth in the company's intellectual property portfolio and the launch of global campaigns to bring enforcement actions against those engaged in software piracy and counterfeiting, malware, consumer fraud and other digital crimes. He has played a leading role within Microsoft and in the IT sector on privacy, immigration, and computer science and STEM education policy issues.

Smith has played a central role in ensuring that Microsoft fulfills its corporate responsibilities. In recent years Microsoft has consistently ranked in the top 2 percent of the S&P 500 for corporate governance scores. He serves as Microsoft's senior executive responsible for the company's corporate citizenship and philanthropic work, including Microsoft YouthSpark, a company-wide, global initiative to create opportunities for 300 million youth over three years. In its first year alone Microsoft YouthSpark has created new opportunities for more than 103 million young people in over 100 countries around the world. Smith has also helped advance several significant diversity and pro bono initiatives, both within Microsoft and in the broader legal profession. He currently co-chairs the board of directors of Kids in Need of Defense (KIND) and is the chair of the Leadership Council on Legal Diversity.

In Washington state, Smith has served as chair of the Washington Roundtable, a leading Washington state-based business organization, and he has advanced several statewide education initiatives. In 2010 he chaired for Governor Christine Gregoire her Higher Education Funding Task Force, and in 2012 he co-chaired the transition team for incoming Governor Jay Inslee. Since 2011 he has chaired at the appointment of the Governor the Washington Opportunity Scholarship Program, the nation's first private-public funded endowment to enable more students to attend college. In 2010-11, Smith and his wife, Kathy Surace-Smith, also an attorney, co-chaired the annual campaign for the United Way of King County, the country's largest United Way campaign.

Before joining Microsoft in 1993, Smith was a partner at Covington & Burling, having worked in the firm's Washington, D.C., and London offices. He graduated summa cum laude from Princeton University and received his law degree at the Columbia University School of Law. He also studied international law and economics at the Graduate Institute of International Studies in Geneva, Switzerland.

In early 2013 Smith was named by the National Law Journal as one of the 100 most influential lawyers in the United States. He has written numerous articles and commentaries regarding international intellectual property and Internet, immigration and education policy issues, and has served as a lecturer at The Hague Academy of International Law.

Edward Snowden is a former intelligence officer who served the CIA, NSA, and DIA for nearly a decade as a subject matter expert on technology and cybersecurity. In 2013, he revealed the NSA was unconstitutionally seizing the private records of billions of individuals who had not been suspected of any wrongdoing, resulting in the largest debate about reforms to US surveillance policy since 1978. He has received awards for courage, integrity, and public service, and was named the top global thinker of 2013 by Foreign Policy magazine. Today, he works on methods of enforcing human rights through the application and development of new technologies. He joined the board of Freedom of the Press Foundation in February 2014.

Mariya Soroka is a co-founder of Razom for Ukraine (which means “together” in Ukrainian), a non-profit organization established to support the people of Ukraine in their continued quest for democracy, justice, and human rights.

Mariya believes deeply in the enormous potential of dedicated volunteers around the world united by a single goal: to realize a free and democratic Ukraine. Razom uses powerful social networking tools to unite a global network of individuals, institutions and organizations into a coordinated effort supporting this shared goal.

Terrell J. Starr is the Associate Editor at NewsOne, a Black news site in New York City. He has five years of journalism experience in public radio, social media, magazines, photography and online reporting. Fluent in SEO and social media best practices, his skill of using social media in his reporting has lead to him breaking several national stories, including one where a Twitter user forced a literary agent to withdraw a book contract offered to a George Zimmerman juror.

Starr has a bachelor's degree in English from Philander Smith College and an M.S. in Editorial Journalism and M.A. in Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

He is also Fulbright Journalism Scholar (Ukraine 2009-2010) and a Returned Peace Corps Volunteer (Georgia 2003-2005). He is also an active member of the #DigitalMaidan activist group that helps to promote accurate information about Ukrainians and its people.

Starr is the founder of Diaspora Wire, a daily newsfeed launching this summer that produces originally reported stories on African diasporas worldwide from an exclusively Black/African perspective.

Dave Steer is Mozilla Foundation’s director of policy and advocacy, where he shapes the organization’s public policy position and develops programs that enable web users to have a voice in advancing and protecting the free and open web.

Dave joined Mozilla in 2014 from Facebook, where he was responsible for the company’s global policy programs in a variety of areas including teen safety, education, digital citizenship, jobs and economy, and veterans affairs. Prior to Facebook, he held leadership positions at Common Sense Media and GreatSchools.org, and ran Trust & Safety marketing at eBay and PayPal. Steer started his career as part of the initial team at TRUSTe, where he was responsible for marketing and public relations for the privacy program.

Steer holds a B.A. in political science from the University of Vermont. He serves on the Bay Area advisory board for Little Kids Rock, is an avid Phish fan, and dreams of touring in a band when he grows up. He lives in San Francisco, CA, with his wife and daughter.

Natalia Stelmakh is an activist and a member of the Ukrainian Democratic Alliance for Reform. During the Ukrainian revolution, by simply using Google and her 9-years of experience working in finance, she worked with the Anti-Corruption Center of Ukraine to trace public funds stolen and laundered by members of the former Ukrainian government. She spearheaded a number of initiatives aimed at encouraging western banks and financial institutions to screen and freeze assets of Ukrainian officials who violated human rights or gained those assets through corruption. Her team worked throughout the country and in Europe. In late January 2014, she left Ukraine for New York to continue her financial forensics initiatives, working with leading sanctions experts and law enforcement, and organized demonstrations. Stelmakh is a native of Luhansk, Ukraine and holds a Masters in Finance from the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm and is a member of the Royal Institute of Chartered Surveyors of the United Kingdom.

Taren is the Executive Director and Founder of SumOfUs.org. She is a dual Australian-American citizen and has experience with online organizing on four continents and at the global level, including at Avaaz.org, GetUp.org.au, and the AFL-CIO. She was born in Australia, currently lives in San Francisco and enjoys reading science fiction and playing ultimate frisbee for fun.

Anthea is a technologist and community organizer working at the intersection of the internet and urban systems. Anthea is part of Google's Civic Innovation team, building products that facilitate civic engagement, open societies and free expression across digital platforms.

During the 2012 campaign cycle, Anthea worked as the Director of Voter Experience with the Obama technology team. On the Obama campaign, Anthea product managed voter engagement and volunteer management tools. Prior to joining the campaign, she ran the Voting Information Project. This project is an effort to collect, standardize and distribute, through an open API, a nationwide database of polling locations and election related information. The API received 22 million look-ups in 2012 and was used by Google, AT&T, Microsoft, Foursquare, CNN and Politics-360 among many others.

Before getting her start in civic technology after attending PDF in 2009, Anthea worked as a lawyer in the House of Representatives as well as for several years in the field on political and issue campaigns.

Hallie is the co-founder and CEO of The Target Labs, a company dedicated to making best-in-class analytics affordable and accessible to smaller Democratic and progressive campaigns. She worked on her first campaign in 2003 in San Francisco, and fell in love with electoral politics. She subsequently co-founded the League of Young Voters, a national non-profit organization, and played a key role in building the organization out to 24 staff and a $2 million annual budget over three years. Hallie joined the Obama campaign in Nevada early in 2007, ultimately leading field operations for the campaign in New Mexico, Texas, Chicago HQ and Wisconsin. Hallie studied analytics and targeting at the Haas School of Business at UC Berkeley, where she earned her MBA in May 2013.

Trevor Timm is a co-founder and the executive director of the Freedom of the Press Foundation. He is a writer, activist, and lawyer who specializes in free speech and government transparency issues. He writes a weekly column for The Guardian, and has also contributed to The Atlantic, Al Jazeera, Foreign Policy, Harvard Law and Policy Review, PBS MediaShift and Politico.

Trevor formerly worked as an activist at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Before that, he helped the longtime General Counsel of The New York Times, James Goodale, write a book on the Pentagon Papers and the First Amendment. He received his J.D. from New York Law School.

In 2013, he received the Hugh Hefner First Amendment Award for journalism.

During the 2012 election cycle Nickie served as Director of Digital Media for Tim Kaine's successful senate campaign. She previously worked for new media firm Blue State Digital (BSD) as Director of Business Development. Prior to joining BSD, Titus worked for O'Brien, McConnell and Pearson as a Director of Client Services, managing multi-million dollar national fundraising programs for the Democratic National Committee, Senator Harry Reid, the ACLU and Hillary's 2008 presidential campaign. Nickie also worked for EMILY's List during the 2004 election cycle.

Tom Tresser is an educator, organizer, creativity champion, public defender and fighter of privatization. He has doing civic engagement and grassroots democracy efforts for over 40 years. His first voter registration campaign was in 1972.

Tom has acted in some 40 shows and produced over 100 plays, special events, festivals and community programs. He was director of cultural development at Peoples Housing, in north Rogers Park, Chicago, where he created a community arts program that blended the arts, education and micro-enterprise. Tom was elected to the Abraham Lincoln Elementary School’s Local School Council and served from 2004 to 2006.

He was a co-founder of Protect Our Parks, a neighborhood effort to stop the privatization of public space in Chicago. He was a lead organizer for No Games Chicago, an all-volunteer grassroots effort that opposed Chicago’s 2016 Olympic bid. He has taught workshops on “The Politics of Creativity – A Call To Service”for arts service organizations in six states. He teaches a number of classes on art, creativity and civic engagement for Loyola University, School of the Art Institute, the Illinois Institute of Technology, and DePaul University. Tom has published a web-based project, “America Needs You!” – about the need for artists to get involved in politics.

Tom was the Green Party candidate for the position of President of the Board of Commissioners of Cook County in November 2010 election. Tom is extremely proud to announce the launch of a new civic project, The CivicLab, a space where activists, educators, coders and designers meet to collaborate, teach, and build tools for civic engagement. The space is located in Chicago’s West Loop at 114 N. Aberdeen.

He is the lead organizer for the TIF Illumination Project that is investigating and explaining the impacts of Tax Increment Financing districts on a ward-by-ward basis. Tom and the TIF Illumination Project are profiled in the cover story of the July 22, 2013 issue of The Nation entitled “Chicago Rising!” Tom consulted with the Rockford Housing Authority on a local economic development program that combines the arts and creative enterprise.

Zeynep Tufekci is an assistant professor at the University of North Carolina at the School of Information and a fellow at the Center for Information Technology Policy and Princeton University. Her research revolves around examining how technology and society interact especially for sociality, surveillance, social movements and civics. She also blogs at http://www.technosociology.org.

Kaiya Waddell is a Client Partner at Facebook, where she focuses on driving strategic marketing initiatives with political organizations, government agencies and advocacy groups. Prior to managing the Facebook relationship with progressive 3rd party groups during the 2012 election, Kaiya was the PAC & Nonprofit Sales Manager at NGP VAN, a Democratic political software and new media firm. She previously served as the National Events Coordinator for EMILY’s List, which works to recruit, train and elect pro-choice Democratic women to public office. Kaiya holds a B.A. in political science from Eckerd College.

Bettina has a background in global governance and cultural diplomacy. Her interest in engaging the future by looking at the past has led her to projects across the world: she has written for Georgetown University Press on German nationalism, researched the Tamil diaspora, and produced cultural radio shows for NPR in Berlin. Bettina received her MSc from Oxford University and BS from Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service. Governance design, futures thinking, and how to grow the public imagination inform much of her research and project areas at the Institute for the Future, including in launching the Governance Futures Lab. As a Public Foresight Strategist at IFTF, Bettina works on a variety of strategic initiatives that push for foresight in the public realm, including the Future of Philanthropy, the Future of Learning, and the Future of Work. Bettina's current research examines the roles of creative social spaces in developing new models for generating value and systemic change.

A co-founder and the Research Director for Public Laboratory for Open Technology and Science, Jeffrey Warren designs mapping and civic science tools and professionally flies balloons and kites. Notable software he has created include the vector-mapping framework Cartagen and orthorectification tool MapKnitter, as well as open spectral database and toolkit Spectral Workbench.

He is a fellow at MIT's Center for Civic Media, on the board of the Open Source Hardware Association, on the advisory board of Personal Democracy Media's WeGov and an advocate of open source software, hardware, and data. He co-founded Vestal Design, a graphic/interaction design firm in 2004, and directed the Cut&Paste Labs project, a year-long series of workshops on opensource tools and web design in 2006-7 with Lima designer Diego Rotalde.

With 10 years of experience in project management and software architecture in open source code, Jeff has founded and contributed to dozens of widely-used software projects, from data visualization to geospatial applications. His experience in user experience, interface and graphic design have guided his work both in industry -- consulting and designing for GE and Intel -- as well as in the academic and open source space.

At Public Lab he has led software and hardware development efforts, coordinating a diverse team of project contributors from many organizations around the world. His hardware work has ranged from electronics design for air quality sensing to optics and imaging design for remote sensing and mobile spectrometry.

Jeff holds an MS from MIT and a BA in Architecture from Yale University, and spent much of that time working with artist/technologist Natalie Jeremijenko, building robotic dogs.

Rachel Weidinger is an artist and community organizer, who makes to illustrate what is possible. Her medium is social forms. Significant past works include Upwell (2011-2015), We Are Very Hungry (2010-2012), Scrap Eden (2006-2008) and Scrap House (2005).

In 2011, Rachel founded Upwell. Over the 3.5 years of Upwell's existence, she went on to become it's Executive Director of this nonprofit PR firm. Upwell's clients were movements. The ocean was our first client. Rachel led the development and evolution of Upwell's innovative big listening practices, coupling this big data approach with the resiliency-increasing tactic of campaigning across a distributed network. The project worked on a daily basis to both massively aggregate power for movements, and immediately redistribute that power through networks. Upwell's work was grounded in both offline community organizing and online community management. We developed and tested models to measurably increase online attention to issues. In the Spring of 2014, Upwell began a test to track issues in our U.S. democracy, and undertook research to baseline the African elephant conversation. Upwell concluded operations in March 2015.

Previously, Rachel was at TechSoup Global where she provided marketing leadership for TechSoup Global, and their earned-revenue-driven, tech-capacity-building Global Network of partners in 36 countries. She has also worked with social enterprises including the Nonprofit Technology Network, Common Knowledge, the Black Rock Arts Foundation, SF Environment, Copia, and the Xtracycle Foundation.

Rachel will enter the MFA program at the California College of the Arts, in the Social Practice Workshop, in the fall of 2015. She rather likes learning, and has a B.Phil. in Interdisciplinary Studies from Miami University's Western College Program, and completed the coursework for a masters in Arts Policy and Administration at Ohio State University. The latter she often describes as an MBA for people who run cultural organizations, and she focused on earned revenue to weather funding challenges. Completing the Renaissance Entrepreneurship Center's 14 week Business Planning Intensive upped her biz plan writing skills immeasurably.

Rachel paints words, and does not fear complexity.

Michael Weiss is a Russia expert and a columnist for NOW Lebanon, Foreign Policy, and The Daily Beast. He is the editor-in-chief of The Interpreter, a daily online journal dedicated primarily to translating media from the Russian press and blogosphere into English.

Lindsea K. Wilbur, born and raised in the countryside of Hawai'i, is professionally curious about storytelling, the lived experience of governance, and emerging technology.

Following her inquiries into alternative governance systems, she's gone from a network of underground tunnels beneath Paris to New York City's MacArthur and Knight Foundation-funded Governance Lab to the deep playa at the Burning Man Art and Music Festival.

In August 2013, sponsored by Institute for the Future, she took Governance Futures Lab's Inventors Toolkit across America with the Millennial Trains Project. Exploring what it means to do human-centered political design, she used this hands-on tool to explore citizen systems and futures thinking in 7 cities and regions: the Bay Area, Salt Lake City, Denver, Omaha, Chicago, Pittsburgh, and Washington, D.C.. She is helping design the next Millennial Trains Project journey, which will take place August 2014 and travel from Portland to New York City.

She also serves as Resident Futurist in the Planetary Collective, and is an affiliate at the Institute for the Future and the Hawai'i Research Center for Futures Studies.

Holmes Wilson is a co-founder and co-director of Fight for the Future. Wilson also co-founded Miro , Open Congress , and Amara . During that time, he served as founder and co-director of Downhill Battle, a first-of-its-kind viral campaign operation; director of development and project manager of Universal Subtitles at Participatory Culture Foundation and Participatory Politics Foundation (where he worked with Cheng to launch Open Congress, the most popular government transparency and accountability website in the world); and Campaign Manager for Free Software Foundation. Recently, Fight for the Future has been at the forefront of campaigns to end government mass surveillance and restore net neutrality.

Ben Wizner (@BenWizner) is director of the ACLU Speech, Privacy & Technology Project. He has litigated numerous cases involving post-9/11 civil liberties abuses, including challenges to airport security policies, government watchlists, extraordinary rendition, and torture. He has appeared regularly in the media, testified before Congress, and traveled several times to Guantánamo Bay to monitor military commission proceedings. Ben is a graduate of Harvard College and New York University School of Law and was a law clerk to the Hon. Stephen Reinhardt of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit. He is also Edward Snowden's legal advisor.

Christopher Wong is the Executive Director of the Engelberg Center on Innovation Law & Policy at NYU School of Law and a Visiting Fellow at the Yale Law School Information Society Project. Prior to joining NYU, Christopher was a Lecturing Postgraduate Fellow at the Institute for Information Law & Policy at New York Law School, as well as a Visiting Fellow at the Center for Information Technology Policy at Princeton University. While at NYLS, Christopher was the lead researcher of Open Patent, a National Science Foundation-funded program to explore the use of user-generated tags to improve access to and understanding of patent information. He previously served as the founding Project Manager of Peer to Patent, an initiative allowing the public to contribute to the patent examination process at the US Patent and Trademark Office, and which led to the codification of third-party prior art submissions in the America Invents Act. He is the founder of Innovate / Activate and Co-Director of both the Open Video Conference and the Drones & Aerial Robotics Conference.

Jillian C. York is Director for International Freedom of Expression at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Her work is at the intersection of technology and policy, with a focus on the Arab world. She is a frequent public speaker and has written for a variety of publications, including the New York Times, Al Jazeera, the Atlantic, the Guardian, Foreign Policy, and CNN.  With Katherine Maher, she has a regular web show, Interrobang‽, hosted on Bloggingheads.tv

Jillian contributed chapters to Beyond WikiLeaks: Implications for the Future of Communication, Journalism and Society (Palgrave Macmillan; March 2013) and State Power 2.0: Authoritarian Entrenchment and Political Engagement Worldwide (Ashgate Publishing; expected November 2013).  She serves on the Board of Directors of Global Voices Online, and on the Advisory Boards of R-Shief, Radio Free Asia’s Open Technology Fund, and Internews’ Global Internet Policy Project.

Deanna Zandt is an award-winning media technologist, the co-founder of and partner at Lux Digital, and the author of Share This! How You Will Change the World with Social Networking (Berrett-Koehler 2010). She is a consultant to key media and advocacy organizations, and her clients have included The Ford Foundation, Deutsche Telekom, Planned Parenthood, and Jim Hightower’s Hightower Lowdown. Zandt has advised the White House on digital strategy and public engagement; she has been a regular contributor to Forbes.com, as well as NPR’s flagship news program, “All Things Considered.” Zandt specializes in emerging media, is a leading expert in women and technology, and is a frequent guest on MSNBC, CNN International, BBC Radio, Fox News and more.

Zandt works with groups to create and implement effective web strategies toward organizational goals of civic engagement and cultural agency, and uses her background in linguistics, advertising, telecommunications and finance to complement her technical expertise. She has spoken at a number of conferences, including TEDxBerlin, SXSW Interactive, Tribeca Film Festival, re:publica, Personal Democracy Forum, Ignite (NYC), Netroots Nation, the National Conference on Media Reform, Facing Race, Web 2.0 Expo, Bioneers, Women Action & The Media, and provides beginner and advanced workshops both online and in person.

In 2012, the Planned Parenthood Federation of America awarded Deanna their first-ever social media Maggie Award for Media Excellence for her work on the Planned Parenthood Saved Me Tumblr blog during the Susan G Komen crisis. Deanna was a fellow at American University’s Center for Social Media (2010-2011), and at the Progressive Women’s Voices program at the Women’s Media Center (2009). She is on the board of the Applied Research Center, a racial justice think tank and home for media and activism, and Women Action & The Media, the activism home of gender justice in the media. Deanna also serves as an advisor to Social Media Week NYC, and the Media Ideation Fellowship.

In addition to her technology work, Deanna writes and illustrates graphic stories and comics, and volunteers with dog rescue organization Rat Terrier ResQ.

Mike's career/life is all about re-thinking industries and trends to create mass appeal and participation. Mike pushes the boundaries of shared economy models and their impact on innovative ecosystems, sustainable development and grass-roots community activation to improve civic life.

Currently he is: an affiliate Institute for the Future, Organizer for the National Day of Civic Hacking, Artist Liaison for Haiti Cummunitere in Port au Prince, Director of the Free Burma Project, Creative Director of the Urban Innovation Exchange, Community Organizer for Yerdle the free sharing site and most recently a co-founder of [ FREESPACE ]

Formerly... Mike was: Project Manager for Pacific Building and Design, worked at yahoo! and Director of Sustainability for Temple Nightclub - America's 1st green nightclub and on the original Advisory Council for the UN backed Business Council on Climate Change, was elected Chairman of the Kyebando Green Movement in Kampala, Uganda, Creative Consultant at the Barlow a new maker retail community in Sebastopol and a Culture Hacker at Innovation Endeavors, Eric Schmidt’s VC firm. He is also an urban bee keeper and loves sailing.

Scott Zumwalt has nearly a decade of experience in digital strategy and marketing for non-profits and progressive political campaigns. He is currently a senior director at Bully Pulpit Interactive. Scott leads some of BPI’s major client engagements drawing on his diverse background in digital advocacy for non-profits and political campaigns.

Scott is the chief digital strategist that helped launch and develop the award winning It Gets Better Project. He previously worked for Blue State Digital where he directed strategy accounts for American Red Cross and the Communications Workers of America. In 2008 he was the New Media Director for Kay Hagan’s successful campaign for the U.S. Senate in North Carolina against former Sen. Elizabeth Dole. Scott was also a digital aide on Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign and with former Gov. Tom Vilsack.

A native of Chappaqua, New York, Scott graduated cum laude from Georgetown University with a B.A. in Political Economy and minor in Sociology. Scott also holds a certificate in Graphic & Web Design and focus in web design and development from Boston University Center for Digital Imaging and Arts. He currently serves on the Gay & Lesbian Victory Fund Campaign Board.

Tantek Çelik has been active in open web standards innovation, development, and advocacy for over 16 years. He is currently Web Standards Lead at Mozilla, a founder and community leader of GMPG, microformats.org, & indiewebcamp.com, and participates in the World Wide Consortium (W3C) Advisory Board (AB), as well as CSS & HTML Working Groups. He is the author of HTML5 Now: A Step-By-Step Tutorial for Getting Started Today (New Riders: 2010). Previously he co-edited the W3C Recommendations CSS 2.1 and CSS3 Color, co-founded GMPG, BarCamp, IndieWebCamp, and was Chief Technologist at Technorati. Tantek lives in San Francisco, and has bachelor's and master's degrees in Computer Science from Stanford University, as well as a strong background in human interface and user-centered design from his many years at Apple Computer. He shares his thoughts at tantek.com.