Personal Democracy Forum

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

David Parry is an assistant professor of Emerging Media and Communications at the University of Texas at Dallas.

His research centers around exploring how media transforms culture, in particular understanding the cultural changes produced by the evolution of the digital network. Recently his work has focused on examining the relationship between democracy, protests, governments, publics and emerging media.

He is one of the core faculty members of the Emerging Media and Communications program at UT Dallas, a non traditional undergraduate and graduate media studies program focusing exclusively on social and digital media.

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

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

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

Dave Troy is a serial entrepreneur and community activist in Baltimore, Maryland. He is currently CEO and product architect at 410 Labs, maker of the popular e-mail management tool Mailstrom.co. He has been acknowledged by the founding team at Twitter as the first developer to utilize the Twitter API, with his project “Twittervision,” which was featured in the 2008 MoMA exhibition “Design and the Elastic Mind,” curated by Paola Antonelli. His new crowdsourced project Peoplemaps.org uses social network data to map cities. He is also organizer of TEDxMidAtlantic and is passionate about data, cities, and entrepreneurship. He lives in Baltimore with his wife and two children. His TED Talk (October 2014) has over 1 Million views.

David Binetti is Co-Founder and CEO of Votizen. He is also the co-creator of USA.gov, the official website of the US Government, which was named USA Today’s Site of the Year for 2000. David is a recipient of Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government’s “Innovations in American Government” award.

Votizen is a web service that allows you to discover how your friends on social networks are registered to vote, and campaign with them to elect candidates that share your values. Its heart is the over 200,000,000–strong social-media-ready voter database. USA.gov is the official US Goverment portal and one of the most useful sites on the Net.

His career began at Intuit, where he learned about marketing for startups as part of the 7-person team that created Quicken.com. He graduated from the University of California at Berkeley and the business school at UCLA, and his wonderful family is first in his life.

Fundly CEO Dave Boyce is a serial entrepreneur who lists his favorite start-up as his own family – he is married with six children. His most recent venture, Fundly (www.fundly.com), is fast disrupting online political, philanthropic and individual giving.

The world’s largest and most widely-adopted social fundraising platform, Fundly has enabled political campaigns, nonprofits and individual fundraisers of all sizes to raise more than $250 million to-date for their causes and candidates.

Backed by the same VCs who invested in Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Apple, Mint.com and Zynga, Fundly is the winner of numerous awards and hosts over 20,000 fundraising campaigns on its platform, including more than 1,200 Democratic and Republican political campaigns and organizations at all levels of government.

Featured in the Washington Post, Campaigns & Elections, techPresident, POLITICO, GOOD, Forbes, the Financial Times, and on PBS, Bloomberg Television, NPR and FOX Business News, Dave lectures frequently on social fundraising at thought leader convenings including SXSW Interactive, The Atlantic’s High Growth Business Forum, Nonprofit Technology Network, The Foundation Center and the seven-city Social Media for Nonprofits conference series. Follow him on Twitter: @davidjboyce1.

A public policy entrepreneur, and expert in information technology, innovation and government, David Eaves serves as a fellow and adjunct lecturer at the Belfer Center, at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University.

In 2009, as an adviser to the Office of the Mayor of Vancouver David proposed and helped draft the Open Motion which created one of the first municipal open data portals in the world. He subsequently advised the Canadian government on its open data strategy where his parliamentary committee testimony laid out the core policy structure that has guided multiple governments approach to the issue. He has also advised numerous local, state and national governments advising on technology and policy issues, including sitting on Ontario’s Open Government Engagement Team in 2014-2015.

In addition to working with government officials, David served as the first Director of Education for Code for America – training each cohort of fellows for their work with cities. David has also provided training and support to 18F and the Presidential Innovation Fellows program at the White House.

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

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

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

Dave Karpf is an Assistant Professor of Political Communication at Rutgers University. His research explores the Internet’s effect on American political organizing, with a particular focus on the new generation of advocacy organizations like MoveOn.org, Democracy for America, and the DailyKos blogging community. Karpf also has firsthand experience with political advocacy, having served as the National Director of the Sierra Student Coalition in 1999 and serving on the Sierra Club’s Board of Directors from 2004-2010. His research has been published in the Journal of Information Technology and Politics, Policy & Internet, and Information, Communication and Society. His first book, The MoveOn Effect: The Unexpected Transformation of American Political Advocacy, has just been published in May 2012 (Oxford University Press. He tweets at @davekarpf, and his research can be found at www.davidkarpf.com and www.shoutingloudly.com.

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