Speaker Database / 1,371 Speakers
The Personal Democracy Forum was a conference that ran for over 15 years and took place in NYC, Europe and Central America.
Craig has led Free Press and the Free Press Action Fund since 2011. For more than a decade, he has been a leader in major campaigns to safeguard Net Neutrality, stop media mergers and consolidation, oppose unchecked surveillance, defend public media and sustain quality journalism. He works in Washington and speaks often to the press and the public on media and technology issues. His commentaries appear regularly in The Huffington Post, and he has written for The Daily Beast, The Guardian, The Hill, MSNBC, Politico, The Progressive, The Seattle Times, Slate and many others. Before joining Free Press, he was an investigative reporter for Public Citizen’s Congress Watch and the managing editor of In These Times magazine. He is the editor of two books, Appeal to Reason: 25 Years of In These Times and Changing Media: Public Interest Policies for the Digital Age. He is a graduate of Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism.
In 1995, Craig started craigslist, a non-commercial community bulletin board featuring classifieds and discussion forums. Craig is a Web-oriented software engineer with around 25 years of experience, including 18 years at IBM and work for Bank of America and Charles Schwab. Craig serves on the advisory boards of Climate Theatre and the Haight-Ashbury Food Program. He has been featured in the stories The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, USA Today, Business Week, Time Magazine and Esquire Magazine.
Crystal Patterson is a Government & Politics Outreach Manager for Facebook. She has more than a decade of experience in digital strategy and communications. With a background working on Capitol Hill, campaigns and in both the private and non-profit sectors, Crystal now works with elected officials, government agencies, non-profits and political organizations to optimize their Facebook experience and results. A graduate of Northwestern University, Crystal is originally from northeast Ohio and currently resides in Washington, DC.
As Global Head of Sustainability, Curtis Ravenel leads Bloomberg’s sustainability initiatives – a Chairman’s Office effort and the result of his 2006 Bloomberg Global Leadership Forum proposal. The program aggressively integrates sustainability considerations into all firm operations and leverages the Bloomberg Professional Service to evaluate sustainability-related investment risks and opportunities for its 315,000 customers.
Curtis has worked for Bloomberg in multiple roles. He was the Financial Controller for Asia managing accounting, tax, treasury and audit services for 23 legal entities with combined annual revenues exceeding $1 billion USD. This was preceded by various roles in the Capital Planning and Financial Analysis Groups.
Prior to his work with Bloomberg, L.P., Curtis co-managed a small real estate development group, founded a micro-brewery and worked with the Recycling Advisory Council in Washington, DC conducting Full Cost Accounting and Life Cycle Analysis work.
He currently serves as a board member at US SIF, The Forum for Sustainable and Responsible Investment, and is an advisor to the Sustainability Accounting Standards Board (SASB), the Global Initiative for Sustainability Ratings (GISR) and the USA Advisory Board to the G8 Social Impact Investment Taskforce. Curtis was awarded a David Rockefeller Fellowship with the Partnership for New York City in 2011. He earned an MBA from Columbia Business School and a BA in History from Davidson College.
Cynthia Pompa is a proud native to the borderlands who grew up on both side of the border in El Paso, TX and Ciudad Juarez. She is the Advocacy Coordinator at the ACLU Border Rights Center in El Paso. In this role, she works to develop and coordinate advocacy and organizing strategies among the four ACLU southwest border affiliates, CA, AZ, NM and TX, and the ACLU national office. Cynthia spent over three years as a field organizer in Southern New Mexico with the ACLU of NM, where she led border-wide abuse documentation campaigns, and played a key role in coalitions efforts to resist the militarization of the U.S./Mexico border.
Dan is the founder and CEO of UniteUS.com, a centralized technology platform connecting citizens to local coordinated services. Dan is deeply committed to his work with Military Veterans and their families, and as such, Unite US is initially focused on improving access to coordinated care for these communities. Dan started his career at Buck Consultants, where he provided strategic investment and deal structuring advice for mid-large cap clients. Dan is also a Captain and pilot in the United States Air Force Reserves, where he has earned several combat air medals and commendations during deployments in both Iraq and Afghanistan.
Dan received a BA from Yale University in 2006 and an MBA from Columbia Business School in 2012. He graduated United States Air Force Flight School at the top of his class, receiving 4 distinguished graduate awards.
Dan Gillmor is founder of Grassroots Media Inc., a weblog devoted to the discussion of the issues facing grassroots journalism as it grows into an important force in society. Dan is author of We the Media: Grassroots Journalism By the People, For the People, a 2004 book on how the collision of technology and journalism is transforming the media landscape. From 1994-2004, Dan was a columnist at the San Jose Mercury News, Silicon Valley’s daily newspaper, and wrote a weblog for SiliconValley.com. He joined the Mercury News after six years with the Detroit Free Press. Before that, he was with the Kansas City Times and several newspapers in Vermont. A Phi Beta Kappa graduate of the University of Vermont, Dan received a Herbert Davenport fellowship in 1982 for economics and business reporting at the University of Missouri School of Journalism.
Dan Robinson is both a founder and board member of the E-Volve Foundation as well as the Technology Practice Lead at CivicActions. E-Volve is a non-profit working to integrate Internet based grassroots organizing tools and techniques into organizations working for social change. CivicActions is a consultancy working with political campaigns and activist organizations seeking to gain strategic advantage from their use of the Internet. During the 2004 campaign season Dan worked to develop the first Free software GOTV package ever produced which was successfully deployed during the final months of the campaign. Dan has over 20 years of experience as a senior technologist in a variety of different companies including HP, BofA, MCI and Charles Schwab. Dan is currently wedding his deep software industry experience with a lifelong commitment to social change by helping grassroots organizations leverage the true power of the Internet.
As Co-Founder and Chief Operating Officer of Mobile Accord, Inc., Mr. Weaver is responsible for the firm’s overall strategic positioning. He oversees all facets of the firm’s day to day operations, manages new product development, and directs the company’s information systems and systems engineering. Mobile Accord provides widespread access to the mobile marketplace with innovative turnkey mobile business applications. As solution, Mobile Accord allows nonprofit organizations to communicate with supporters and accept charitable contributions via SMS technology. Mr. Weaver and Mobile Accord Co-Founder and President James Eberhard are using their collective expertise to help guide and develop mobile charitable giving in the U.S. to instill consumer confidence and achieve regulatory compliance while maintaining the integrity of the mobile and nonprofit spaces. He has also been called upon to speak about wireless technology at a variety of fundraising and technology conferences including NTEN’s Nonprofit Technology Conference, IPDI’s Politics to Go, and Politics Online.
Prior to starting Mobile Accord, Mr. Weaver worked as a corporate foreign exchange trading professional for San Francisco-based Commonwealth Foreign Exchange where he advanced from his position as an Account Executive in Commonwealth’s Los Angeles office to a Senior Trading Specialist in their San Francisco headquarters. There he managed spot and hedging strategies for a corporate portfolio that totaled nearly $100 million in annual FX trading volume.
