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Technology and the Internet are changing democracy in America. We envision this site as one hub for the conversation already underway between political practitioners and technologists, as well as anyone invigorated by the potential of all this to open up the process and engage more people in all the things that we can and must do together as citizens.
Over the coming weeks and months, we are going to experiment with various ways of nurturing and expanding this conversation, ranging from blogging to investigative journalism, interviews, profiles and guest columns. The focus is going to be on new tools, processes, uses and trends--not on scoring partisan political points. We value your input and ideas.
Democracy in America is changing.
A new force, rooted in new tools and practices built on and around the Internet, is rising alongside the old system of capital-intensive broadcast politics.
Today, for almost no money, anyone can be a reporter, a community organizer, an ad-maker, a publisher, a money-raiser, or a leader.
If what they have to say is compelling, it will spread.
The cost of finding like-minded souls, banding together, and speaking to the powerful has dropped to almost zero.
Networked voices are reviving the civic conversation.
More people, everyday, are discovering this new power. After years of being treated like passive subjects of marketing and manipulation, they want to be heard.
Members expect a say in the decision-making process of the organizations they join. Readers want to talk back to the news-makers. Citizens are insisting on more openness and transparency from government.
All the old institutions and players-big money, top-down parties, big-foot journalism, cloistered organizations-must adapt or face losing status and power.
Personal Democracy, where everyone is a full participant, is coming.
The Personal Democracy Forum is your place to meet the people who are making that change happen, discover the tools powering the new civic conversation, spot the early trends, and share in understanding and embracing this dynamic new force.
Personal Democracy Forum Staff
Andrew Rasiej
Founder & Publisher
Micah L. Sifry
Executive Editor
Joshua Levy
Associate Editor
Anthony Russomano
Project Manager
And thanks to...
Hart Hooton
Dawn Barber
Elizabeth Caputo
Andrew Rasiej
Founder & Publisher
Andrew Rasiej is the Founder of Personal Democracy Forum , an annual conference and community website about the intersection of politics and technology. He is also the co-founder of techPresident, an award winning group blog that covers how the 2008 presidential candidates are using the web, and how content generated by voters is affecting the campaign. He has served as an advisor to Senators and Congressman and political candidates on the use of Information Technology for campaign and policy purposes since 1999. Among those he has worked with are Senator Hillary Clinton, Senator Tom Daschle, Congressman Dick Gephardt, the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee and the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. In 2001, he addressed the United States Senate Democratic Caucus in the US Capital Building on the "Digital Divides Facing Democratic Party" and has been actively involved in the campaigns of many Senators and Congressmen. For the 2004 Presidential race he served as Chairman of the Howard Dean Technology Advisory Council. He recently ran a highly visible campaign for Public Advocate of New York City, running in the Democratic primary on a platform to bring low cost wireless access to all New Yorkers. In the aftermath of the September 11th tragedy, Mr. Rasiej helped organize hundreds of local technology professionals to provide relief and recovery to small businesses and schools in lower Manhattan. From this experience, he proposed the creation of a National Tech Corps that would act similarly to the National Guard and provide emergency technical, communication, and database support in the event of a natural disaster or terrorist strike. This idea, now called NetGuard, was approved in a bill by the US Senate by a vote of 97 to 0 within four weeks from inception and was integrated into the Homeland Security Act and is currently being built by the US Department of Homeland Security.
Mr. Rasiej also maintains the position of senior technology adviser for the Sunlight Foundation, a Washington D.C. based organization that focuses on using technology to expose corruption in Congress and facilitates citizen engagement and oversite.
Mr. Rasiej is the founder of MOUSE (Making Opportunities for Upgrading Schools and Education), an educational non-profit organization started in 1997 focused on providing technology support to public schools. Originally a volunteer organization MOUSE currently runs a program called MOUSE Squad which trains students to run their school's computer systems and thereby helping them not only to learn lifelong skills but also empowering them to expanding their schools capacity in the use of technology for education. Mouse is active in 100 public schools in New York City and over 90 percent of the students in its programs graduate and go to college. Mouse has also expanded to over 20 countries around the world. Mr. Rasiej has served on the 2001 New York City Board of Education's task force on technology and has spearheaded several other innovative projects that support efforts to bridge the "Digital Divide" in public education.
In addition to work in bringing technology innovation to public schools, Mr. Rasiej is a co-founder of www.mideastwire.com, which is a Beirut based news service which translates opinion pieces from newspapers in all 22 Arab countries, Iran, and the Arab media Diaspora and makes them available to English speaking governments, corporations, media, and educational institutions.
Mr. Rasiej is the former chairman, CEO, and co-founder of the Digital Club Network (DCN) which created the internet's largest live music archive, which is now part of eMusic. In 1996, concurrent with his involvement in music and technology, Mr. Rasiej co-founded the world's best known annual digital music conference, "Plug In," which was attended by executives from major record labels and technology companies.
In 1990 Mr. Rasiej founded Irving Plaza, an internationally known concert venue located in New York City and produced concerts by well-known artists such as Bob Dylan, Eric Clapton, and Dave Matthews Band. Mr. Rasiej was also the Founder and President Emeritus of the New York Nightlife Association, a business trade group representing major New York City nightclubs and bars. NYNA works to create strong neighborhood relationships through community oriented programs and outreach.
Previous to his work in technology and the music industry, Mr. Rasiej had a successful career working in the real estate development working on several high profile projects in New York City including World Financial Center and South Street Seaport. Mr. Rasiej also provided real estate consulting services to various not for profit organizations.
Mr. Rasiej is a member of the Board of Directors of Pop!Tech. He is also a graduate of the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art and past recipient of the prestigious David Rockefeller Fellowship administered by the New York City Partnership.
Micah L. Sifry
Executive Editor
In May 2004, Micah L. Sifry helped co-found PDF. Since 1997, he has been a senior analyst with Public Campaign, a non-profit, non-partisan organization based in Washington, DC working on comprehensive campaign finance reform. In that capacity, he has published articles and op-eds in The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, Newsday, The American Prospect, The Hill, Salon.com, IntellectualPolitics.com and many smaller papers and magazines. He is also, with his colleague Nancy Watzman, co-author of Is That a Politician in Your Pocket? (John Wiley & Sons, 2004), a book on how money in politics affects people in their everyday lives.
He is also a freelance writer whose work has frequently appeared in The Nation, The American Prospect, Tikkun magazine and on the web in TomPaine.com and Salon.com. His book Spoiling for a Fight: Third-Party Politics in America (Routledge, 2002) was described in Newsday as "a commanding survey of contemporary third parties... In a more politically developed country, Sifry's reporting would be the gold standard of contemporary journalism." He has also written for The New York Times, Newsday, HotWired's Netizen, World Business, The New York Observer, George, Los Angeles, Elle, Inside Media, The Village Voice, and The Progressive. In 1998-99, he was an Independent Project Fellow of the Open Society Institute (1998-99), and was invited to write the epilogue of The Encyclopedia of Third Parties in America (M.E. Sharpe, 2000). He has appeared on CBS "This Morning," MSBNC, C-SPAN, MTV News, National Public Radio, Air America and many talk radio programs, and is frequently consulted as a leading source on third-party politics by many reporters.
Prior to joining Public Campaign in 1997, Sifry was an editor and writer with The Nation magazine for thirteen years, writing widely on domestic and international politics, especially the Middle East, his first love and specialty. He is the co-editor, with Christopher Cerf, of The Iraq War Reader (Touchstone, 2003), of which the Weekly Standard said: "Most public-policy anthologies are a bore--either too slight in substance or too academic in tone. Not so The Iraq War Reader. It combines polemics with solid policy statements; forceful opinion pieces with scholarly analyses. Readers will find in its pages key documents, speeches, and essays that give depth to the debate about American policy toward Iraq.
Sifry and Cerf also co-edited The Gulf War Reader (Times Books, 1991), which The Washington Post reviewed as "a highly valuable book....a fascinating tour back through the dilemmas and edgy emotions of the crisis." From 1993-96, in addition to being associate editor of The Nation and politics editor of RadioNation, he published The Perot Periodical, a quarterly newsletter, which was praised by the Columbia Journalism Review as "indispensable reading for politics junkies of any political persuasion: first-rate reporting by first-rate reporters."
He is a graduate of Princeton University (B.A. in Politics, 1983) and New York University (M.A. in Politics, 1989). He is also an adjunct professor at the Political Science Department of the City University of New York/Graduate Center, and a founding member of its Independent Politics Group.
Joshua Levy
Associate Editor
Joshua Levy is a writer, editor, filmmaker, and blogger whose work explores the social nature of technology and its role among immigrant, minority, and disenfranchised groups. His work includes The Bronx Blog Project, a video and web project that examines the intersections of technology, immigration, and community by documenting immigrants in the Bronx as they learned how to blog; "Social Software for Social Change," an experimental and open essay in wiki form that considers the social and political possibilities of open source software and invites its readers to modify its content; and Pigeon People, a documentary about three pigeon-keepers that screened at the Brooklyn Arts Council International Film Festival in May 2006.
Levy is an adjunct lecturer in the Department of Film and Media at Hunter College, where he received an M.F.A. in Integrated Media Arts. He is a graduate of the University of Vermont.
Hart Hooton
General Manager
Mr. Hooton’s diverse publishing experiences span twenty years and include stints as both editor and business executive, and in start-up and blue-chip media companies. In 2002, Hart created Marketechnique Consulting and now leverages his best-practices expertise in traditional and emerging publishing sectors to develop online media and marketing programs for book, newspaper, magazine publishing and digital content clients.
Hart Hooton began his career in magazine and Internet publishing by working on numerous magazine launches, first for Children’s Television Workshop and then for Hearst Magazines. His ten-year stint at Hearst encompassed work at individual magazine franchises and in both its international publishing operation and corporate sales & marketing division.
An early adopter of computer technology, Hart later joined Time Inc.’s Sports Illustrated, helped create and build a joint venture between CNN and Time Inc., and successfully launched CNNSI.com, a 24x7 online sports news business (now known as SI.com). Hart was instrumental in building this franchise into one of the Web’s leading sports sites and online communities. As general manager, accomplishments included overseeing critical components of the site’s launch and rapid market share and revenue growth, with CNNSI.com reaching six million monthly consumers and triple-digit revenue increases.
A lifelong resident of New York City, Hart counts rollerblading, hard-nosed basketball, music, and science fiction as passionate hobbies and lives with his wife, daughter and son in Manhattan’s downtown Chelsea section.
Dawn Barber
Director of Marketing & Events
Dawn Barber has 15 years business experience, more than six years of which have been spent successfully building and administering programs for not-for-profit organizations in the arts and in the new-media industry. She also has a track record of effectively raising funds and forging significant corporate partnerships with prominent professional services firms and Fortune 500 companies.
Most recently, Ms. Barber served as Director of Conferences and Events for the New York New Media Association, the largest Internet-industry association in North America. There, she was responsible for raising the sponsorship monies for Venture Downtown, a leading annual venture capital conference that raised over $4 billion for participating companies. She consistently exceeded Venture Downtown fundraising goals by 20%.
Ms. Barber was also responsible for the New York New Media Association’s annual trade show, Super CyberSuds, as well as a wide variety of other networking and educational events. Among her accomplishments in that role, she achieved a nearly 100% success rate at obtaining desired high-profile speakers.
In her four years at NYNMA, she forged key corporate partnerships (with companies including JP Morgan Chase, Hewlett-Packard, Sun Microsystems and Google), and managed a budget of over $2 million (representing 40% of the organization’s operating budget), while overseeing a staff of six employees, plus consultants. She increased NYNMA’s corporate sponsorship renewal rate by 50% and contributed directly to a fourfold growth in both membership and corporate sponsorship rolls.
Earlier in her career, Ms. Barber was Production Coordinator for the Museum of Modern Art. She was responsible for producing the museum’s permanent collection paper products for the MoMA Design Store, negotiating with vendors, printers and packagers and acting as liaison with museum staff and curators.
A native New Yorker, Ms. Barber received her B.A. in English from Clark University, and lives in Manhattan with her husband and daughter.
Anthony Russomano
Project Manager
Anthony Russomano received a BA in history with a minor in New York City Studies from Pace University in May 2004. While attending Pace University, Mr. Russomano worked in online marketing as the Assistant Director of Marketing for Wall Street Rising, a not-for-profit organization dedicated to restoring the vibrancy and vitality that existed in Lower Manhattan prior to the devastating events of September 11, 2001. During his senior year, in addition to working at Wall Street Rising, Mr. Russomano interned at the district office of New York City Councilmember Alan J. Gerson. There he was responsible for researching and drafting legislation that would become New York City laws. Mr. Russomano currently resides in Brooklyn, NY and enjoys spending time with his goddaughter Antonia and his nephew Angelo.
Jay Rosen
Michael Bassik is Vice President for Internet Advertising at Malchow Schlackman Hoppey & Cooper, the leading political direct mail and online advertising firm in America. Under Michael's leadership, MSHC has executed over 100 different banner ad campaigns and delivered over 1 billion ad impressions on behalf of Democratic candidates at all levels of the ballot. MSHC was also the online advertising agency of record for John Kerry and the Democratic National Committee during the 2004 election cycle. Before joining MSHC, Michael worked at America Online as director of political advertising where he oversaw political sales strategy across Time Warner's online properties, including AOL, CNN.com, and TIME.com. Michael has previously held internship positions at The White House, The New York Times, New York City Hall, and on various political campaigns. He is a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania and currently attends evening classes at Brooklyn Law School.
Michael Cornfield, a political scientist, studies and advises on campaign politics, the public discourse, and the internet. He is the author of Politics Moves Online: Campaigning and the Internet and The Civic Web: Online Politics and Democratic Values, co-edited with David M. Anderson. Cornfield currently serves as a Senior Research Consultant to the Pew Internet & American Life Project and is an Adjunct Professor at The Graduate School of Political Management (GSPM) of The George Washington University.
Christian Crumlish is a writer and consultant based in Oakland, California. His most recent book is The Power of Many: How the Living Web is Transforming Business Politics, and Everyday Life and he blogs primarily at xian's monolog.
Chuck DeFeo has been an innovator in using the Internet and new technologies to increase participation in the political process for nearly a decade. He has recently joined Salem Communications where he is working to integrate Salem's talk radio content with an interactive Web presence. Prior to joining Salem, DeFeo served as eCampaign Manager for Bush-Cheney '04, where he developed the online strategy and managed Internet operations for President Bush's re-election campaign. He served in a similar capacity with the Republican National Committee during the 2002 Election. DeFeo is also a member of MeetUp.com’s Politics and Governance Advisory Council.
Jan Frel is a former editor for TomPaine.com and AlterNet.org. He has also worked on Howard Dean's presidential campaign in Vermont. Jan was raised in Southern California and he studied Geography at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland. He currently lives in San Francisco, California.
Kate Kaye is a freelance writer who has been covering online advertising, media and emerging technologies for various trade publications since 2000. Kate’s work has been published in Advertising Age, Business 2.0, AdAge's Creativity, Revolution Magazine, various MediaPost publications, and others. In 2001, Kate self-published Sales Pitch Society, an essay documenting and exploring the dangers of engineered viral and peer-to-peer marketing tactics, and since 2000, Kate has written and published her irreverent commentary column, The Lowbrow Lowdown, aiming to analyze the effects of marketing and advertising on culture, society and our daily lives. Most recently, Kate wrote and designed a kooky self-published punk rock-themed cookie cookbook entitled, The Punk Rock Kitchen Presents Cookie Chaos!
Kaliya Hamlin works developing social media strategy and blogging for a variety of clients ranging from Broadway musicals to enterprise software companies. Her own blogging has focused on the emergence of persistent digital identity systems at IdentityWoman.net. She serves in a networking role for several organizations at the intersection of information technology and civil society: Planetwork, Identity Commons and Integrative Activism. She is an associate of the Co-Intelligence Institute and regularly volunteers her networking skill for the Interra Project. Kaliya was born and raised in Vancouver, Canada and came to the United States in 1995 to play varsity water polo and study Political Economy, Human Rights, Demography and Environmental Science Policy Management at UC Berkeley. She currently lives with her husband in Oakland, California.
Mike Krempasky is the political director for American Target
Advertising, a conservative direct mail firm, founded by conservative
activist pioneer Richard Viguerie. He co-founded RedState.org,
Rathergate.com, and NotSpecter.com. He would have tolerated a Kerry
presidency in exchange for a Steelers Super Bowl win.
Rebecca MacKinnon is currently a research fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society. Previously she was CNN’s bureau chief and correspondent in Tokyo and Beijing. She blogs at www.RConversation.com and www.NKzone.org.
Ari Melber is a regular contributor to The Nation Online and The Huffington Post, and his commentary has appeared in The Baltimore Sun, The Seattle Post-Intelligencer, The Forward, The Times Union, Alternet.org and The American Prospect Online. He has reviewed nonfiction books for The New York Post, Kirkus Reviews and The Stranger, and is also a contributor to "MoveOn's 50 Ways to Love Your Country," a bestselling book about political activism (Inner Ocean Publishing, 2004).
Melber has served as a Legislative Aide in the U.S. Senate and as a national staff member of the John Kerry Presidential Campaign. He spoke at the 2006 YearlyKos convention on a panel about foreign policy and netroots activism, and he volunteers as a guest lecturer for the Close Up Foundation, a nonpartisan civics education organization. Melber has appeared as a commentator on several talk radio shows, from Westwood One's conservative "Scarborough Country" to the liberal "Young Turks" program on Sirius Radio. Melber received a Bachelor of Arts in Political Science from the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, and he also studied at the University of Chile in Santiago. He was born and raised in Seattle, Washington. He can be contacted at amelber(at)hotmail.com.
Jerry Michalski spent five years writing Esther Dyson's monthly technology newsletter Release 1.0 and co-hosting her annual conference, PC Forum. An independent consultant since 1998, Jerry helps organizations figure out what path to take through an ever-changing future, based largely on his expertise with social media and his pursuit of the word "consumer" for the past decade. Jerry believes that the sphere of Government has become consumerized, to its detriment, and will post here about ways that this is being remedied. Think of it as "small g" governance. His site and personal blog are at www.sociate.com.
Jed Miller is director of Internet programs for the American Civil Liberties Union. He was previously director at the New York nonprofit Web Lab, where he oversaw online dialogues on civic issues and social change (www.weblab.org/sgd). Jed has written about digital democracy and Internet culture for PlaNetwork Journal, the Kettering Foundation, the E-Volve Foundation and others. As interactive editor at The New York Times on the Web, he managed all reader forums and created the web discussions for the newspaper's Pulitzer-winning 2000 series on race in America. His site and personal blog are at www.jedmiller.com.
Kathy Mitchell manages online advocacy for Consumers Union, nonprofit publisher of Consumer Reports and helps other nonprofits develop their web advocacy on a volunteer basis. She now writes regularly about the practical problems faced by nonprofit advocates trying to reach an audience on the Internet on her new personal blog gettingthemessageout.blogspot.com.
Stand-alone journalist Chris Nolan runs "Politics From Left to Right," a San Francisco-based political site that focuses on the intersection of politics and technology and the differences between East Coast insiders and West Coast influencers.
Justin Oberman consults in the new media space. As a New Media Viral Communication Consultant and founder of Digitisms for that purpose, Justin specialized in consulting corporations, non-profits, political campaigns and individuals to effectively harness the power of new media tools such as the blogosphere, social networking and mobile technology.Justin is also the founder and editor of the popular mobile technology weblog MOpocket.com. Known as a mobile maven of sorts, you can also read Justin at MobileActive an organization dedicated to the use of mobile technology for social activism of which he is an original member and at the Personal Democracy Forum where he is the Mobile Technology and Politics Correspondent. Recently, Justin was made the mobile guru for the recently launched TechPresient blog which covers how the 2008 presidential candidates are using the web, and vice versa. Justin has also contributed to the Institute of Politics, Democracy and the Internet's Politics To Go Handbook and many other wireless specialty publications and white pages. Justin is also on the board of Mobile Monday New York and is also a co-founder and on the board of advisors for Mobile Monday Washington DC. He is also a major contributor to the Carnival of the Mobilists.
When he is not traveling the globe attending and speaking at wireless related events Justin lives in New York City where in his spare time he is also a high school policy debate coach. He has a BA from Brandeis University, a Masters Degree in Philosophy from the Graduate Faculty at the New School and 2-3 start up ideas written on napkins in his back pocket.
For more information text "joberman" to Mozes (66937)
Christopher Rabb is a freelance writer, blogger, web activist and serial
entrepreneur. A former Capitol Hill staffer, Christopher is the founder and
chief evangelist of Afro-Netizen, one of the oldest and well-known Black
online communities in cyberspace.
Brian is the editor of Campaign Web Review, a blog examining the use of the Internet by candidates, campaigns and organizations, activists and the media during the 2004 cycle. He was credentialed to blog the Democratic and Republican Conventions as well as the Presidential Debates. He has spent much of his life working with campaigns and political organizations, helping to direct dozens of campaigns across the country. He also served as Vice President Gore's Briefing Director in the White House and during the 2000 campaign. Brian is now a strategic consultant and Director of Boston Operations for Mindshare Interactive Campaigns.
Nancy Scola is a former staffer for the House Committee on Government Reform where she covered both online communications and technology policy. Before that, Nancy developed research techniques in the non-profit sector for an organization focused on the development of urban neighborhoods. And before that, she was a grad student in anthropology. She is now an aspiring writer focusing on culture,
politics, technology, and more. She blogs at nancyscola.com and lives in Brooklyn.
Zephyr Teachout was the Director of Internet Organizing for Howard Dean's campaign, the Executive Director of Baobabs College Labs Project, and a consultant to America Coming Together. She was previously the Executive Director of the Fair Trial Initiative.
Michael Turk is Vice President of Industry Grassroots for the National Cable & Telecommunications Association, where he is working to build a robust grassroots activist base for the cable industry. Before joining NCTA, Turk served as the eCampaign Director for the Republican National Committee. Prior to his position at the Committee, Turk was the eCampaign Director for Bush-Cheney '04. In his professional career, Turk has lived at the intersection of politics and technology - crossing from the political, to the commercial and into government. Beginning in 1994 with the creation of one of the first state party websites on the Internet, he has served as the e-Government Portfolio Manager for Government-to-Citizen projects at the Office of Management and Budget; redeployed the Department of Energy’s internet presence at energy.gov; and worked with Grassroots Enterprise - an Internet focused public affairs firm - as a technology and activism consultant.
David Weinberger is co-author of The Cluetrain Manifesto and author of Small Pieces Loosely Joined. He was Senior Internet Advisor to the Dean campaign. He has written for a wide range of publications about the intersection of technology, ideas and values; he is a senior editor at Worthwhile Magazine and a columnist for KMWorld. He is currently a fellow at Harvard Law's Berkman Center for Internet and Society. His main blog is Joho. He has not appeared on Oprah.
Cory Doctorow is the author of two science fiction novels, Eastern Standard Tribe, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom, both published by Tor books and circulated for free on the Internet under a Creative Commons license (his short story collection, A Place So Foreign and Eight More, is also available). His day job is in London, working as European Affairs Coordinator for the Electronic Frontier Foundation and UK Coordinator for the Creative Commons. He is also the co-editor of the popular weblog boing boing and is a Contributing Writer to Wired Magazine.
Max Fose is a Partner with the firm Integrated Web Strategy (IWS). IWS is an Internet consulting company specializing in helping campaigns, corporations, and non-profit associations integrate the Internet into their overall communication and fundraising strategy.
Prior to becoming a partner with IWS, Fose was the Internet Manager and Treasurer for the McCain 2000 presidential campaign. As the Internet Manager, he created an interactive Web site that not only organized more than one hundred thousand volunteers nationwide, but also raised an historic $6.4 million through the Internet.
Max Fose was named to the list of "25 Internet professionals who are changing the world of politics" by Politics Online, Harvard University, and the American Association of Political Consultants (AAPC).
Fose sat for two years as an Expert Panelist for the Congress Online Project that studied and recommended best practices to the United States Congress. He also co-authored The Internet and Campaigns: Interactively Empowering Citizens for the Chicago Policy Review and served as a Practitioner in Residence at the Institute for Politics Democracy and the Internet at George Washington University.
Max Fose has serviced a wide range of clients that include three Presidential campaigns, nationwide non-profit organizations, statewide Senatorial, gubernatorial and initiative campaigns, and Mayoral races for some of Americas largest cities.
Scott Heiferman is the CEO of Meetup.com, a global non-partisan platform that helps people organize local monthly real-world gatherings about anything anywhere. Scott co-founded Meetup.com in 2002, Fotolog.net in 2002 (the leading photo weblog platform, used by over a quarter million people and viewed by nearly 1 million people daily) and i-traffic in 1995 (the first online ad agency, a pioneer in search-keyword media placement and now one of the largest online media buyers, with offices in the U.S. and Europe).
Over 1 million people (and growing) have signed up to Meetup with a group of neighbors about knitting, chihuahuas, diabetes, George Bush, and thousands of other topics.
In 1994, Scott was "Interactive Marketing Frontiersman" at Sony, where he created Sony's first consumer online presence. He graduated from The University of Iowa and has posted a photo on his personal Fotolog every day for three years.
Arianna Huffington is a nationally syndicated columnist and author of ten books. Originally from Greece, she moved to England when she was sixteen and graduated from Cambridge University with an M.A. in Economics. At twenty-one she became President of the famed debating society, the Cambridge Union.
In 2003, she ran for governor as an Independent in California's recall election. Her populist grassroots campaign was widely praised for putting the media spotlight on the corrupting influence of special interest money on American politics.
Her New York Times bestseller,"Pigs at the Trough: How Corporate Greed and Political Corruption are Undermining America", was published in 2003. Her latest book, "Fanatics and Fools: The Game Plan for Winning Back America" (April 2004), offers both a scathing portrait of our contemporary political landscape and a bold, inspiring, yet practical approach to restoring America to the promise envisioned by our greatest leaders.
During Campaign '96, Arianna teamed up with Al Franken to provide political coverage for Comedy Central during the Republican and Democratic conventions, as well as on election night. She and Franken also appeared in a point-counterpoint segment, Strange Bedfellows, for Politically Incorrect.
She serves on several boards that promote community solutions to social problems, including A Place Called Home that works with at-risk children in South Central Los Angeles. She also serves on the Board of Trustees for the Archer School for Girls, the advisory board of the Council on American Politics at George Washington University, and the board of the Reform Institute that works on campaign and election reform issues.
Jeff Jarvis is former TV critic for TV Guide and People, creator of Entertainment Weekly, Sunday Editor of the NY Daily News, and a columnist on the San Francisco Examiner. He is now president & creative director of Advance.net and blogs at Buzzmachine.com.
Bob Kerrey is President of New School University in New York City. For twelve years prior to becoming President of New School University, Bob Kerrey represented the State of Nebraska in the United States Senate. Before that he served as Nebraska's Governor for four years.
Educated in pharmacy at the University of Nebraska, Bob Kerrey served three years in the United States Navy. After his military service, he started a chain of restaurants and health clubs in Nebraska, Iowa and Kansas.
Bob Kerrey entered the race for Governor of Nebraska with no prior political experience and was elected as a Democrat in a heavily Republican State. After serving a single four-year term, he returned to business. Upon the death of Nebraska's senior United States Senator, Kerrey became a candidate for the U.S. Senate. He was elected in 1988 and re-elected in 1994. He chose not to run for re-election a third time because of the offer to be President of New School University and his desire to return to private life.
Bob Kerrey is the author of When I Was A Young Man: A Memoir, published by Harcourt Books (May 2002). He served as a member of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks upon the United States, currently leads a five year writing challenge sponsored by The National Commission on Writing in America’s Schools and Colleges, and is co-chair with Newt Gingrich of The National Commission for Quality Long-Term Care.
Andrew is Senior Policy Counsel for Google Inc., based in New York City. He is a non-resident Senior Fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School, where his work has focused on the law and regulation of Internet and telecommunications networks. In recent years, he has focused primarily on developing countries, including Ghana, Mongolia, Kenya, Afghanistan, and South Africa. Since joining Google, Andrew has continued that work as a member of the Board of Directors of Bridges.org, an international non-profit organisation based in Cape Town that promotes the effective use of information and communications technology in the developing world to reduce poverty and improve citizens' lives.
From 1999-2002, Andrew helped to launch and manage the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), serving as Vice President, Chief Policy Officer, and Chief Financial Officer. ICANN is the global non-profit organization responsible for coordinating the Internet's systems of unique identifiers, such as domain names and IP addresses.
From 1997-98, Andrew served as Counsel to Congressman Henry Waxman of Los Angeles. From 1995-97, he practiced law at Jenner & Block in Washington, D.C., where he was a member of the team that challenged the U.S. government's Communications Decency Act, resulting in a Supreme Court victory and the landmark Internet free speech ruling in Reno v. ACLU. In 1994-95, Andrew clerked for Judge Gerald W. Heaney of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit.
Born in West Africa to foreign service parents, Nicco Mele graduated from the College of William & Mary in 1999. He went on to be the first webmaster at Common Cause, and then the producer of the Shadow Conventions website and live streaming webcasts during the 2000 presidential election cycle. Prior to joining the Dean campaign, Nicco worked as the webmaster of the International AIDS Vaccine Initiative (IAVI) in New York City. Nicco joined the Dean campaign during the last week of April 2003, and worked as the Director of Internet Operations managing the strategy, technical and design details of the Dean internet campaign through March 2004. He has been profiled by the Wall Street Journal and CNN, and in December of 2003 he was named one of the "best and brightest" by Esquire Magazine.
Jerry Michalski spent five years writing Esther Dyson's monthly technology newsletter Release 1.0 and co-hosting her annual conference, PC Forum. An independent consultant since 1998, Jerry helps organizations figure out what path to take through an ever-changing future, based largely on his expertise with social media and his pursuit of the word "consumer" for the past decade. Jerry believes that the sphere of Government has become consumerized, to its detriment, and will post here about ways that this is being remedied. Think of it as "small g" governance. His site and personal blog are at www.sociate.com.
Doc Searls s a writer and speaker on topics that arise where
technology and business meet. He is the Senior Editor of Linux Journal, the premier Linux monthly and one of the world's leading technology magazines. He also runs the Doc Searls' IT Garage, an online journal published by Linux Journal's parent company, SSC. He is co-author of The Cluetrain Manifesto: The End of Business as Usual, a New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Business Week, Borders Books and Amazon.com bestseller. He also writes Doc Searls Weblog. J.D. Lasica of Annenberg's Online Journalism Review calls Doc "one of the deep thinkers in the blog movement." Doc's blog is consistently listed among the top few blogs, out of millions — by Technorati, Blogstreet and others.
Joe Trippi, heralded on the cover of The New Republic as the man who "reinvented campaigning," was born in California and began his political career working on Edward M. Kennedy's presidential campaign in 1980. His work in presidential politics continued with the campaigns of Walter Mondale, Gary Hart, Richard Gephardt and most recently Howard Dean.
As a campaign manager, Trippi has run presidential, Senate, gubernatorial and mayoral campaigns. He was selected by former Vice President Walter Mondale to manage Iowa's first-in-the-nation caucuses in 1984 and later went on to run several key states for the Mondale for President campaign. In 1988, Trippi was the Deputy National Campaign Manager for Richard Gephardt's presidential campaign. In 2004, he was National Campaign Manager for Howard Dean's presidential campaign, pioneering the use of online technology to organize what became the largest grassroots movement in presidential politics. Through Trippi's innovative use of the internet for small-donor fundraising, Dean for America ended up raising more money than any Democratic presidential campaign in history, all with donations averaging less than $100 each.
Joe Trippi is an MSNBC elections analyst, Harvard University fellow and heads the Washington, DC political consultancy, Trippi & Associates.
Trippi is the author of, "The Revolution Will Not Be Televised: Democracy, the Internet and the Overthrow of Everything," the story of how his revolutionary use of the Internet and an impassioned, contagious desire to overthrow politics as usual grew into a national grassroots movement and changed the face of politics, and indeed many aspects of American life, forever.
David Weinberger is co-author of The Cluetrain Manifesto and author of Small Pieces Loosely Joined. He was Senior Internet Advisor to the Dean campaign. He has written for a wide range of publications about the intersection of technology, ideas and values; he is a senior editor at Worthwhile Magazine and a columnist for KMWorld. He is currently a fellow at Harvard Law's Berkman Center for Internet and Society. His main blog is Joho. He has not appeared on Oprah.
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