Personal Democracy Forum

The Wall Street Journal called him a “marketing guru.” He’s the co-author of the The Cluetrain Manifesto, the bestseller that cut through the hype and told business what the Web was really about. His next book, Small Pieces Loosely Joined has been published to rave reviews hailing it as the first book to put the Internet in its deepest context. His previous book, Everything Is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder, which has been called “an instant classic”, explains how the new rules for organizing ideas and information are transforming business and culture. He’s been a frequent commentator on National Public Radio’s All Things Considered. He’s written for the “Fortune 500” of business and tech journals, including The New York Times, Harvard Business Review, The Miami Herald, The Boston Globe, USA Today, The Guardian, and Wired. Journalists from The New York Times, Newsweek, The Boston Globe, The Los Angeles Times, InformationWeek, The Economist, Foreign Policy, the Wall Street Journal and many more turn to him for insight. He is a columnist for Knowledge Management World and has been a columnist for il sole 24 ore. He writes a well-known weblog, Joho the Blog. He was a philosophy professor for six years, a gag writer for Woody Allen’s comic strip for seven years, a humor columnist, a dot-com entrepreneur before most people knew what a home page was, and a strategic marketing consultant to household-name multinationals and the most innovative startups. He has a Ph.D. in philosophy and is a Senior Researcher at the prestigious Harvard Berkman Center for Internet & Society and is Co-Director of the Harvard Library Innovation Lab, and was a Franklin Fellow at the United States State Department.

David Wertime focuses on crossing the digital, cultural, and linguistic barriers that separate China from the West. He believes the great promise of the Internet is to expand our capacity to care about people we have never met, wherever they may be.

Tea Leaf Nation aggregates, synthesizes and analyzes Chinese social media, turning millions of comments and tweets into stories that English language readers can understand. You can follow TLN via @TeaLeafNation on Twitter or @TeaLeafNation杂志 on Sina Weibo.

David first encountered China as a Peace Corps Volunteer ten years ago. Since then, he has lived, worked and studied in Beijing, Chongqing and Hong Kong. He spent four years as a corporate lawyer, including over two years at Cravath, Swaine & Moore in New York City.

He holds a B.A. from Yale and a J.D. from Harvard, where he was co-president of the Harvard Asia Law Society. Originally from the Philadelphia area, he now lives in Washington, D.C.

Deanna Zandt is an award-winning media technologist, the co-founder of and partner at Lux Digital, and the author of Share This! How You Will Change the World with Social Networking (Berrett-Koehler 2010). She is a consultant to key media and advocacy organizations, and her clients have included The Ford Foundation, Deutsche Telekom, Planned Parenthood, and Jim Hightower’s Hightower Lowdown. Zandt has advised the White House on digital strategy and public engagement; she has been a regular contributor to Forbes.com, as well as NPR’s flagship news program, “All Things Considered.” Zandt specializes in emerging media, is a leading expert in women and technology, and is a frequent guest on MSNBC, CNN International, BBC Radio, Fox News and more.

Zandt works with groups to create and implement effective web strategies toward organizational goals of civic engagement and cultural agency, and uses her background in linguistics, advertising, telecommunications and finance to complement her technical expertise. She has spoken at a number of conferences, including TEDxBerlin, SXSW Interactive, Tribeca Film Festival, re:publica, Personal Democracy Forum, Ignite (NYC), Netroots Nation, the National Conference on Media Reform, Facing Race, Web 2.0 Expo, Bioneers, Women Action & The Media, and provides beginner and advanced workshops both online and in person.

In 2012, the Planned Parenthood Federation of America awarded Deanna their first-ever social media Maggie Award for Media Excellence for her work on the Planned Parenthood Saved Me Tumblr blog during the Susan G Komen crisis. Deanna was a fellow at American University’s Center for Social Media (2010-2011), and at the Progressive Women’s Voices program at the Women’s Media Center (2009). She is on the board of the Applied Research Center, a racial justice think tank and home for media and activism, and Women Action & The Media, the activism home of gender justice in the media. Deanna also serves as an advisor to Social Media Week NYC, and the Media Ideation Fellowship.

In addition to her technology work, Deanna writes and illustrates graphic stories and comics, and volunteers with dog rescue organization Rat Terrier ResQ.

Deena Rosen is a product designer who specializes in influencing behavior to benefit society. As the former head of the Design team at Opower, she led the design of products that nudge people to use less energy, and with big impact: Opower has so far created over 9 billion kWh of energy savings across 32 million homes around the world. Prior to Opower, Deena spent 15 years designing across multiple industries, including mobile technology, enterprise software, and organic food. She has a masters degree in Product Design from Stanford University and a Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science from Duke University. In addition to being a designer, she can be tagged as a meditator, amateur anthropologist, farmers’ market aficionado, and post-it doodler. She lives happily in San Francisco, and is the person always nagging you to turn off the lights when you leave the house.

Demond Drummer is part of the Smart Chicago Collaborative, where he leads a multi-sector partnership to drive full participation in the digital economy: The Connect Chicago Challenge.

He was previously tech organizer at Teamwork Englewood. As tech organizer he facilitated digital leadership trainings with block clubs, parent leaders and business owners. His projects included Englewood Codes, a summer youth code camp, and LargeLots.org, a community-driven effort to reclaim city-owned vacant lots.

An alumnus of Morehouse College, Demond is a founding member of the Resident Association of Greater Englewood (R.A.G.E.) and a longtime member of Chicago’s open government movement. He was previously an Organizing Fellow with the New Organizing Institute and a field organizer for Barack Obama’s primary campaign in South Carolina.

Denise Cheng lives at the intersection of civics, media, and work. She specializes in designing frameworks for meaningful participation, whether in media creation or workforce development. Denise received her masters in Comparative Media Studies from MIT, where she was funded by the Knight Foundation as part of the Media Lab’s Center for Civic Media. In past lives, she was a Tow-Knight entrepreneurial journalism fellow with CUNY J-School, the citizen journalism coordinator for The Rapidian, a hyperlocals community wrangler, strategist for involving marginalized groups in community media, and Peace Corps volunteer. She has appeared on NPR, Harvard Business Review, and The New York Times, and she has spoken at numerous conferences in both community-focused journalism and the future of work.

DeRay McKesson is a protestor, activist, and educator focused primarily on issues of innovation, equity and justice. Born and raised in Baltimore, Maryland, he graduated from Bowdoin College and has advocated for issues related to children, youth, and families since he was a teen. DeRay has served as an educator, student leader, and founding director of an after-school/out-of-school program. He has also provided leadership to the executive teams of two large urban school districts. Spurred by the death of Mike Brown and the subsequent protests in Ferguson, Missouri, DeRay has become a leading voice in the effort to confront the systems and structures that have led to the mass incarceration and police killings of black and other minority populations. The cofounder of the Protestor Newsletter and Campaign Zero, DeRay has worked to connect individuals with knowledge and tools, and provide citizens and policy makers with commonsense policies to end police violence. As a civil rights activist, DeRay’s work has had national impact – leading Fortune Magazine to name him one of 2015’s 50 World’s Greatest Leaders, and the New School to award him an honorary doctorate in 2016.

Derek Khanna is a Yale Law Fellow with the Information Society Project, a columnist, policy expert and thought leader on technology and innovation. He has experience on two Presidential campaigns and working for the House and Senate, where he worked for Senator Scott Brown. Until recently, he was a staff member for the House Republican Study Committee, where he authored the widely read House Republican Study Committee report “Three Myths about Copyright Law.” In the few months since he was on Capitol Hill he has taken on the largely unknown issue of phone unlocking and created it as a national issue by spearheading a modern digital advocacy campaign. His unprecedented and unfunded campaign on cellphone unlocking included a White House petition that achieved over 114,000 signatures, which led to a White House endorsement, an FCC investigation, and several pieces of legislation to allow for unlocking. He has spoken widely, since his time on the Hill he has spoken at the Consumer Electronics Show, South by Southwest, the Conservative Political Action Conference, Princeton University, Harvard Berkman Center, Cardozo Law School, and Freedom to Connect, and has made regular appearances on television. He is also a prolific writer, as a regular contributor to the National Review, Forbes, the Atlantic, Townhall, Daily Caller, and Human Events. He has also published several law journal articles. While only 25, Derek is considered to be an up and coming thought leader on technology policy – specifically focusing upon disruptive innovation.

Devin directs the Institute for the Future’s Workable Futures Initiative and enjoys regularly working with organizations to lay the foundations today to lead in tomorrow’s talent landscape. His interests center on applying foresight to strategy, with an emphasis on the impacts of emerging technologies and shifting approaches to organizational design. He sees organizations as systems designed to activate workforce know-how in the right places and at the right times. From this perspective, he argues that in a post-globalization world, all management is knowledge management.

Devin is a frequent speaker at gatherings of business leaders and others interested in the transformation of work and organizations. He approaches projects from a strongly international perspective, having lived and worked in several countries throughout his career.

He holds a BA in history from the University of Colorado, and an MBA with a focus on innovation in emerging markets from Budapest University of Economics and Institut des Hautes Etudes Economiques et Commerciales in Paris. Devin also participated in the inaugural class of Singularity University, a NASA and Google–sponsored program focused on harnessing emerging technologies to meet humanity’s grand challenges.

Born in 1984, Dino Amenduni is Head of New Media and Communications consultant at Proforma, a communications agency set in Bari (in the south of Italy) that has been running the most successful advertising and communications campaigns in progressive politics for the past decade.
With Proforma, he worked on successful campaigns, both on local and national level, including those of Michele Emiliano (Mayor of Bari – 2009), Nichi Vendola (Puglia Region – 2010) Debora Serracchiani (Friuli Venezia Giulia Region – 2013 ). He also worked on the campaign of current PM Matteo Renzi in the Primaries of 2013. More recently, the agency was in charge of the successful campaign of the National Democratic Party in the 2014 European elections.
Dino is also a contributor for local newspapers of the Espresso Group, writing analysis on politics and political communication, as well as for online outlets like Valigia Blu.
He also teaches political communication and social media marketing all over Italy and he is part of the staff of the International Festival of Journalism in Perugia.

In spring 2013 Dino joined the training program of the U.S. State Department IVLP, traveling in Washington, Minneapolis, Denver and San Diego working on issues related to social entrepreneurship (third sector, nonprofit, Fundraising / Crowdfunding).

In his (very little) spare time he talks about music and collects inspiring quotes on his personal blog.

Dino lives and works in Bari, a beautiful city in the south-east of Italy.
He is the vice-captain of Real Katenaccio, a soccer team in the Bari suburbs – he is also in charge of writing players’ ratings after each game in the team’s blog.