About Us

Welcome

Technology and the Internet are changing democracy in America. This site is 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. We value your input and ideas.

Manifesto

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
Editor and Curator

Nancy Scola
Associate Editor

Nick Judd
Assistant Editor

Anthony Russomano
Project Manager

Daniel Teweles
Vice President of Business Development and Marketing

Contributing Editors

Senior Editors:

Contributing Bloggers:

And thanks to...

Dawn Barber

Hart Hooton

Joshua Levy

Jon Mandell

Jen Vento

Advisory Board:

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
Editor and Curator

Micah L. Sifry is co-founder and editor of the Personal Democracy Forum, a website and annual conference that covers the ways technology is changing politics and TechPresident.com, its award-winning group blog on how the American presidential candidates are using the web and how the web is using them. In addition to organizing the annual Personal Democracy Forum conference with his partner Andrew Rasiej, he consults on how political organizations, campaigns, non-profits and media entities can adapt to and thrive in a networked world. In that capacity, he has been a senior technology adviser to the Sunlight Foundation since its founding in 2006. The Avi Chai Foundation is also currently a client. In the past, he and Rasiej have consulted for the New York State Senate CIO's Office, Air America, the Campaign for America's Future, the Brennan Center, and the Regional News Network.

In recent years, Sifry has been a featured speaker at Games for Change (NYC, May 2010), the European Association of Political Consultants (Vienna, May 2010), eDem10 (Danube University, April 2010), the White House Gathering on Innovation Through Prizes, Challenges and Open Grantmaking (Washington, DC, April 2010), the re:Public conference (Berlin, April 2010), the International School for Digital Transformation (Porto, Portugal, July 2009), the annual U.S. Government Web Managers conference (Washington, May 2009), the Brennan Center Campaign Finance 2.0 conference (Washington, May 2009), Politics Online (Washington, April 2009, and previous years), MESH Forum (Toronto, April 2009), Freedom to Connect (Silver Spring, April 2009 and previous years), Transparency Camp (Washington, February 2009), DLD (Munich, January 2009), the Berkman Center for Internet & Society (Harvard, December 2008), Netroots Nation (Austin, July 2008 and previous years), the USC School of Journalism (Los Angeles, May 2008), Web 2.0 Politics (Royal Holloway, London, April 2008), and eTech (San Diego, March 2008).

Recently, he appeared on the PBS NewsHour debating the impact of the Internet on democracy, and he has written for numerous publications over the course of his career, including The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, Politico, TalkingPointsMemo, Newsday, The American Prospect, The Hill, Salon.com, IntellectualPolitics.com, Columbia Journalism Review, Tikkun, TomPaine.com, Salon.com, Newsday, HotWired's Netizen, World Business, The New York Observer, George, Los Angeles, Elle, Inside Media, The Village Voice, YES Magazine, and The Progressive. In 1998-99, he was an Independent Project Fellow of the Open Society Institute, 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, BBC, Sky News, MTV News, National Public Radio, CBC Radio, Air America and too many local talk radio programs. He was recently nominated to the Consumers Union board, which he will be joining in October 2010.

From 1997-2005, he was a senior analyst with Public Campaign, a non-profit, non-partisan organization based in Washington, DC working on comprehensive campaign finance reform. Prior to that, Sifry was an editor and writer with The Nation magazine for thirteen years. He is the co-author with Nancy Watzman of Is That a Politician in Your Pocket? Washington on $2 Million a Day (John Wiley & Sons, 2004), author of Spoiling for a Fight: Third-Party Politics in America (Routledge, 2002) and co-edited The Iraq War Reader (Touchstone, 2003) and The Gulf War Reader (Times Books, 1991). In June 2008, his latest book, Rebooting America, an anthology of writing on how the Internet and new technology can be used to reinvent American democracy, co-edited with Allison Fine, Andrew Rasiej and Josh Levy, was published. (It’s available online for free download at rebooting.personaldemocracy.com.) He is also an adjunct professor at the Political Science Department of the City University of New York/Graduate Center, where he sometimes teaches a course called “Writing Politics.” His personal blog is at micah.sifry.com.

Nancy Scola
Associate Editor

Nancy Scola is associate editor of Personal Democracy Forum and PdF's techPresident. Before joining Personal Democracy Forum, Scola served as a policy aide and outreach coordinator for now-Senator Mark Warner of Virginia as he explored a bid in the 2008 U.S. presidential race. In that capacity, she covered Warner's tech and innovation policy portfolio while coordinating relationships with those in the technology world. Scola briefly served as chief online editor for Air America Media. From 2001 to 2005, she worked in the United States House of Representatives on the Committee on Government Reform under the direction of Rep. Henry Waxman of California. Scola began her career in Washington working as a research designer at Social Compact, a non-profit organization that maps and analyzes urban domestic neighborhoods to demonstrate opportunities for business investment.

In 2007, Scola co-directed the Personal Democracy Forum unConference, and in 2008 presidential cycle she co-led (Twitter) Vote Report, a project that brought together independent developers, established election protection organizations, and news organizations like NPR to conduct distributed reporting around the practice of democracy.

Scola's work as a writer has also appeared in publications including the American Prospect, Seed Magazine, Politics Magazine, Columbia Journalism Review, the Center for American Progress's Science Progress, and AlterNet. (Some samples of her work are available here.) Her commentary has appeared on the BBC, CNN.com Live, Air America Radio, Brian Lehrer Live, and elsewhere. She fairly regularly appears on conference panels. Among other things, Nancy has worked with the AFL-CIO, served on the Drum Major Institute's netroots advisory board, been a blogger on the political blog MyDD, spent a summer studying Swahili at Yale University, taught English as a second language in Kenya, and taught a seminar at New York University.

Scola holds a B.A. in anthropology from George Washington University, with a minor in Africana studies. She also holds an M.A. in anthropology from Boston University, where she also served as a fellow in the university's African Studies Center. On Twitter, Scola is @nancyscola, and her personal website is nancyscola.com. Scola lives in Brooklyn.

Nick Judd
Assistant Editor

Nick Judd writes about the industry of political technology for Personal Democracy Forum and techPresident. He joined Personal Democracy Forum in the fall of 2009 as a reporter/researcher, and became assistant editor in March 2010. He also wrote and edited Personal Democracy Forum's Who to Hire guide and manages candidate and media partnerships for PdF's 10Questions project.

Prior to signing on with PdF, Judd was a staff reporter at The Riverdale Press, where he covered Bronx politics for about two years and picked up a number of statewide awards, as well as leading coverage that won a national award for spot news coverage.

He has also written for The Jersey Journal and City Limits, and did a brief stint as a research assistant for the public policy think tank Center for an Urban Future. He graduated magna cum laude from New York University in 2007 with a B.A. in metropolitan studies and journalism. You can follow him on Twitter at @nclarkjudd or visit his personal website at nclarkjudd.com. Judd lives in Brooklyn.

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.

Daniel Teweles
Vice President of Business Development and Marketing

Daniel Teweles is Personal Democracy Forum's Vice President of Business Development and Marketing, and the project manager for www.10Questions.com. Prior to joining PdF in June of 2010, Daniel was the National Student Coordinator for STAND, one of the world's largest youth activist organizations and the student-led division of the Genocide Intervention Network. At STAND, Daniel led strategic review and organizational restructuring processes, was a champion of innovative video and social media advocacy, worked with the White House and State Department on the Obama Administration's first-ever live webcast, managed and built partner relationships, and mentored STAND's student leadership team.

Previously, Daniel worked as the project coordinator for an NGO developing water and sanitation public infrastructure in Kenya, and as an Officer of Public and Academic Affairs for Israel's Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Based out of the Embassy of Israel in Washington, DC, Daniel was responsible for helping to manage the Government of Israel's relationship with the American public, managing relationships with academic institutions and student groups, as well as assisting in the launch of Israel's official YouTube channel.

Originally from Michigan, Daniel graduated with dual degrees in Political Science and Philosophy & Religion from James Madison University where he was a member of Theta Alpha Kappa and Sigma Alpha Lambda. He is a proud recipient of the Congressional Medal of Merit for his service to his community. Daniel lives in the West Village with his dog, Jack (who is PdF's VP of Carpet Inspection), and enjoys exploring New York and traveling internationally. You can follow him on Twitter at @dteweles and view his most recent photographs at http://www.flickr.com/anappleanight.

Contributing Editors:

Matthew Burton was an intelligence analyst at the Defense Intelligence Agency from 2003-2005. While there, he became a key Intelligence Community (IC) advocate for better Web-based collaboration and analysis tools, and several of his ideas have since been implemented. In 2005, he was the youngest honoree of the inaugural DCI Galileo Awards, an IC innovation contest. His proposal to change the the culture of Intelink by allowing analysts to freely publish their work has since been adopted by the IC.

After leaving the IC in 2005, he completed a Master's program at New York University's Interactive Telecommunications Program. He is now an online strategy consultant to government agencies, primarily those in the national security community. He and a group of partners have created Analysis of Competing Hypotheses, a Web application that encourages objective intelligence analysis and information sharing.

He is also an advocate for more transparent, tech-savvy governance. He frequently writes about the Internet's impact on government and democracy, and is launching a project to create free, open source software for government agencies.

Sarah Grangerhas a rare combination of technical and communications skills, blended with a deep commitment to public service and advocacy. She directed Internet strategy and operations for former U.S. Senator Gary Hart's 2004 presidential exploratory organization, including launching what Wired News and political analysts called the "first true weblog to be put up by a politician." During the 2008 election, she was a National Correspondent for The Huffington Post "Off the Bus" project, focusing on technology in the 2008 election, and she was a credentialed blogger at the Democratic National Convention. She is currently Managing Director of FutureCampaigns, a political consultancy that advises candidates and organizations on use of technology, the Internet and new media. She has appeared on national TV and talk radio and she has been referenced for a wide range of print publications.

A prolific writer, editor and blogger, Ms. Granger contributes to BlogHer, MOMocrats, The Political Voices of Women, and the WomenCount blog as well as a variety of online magazines. She is a member of the U.S. Association for Computing Machinery Public Policy Committee, she previously worked as a Project Director for the Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility, and she served in 2003 as a delegate to the World Summit on the Information Society at the United Nations. Before entering the world of online politics, Sarah worked as a dotcom project manager and as a network security engineer for the Lawrence Livermore National Lab. Granger is a graduate of the University of Michigan where she designed her own major, "Technology & Society." She lives in the San Francisco Bay Area, and she can be followed on Twitter as 'sairy'.

Mike Turk, former e-campaign director of the Republican National Committee and Bush-Cheney 2004

Tom Watson is a journalist, media critic, entrepreneur and consultant who has worked at the confluence of media technology and social change for more than a decade. During his long career as journalist and blogger, Watson has written for The New York Times, Huffington Post, Industry Standard, Inside, Worth and Contribute magazines, among many other publications. He writes about politics and media on his own popular blog, My Dirty Life & Times, and is the founder and editor of Newcritics.com, a group blog on popular culture. His book CauseWired: Plugging In, Getting Involved, Changing the World (Wiley, 2008) chronicles the rise of online social activism in philanthropy and politics.

Professionally, Watson is the co-founder and managing partner of CauseWired Communications LLC, a boutique communications firm that helps organizations connect people to causes that make the world a better place. The firm publishes onPhilanthropy.com, an extensive online resource for philanthropy professionals. Previously, Watson was chief strategy officer and co-founder of Changing Our World, Inc., an international philanthropic services company. Before joining Changing Our World, Watson was co-founder and editor of @NY, the pioneering Internet news and information service that chronicled the rise New York's Silicon Alley new media in the mid-90s. Early in his career, Watson was the executive editor of The Riverdale Press, a Pulitzer Prize-winning newspaper in the Bronx, where he covered politics and won more than a dozen state and national awards for excellence in journalism.

Watson is a member of the board of directors of the Drum Major Institute for Public Policy, a progressive think tank based in New York. He is a graduate of Columbia University (English literature, 1984) and served as an adjunct professor at the School of Journalism. A lifelong New Yorker, he lives in Mount Vernon with his wife, the artist Beryl Watson, and their three children.

Senior Editors:

Allison Fine

What happens when blogs, Facebook and cell phones intersect with illiteracy, hunger, AIDs and many other worthy causes? Connected activism results; the intersection of easy-to-use social media tools and idealistic activists. Allison Fine writes about this explosive intersection in her award-winning book, Momentum: Igniting Social Change in the Connected Age (Wiley & Sons, 2006).

She is a Senior Fellow on the Democracy Team at Demos: A Network for Change and Action in New York City, Allison’s research and writing focuses on the intersection of social media and social change. She has recently published a paper on young people and activism commissioned by the Case Foundation, Social Citizens, and edited a collection of essays, Rebooting America, of transformative ways to reinvent 21st century democracy using new media tools.

She is also a Senior Editor at the Personal Democracy Forum. Her articles have been published in the Boston Globe, San Jose Mercury Times and the San Francisco Chronicle. She is also a frequent contributor to Huffington Post, Personal Democracy Forum, Alternet and the Chronicle of Philanthropy.

Allison served as the C.E.O. of The E-Volve Foundation in 2004-2005, and was the Founder and Executive Director of Innovation Network, Inc. from 1992-2004. She is a graduate of Vanderbilt University and New York University, and was a Trustee and Fire and Police Commissioner of Sleepy Hollow, New York.

Dave Witzel is a founder of Forum One Communications and facilitator of recently launched Policy Commons. During the past fifteen years he has worked with international organizations, non-profits, and government agencies to better use the web. He has a particular focus on online community and collaboration and is excited by possibilities of social production to transform the way we govern ourselves.

Currently on sabbatical from Forum One, Dave is joining the Personal Democracy Forum as a Senior Editor. He will focus on the "policy not politics" aspects of government 2.0. He is also a Visiting Senior Program Associate at the Center for Global Development, a think tank in Washington, DC, where he is working on understanding the role of public goods, sharing, and "the commons" in international development.

Dave's background includes time as a teacher with the U.S. Peace Corps in Botswana, as a computer programmer at a couple of software companies, and as an international development consultant in Indonesia, Burkina Faso, and with the World Bank. He came of age in Texas and has degrees from Texas A&M University and Harvard's Kennedy School of Government. When not at his computer he spends his time with his wife Claudia and their two boys Adam and Zachary.

Contributing Bloggers:

Morra Aarons, Internet communications consultant, former Director of Internet Marketing for the Democratic National Committee and Kerry-Edwards '04; political director of BlogHer.org. You can visit her at www.womenandwork.org..

David All, former communications director for Rep. Jack Kingston and former communications director for 2006 Senate candidate Mike Bouchard and owner of the David All Group.

Michael Bassik, VP of MSHC, expert on online political advertising.

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, General Manager for Interactiev and Social Media for Washington Times, previously General Manager of Townhall.com.

Colin Delany, online communications consultant and web designer since 1997. Previously Online Communications Manager at the National Environmental Trust, writing at epolitics.com.

Philip de Vellis , viral video producer and Senior VP of New Media at Murphy Putnam Media.

Zack Exley, Director of Online Organizing and Communications, Kerry/Edwards '04.

Mindy Finn, director of Finn Enterprises, former director of e-Strategy for Mitt Romney '08, former Director of New Media & Technology for Rick Santorum, former RNC eCampaign Deputy Director, and former Deputy Webmaster for Bush-Cheney '04.

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.

Steve Garfield, Video-blogging pioneer

Matt Browner Hamlin, Writer and political consultant. He was the Deputy Internet Director on Chris Dodd's Presidential campaign. Before moving to work in American politics full-time, he worked for Students for a Free Tibet and helped turn the SFT Blog into the 21st Most Powerful Blog in the World.

Lynne d Johnson, Senior Editor, FastCompany.com

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!

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.

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.

Dan Manatt , Political Web Video professional since 1999 and Executive Producer and founder of PoliticsTV.com and CapNews.Net, a web video news service that covers the U.S. Congress.

Jack McEnany Editor at LostNation.TV

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

Jed Miller is Internet director for the Revenue Watch Institute, which promotes transparency and responsible resource management in oil, gas and mining. He is also a lecturer on new media at Columbia's School of International Public Affairs. Previously, he oversaw strategy and publishing for ACLU.org and launched the ACLU's blog and multimedia initiatives. From 1998 to 2001 he managed reader forums at NYTimes.com and also created the web discussions for the 2000 series on race in America. He has written and consulted for non-profits and foundations including AmericaSpeaks, The New York Times Company Foundation, and Global Kids, Inc., among others. His personal web site is 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.

Luigi Montanez, Web developer and consultant for Democratic campaigns and progressive organizations. While working at Democracy for America in 2005, he built DFA-Link, one of the first social activism networks on the Web. He now works with WebStrong Group, and specializes in Ruby on Rails development and Salesforce.com implementations.

Chris Nolan is a stand-alone journalist who 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, MOpocket.com, expert on mobile phone use in politics

Spencer Overton, George Washington University law professor, co-founder of blackprof.com, author of Stealing Democracy, and former member of DNC Presidential Nomination Scheduling Commission

Chris Rabb, Publisher, Afro-Netizen

Brian Reich 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.

Alan Rosenblatt, Associate Director of Online Advocacy for the Center for American Progress Action Fund and Executive Director of the Internet Advocacy Center

Patrick Ruffini, former eCampaign Director for the Republican National Committee, webmaster for Bush-Cheney '04, and former Giuliani '08 advisor

Tracy Russo, President of Russo Strategies, an online communications and strategy firm; former Chief Blogger and Deputy Online Communications Director for the John Edwards campaign and former director of Online Outreach for the Democratic National Committee.

Liza Sabater, Publisher, CultureKitchen

Ruby Sinreich, expert on network-centric advocacy

Fred Stutzman, Ph.D. student and social networks researcher at UNC-Chapel Hill's School of Information and Library Science.

Michael Tate, sophomore at the University of Pennsylvania, Communications Director for Penn College Republicans, former Director of Online Communications for Tom Tancredo '08.

Zephyr Teachout, Visiting Assistant Professor of Law, Duke Law School, former Director of Online Organizing for Howard Dean and former National Director of the Sunlight Foundation.

Michael Whitney, progressive Internet strategist and web producer.

Advisory Board:

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.

Senator Bob Kerreyis 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 McLaughlinis 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.

Nicco Mele was born in West Africa to foreign service parents, and 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 is 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.

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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