Personal Democracy Forum

Bridgit Antoinette Evans is a leading voice in the culture change strategy field, collaborating with social change and pop culture leaders to design and implement long-term strategies that shift how mass audiences think, feel and relate to big ideas, values, personal sentiments and cultural narratives. Prior strategy commissions include the National Domestic Workers Alliance #BeTheHelp Oscar campaign; Breakthrough’s #ImHere campaign for immigrant women; GEMS’ Girls Are Not for Sale campaign to re-shape perceptions of American sex trafficking survivors; and Don Cheadle’s “Live for Darfur” campaign. Currently, Bridgit designs culture change strategy for Caring Across Generations, Make It Work, Family Values at Work and the Nobel Women’s Initiative; consult on Next Gen audience research methodologies for Ford Foundation; and has traveled by invitation to the UK, France, Austria, Croatia, Brazil, South Africa and throughout the U.S. to present lectures, courses and workshops for some of the world’s most innovative movement leaders and artists. She is also a professional actor trained in performance and devised theater at Stanford University and Columbia University.

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.

Bryan Sivak joined HHS as the Chief Technology Officer in July 2011. In this role, he is responsible for helping HHS leadership harness the power of data, technology, and innovation to improve the health and welfare of the nation.

Previously, Bryan served as the Chief Innovation Officer to Maryland Governor Martin O’Malley, where he has led Maryland’s efforts to embed concepts of innovation into the DNA of state government. He has distinguished himself in this role as someone who can work creatively across a large government organization to identify and implement the best opportunities for improving the way the government works.

Prior to his time with Governor O’Malley, Bryan served as Chief Technology Officer for the District of Columbia, where he created a technology infrastructure that enhanced communication between the District’s residents and their government, and implemented organizational reforms that improved efficiency, program controls, and customer service. Bryan previously worked in the private sector, co-founding InQuira, Inc., a multi-national software company, in 2002, and Electric Knowledge LLC, which provided one of the world’s first Natural Language Search engines available on the web in 1998.

Camille François is a Fellow at Harvard Law School’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society and at the Yale Law School Information Society Project. She specializes in the public policy of cyberwar and cyberpeace, and related issues in surveillance, privacy and robotics.

A Fulbright Fellow, she is also a visiting scholar at Columbia University’s Saltzman Institute of War and Peace Studies. There, she worked with the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) on cybersecurity and privacy, and won first prize at the Atlantic Council Cyber 9/12 National Challenge in Cyber Policy. She previously worked for Google in Europe, managing cross media market research and key policy and privacy trends.

Camille holds a Master’s degree in International Public Management from Sciences-Po Paris University, and a Master’s degree in International Security from the Columbia School of Public and International Affairs. She completed her Bachelor at Sciences-Po Paris, with a year as a visiting student at Princeton University, and received legal education at Paris II – Sorbonne Universités.

Camille has been involved in a wide range of free culture advocacy projects and serves as a Digital Advisor for Libraries Without Borders, working on digital literacy and digital inclusion.
She co-organizes the Drones and Aerial Robotics Conference (DARC).

In France, Camille served two years in the Parliament as a legislative aide.
Her work and opinions have been featured in media such as Scientific American, The Guardian, WIRED and the BBC.

Carne Ross is a former British diplomat who resigned over the Iraq war. Carne’s second book, “The Leaderless Revolution”, was published by Penguin in 2012. Drawing from his experiences as a diplomat, economist and activist, it describes how governments are failing to address our most urgent problems, including mounting inequality and economic volatility, climate change and terrorism. Instead of looking to authority, the book offers an inspiring message of empowerment and self-organized action: anarchism for the 21st Century.

Carne is also the founder and Executive Director of Independent Diplomat (ID). An expert team of former diplomats and international lawyers, Independent Diplomat advises democratic but marginalized governments and political groups so that their views are heard internationally. ID advised Kosovo before independence, and now advises, among others, South Sudan, the world’s newest state, and island states on climate change negotiations.

Carne is a frequent commentator on international affairs on the BBC, Al Jazeera, NPR and in publications including the Financial Times, the Guardian, The Nation and the Huffington Post.

Carol Davidsen is passionate about creating cutting-edge technology to help the political space identify the best places to find their audience across all screens including TV and Digital in the most cost effective manner. Carol currently leads the political technology group at comScore, working to bridge the gap between what political campaigns, super PACs and lobbyists need today, and the technology they will need in the future as TV and digital evolve. Before joining the comScore team, Carol served as the Director of Integration and Media Targeting for the 2012 Obama for America re-election campaign, where she led the development of “The Optimizer,” an analytics tool that combined campaign data with set top box viewership data, and “Narwhal” the integrated campaign API platform that unified political data available to every arm of the campaign. Carol has also spent more than 18 years in the tech world, building technical CRM, billing, and set-top box audience measurement platforms for the cable, satellite, telecom, campaign, and adtech industries. Carol has been featured on Business Insiders Top 10 people in Digital Politics, Campaigns and Elections Top 10 Technology Disruptors list, and Huffington Posts 50 Women Who made the 2012 Elections. Her insights have been featured by Fox News, MSNBC, The New York Times, The Washington Post, Bloomberg Business, The Victory Lab, and Prototype Politics: Technology-Intensive campaigning and the data of democracy.

Carola Frediani is a journalist and author.
In 2010 she co-founded Effecinque.org, an agency committed to delivering content, digital products, innovative formats and experiments with social media.

She writes mainly about digital culture, privacy, environment, hacking and hacktivism for L’Espresso, Wired, Il Secolo XIX, Pagina99 and TechPresident.
In the past she has also written extensively for Corriere della Sera and Sky.it, where among other things she worked on the Beautiful Lab project.
Previously she had worked for almost ten years with Franco Carlini in the web journalism agency Totem, in Genova.

In 2012, she wrote “Dentro Anonymous”, a travel in the legions of cyberactivism.” In June 2014 she published “Deep Web – La Rete oltre Google”

Carole Post is the Executive Vice President at New York Law School and serves as its first Chief Strategy Officer. She was previously the Chief Information Officer (CIO) and Commissioner of the New York City Department of Information Technology and Telecommunications (DoITT) and was the first woman to ever serve in these positions. Since 2001, she has held a number of senior management and legal positions at the City of New York under Mayors Bloomberg and Giuliani. At New York Law School, she will provide strategic direction to the Dean and the Law School’s senior staff and help implement strategic initiatives to support and enhance the institution. She will lead efforts to identify and develop operational efficiencies and to introduce innovative methods to achieve measurable outcomes. During her tenure with the City of New York, she led several Mayoral initiatives to modernize and streamline City services, improve accountability through increased transparency, and to improve the public’s access to government information and services. She led New York City’s open government initiative and in 2012 was widely praised for her role in advancing landmark legislation concerning the public’s access to City data. In 2011 she was recognized as one of the country’s top 50 CIOs by InformationWeek and was also named the New York State Public Sector CIO of the Year. She has a bachelor’s degree from the University of Florida, a J.D. from Seton Hall University School of Law.

Caroline P. Mauldin joined the Obama Administration in September 2009 to support the Under Secretary of State for Civilian Security, Democracy, and Human Rights on a range of issues including economic security, financial inclusion, innovation, and global partnerships. In 2011, she led the State Department’s development and launch of the Open Government Partnership, a global effort by 50+ countries and civil society organizations to redefine the 21st century citizen-government relationship. Prior to joining the State Department, Caroline worked for microfinance leader ACCION International and was on the founding team of the affiliated think-tank, the Center for Financial Inclusion. She has also worked for Oxfam America and The Carter Center on international trade and public health, respectively. Caroline is fluent in Spanish and holds a degree with honors in International Relations and Latin American Studies from Tufts University in Massachusetts. She is a Fellow with the Truman National Security Project and will begin her MBA at MIT Sloan School of Management in the Fall of 2012.

Caroline Sutcliffe is Deputy Director of Meydan TV, a new media startup that seeks to improve adherence to basic human rights and strengthen civil society in Azerbaijan. She was a U.S. Fulbright Scholar in Baku and enthusiastically joined Meydan TV after finishing her Masters at the London School of Economics. She has previously worked with the ICRC, U.S. State Department and United Nations and is passionate about encouraging innovation, entrepreneurship and citizen engagement in authoritarian states. Meydan TV is an independent, non-partisan startup platform that contributes to democracy-building in the struggling post-soviet republic. The young initiative draws upon the talent of citizen journalists, bloggers, dissidents and civil society to encourage a more pluralistic media climate in the region.

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.

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.

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.