Speaker Database

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.

Diouma Magassa

Diouma is 20 years old and is a student of history.
After years of intensive literature studies, she is the author of a blog and a story titled “I was the obstacle to my success”, published on Raconterlavie.fr

Dmitry Savelau

Dmitry Savelau is a Senior Campaigner for Eastern Europe and Central Asia at Change.org – the world’s largest petition platform, empowering over 50 million people to create change they want to see. Born in Minsk, Belarus he is currently based out of Amsterdam. Dmitry is also a coordinator at the International Education and Resource Network, and the Adobe Youth Voices Program in Belarus.

Dmitry Stavisky

Dmitry Stavisky is a technologist and entrepreneur with a track record of building startups into successful businesses. As VP of International Operations at Evernote, Dmitry Stavisky is responsible for developing, launching, and promoting Evernotes’ services in international markets. Previously, he was responsible for Evernote product development. Prior to joining Evernote, Dmitry was a technical leader and founding member of the technical team at SightPath, a pioneer in the Content Networking market, which was acquired by Cisco Systems in 2000. He was responsible for its service provider CDN technologies and product line. Previously Dmitry held various senior engineering positions at several Boston-based startups. He is the author of five patents. A native of Moscow, Dmitry graduated from Moscow University in 1986 and has a Ph.D. in Geography from the Soviet Academy of Sciences. In past life he studied glacial climates and developed numerical atmospheric models.

Doc Searls

Doc Searls is Senior Editor of Linux Journal, a Linux monthly magazine. He also runs Doc Searls’ IT Garage, an online journal published by Linux Journal’s parent company, SSC. Doc is also co-author of the best-selling The Cluetrain Manifesto: The End of Business as Usual. He also writes Doc Searls Weblog, which is consistently listed among the top blogs by Technorati, Blogstreet and others.

Dominique Cardon

Dominique Cardon is a sociologist at the Orange Labs’ Laboratoire des usages and associate professor at the University of Marne la Vallée teacher.

His work focuses on the use of Internet and the transformation of digital public space. His recent research focuses on social networks on the Internet, forms of online identity, user-generated content and forms of online cooperation and governance.

Currently, he is conducting a sociological analysis of algorithms aimed at organizing information on the web.

Donny Bridges

Dorrian Porter

Dorrian Porter is the founder and CEO of Mozes, a Palo Alto based mobile services company. Dorrian co-founded HigherMarkets, an on-demand software company in March 2000. He later became CEO and led it to its acquisition by a Nasdaq listed company in 2002. Dorrian worked with the combined company until July 2005, where he helped significantly grow the business and shape the company’s product offerings. Previously, Dorrian practiced law at Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati in Palo Alto, California where he represented a wide range of technology companies. Prior to joining WSGR, he worked in Canada as an associate at McCarthy Tetrault, an analyst at Harrowston, Inc. (now TD Capital) and at the Canadian Parliament, including the Prime Minister’s Office. He received a law degree and an MBA from the University of Toronto and Bachelor of Social Sciences from the University of Ottawa. To obtain Dorrian’s contact information, you can use Mozes by sending the text message “dorrian” to 66937.

Douglas Busk

With over 10 years’ experience in high tech fields, ranging from interactive marketing to wireless strategy, Doug Busk brings a diverse background to his current role as General Manager of the SinglePoint division of Wireless Services Corporation. Previously, Doug was Associate Director of Messaging for Verizon Wireless, where he led product management of intercarrier, premium, international, and B2B SMS-based initiatives as well as Instant Messaging product lines. Upon joining Verizon Wireless in 2003, Doug headed up Wi-Fi and EV-DO-related development. From 2001-2003, Doug drove product development and management of third-party revenue at Cingular. From 1997-2000, Doug led CIMStudio, the in-house advertising creative unit of nationwide city site network Cox Interactive Media.

Douglas Rushkoff

Named one of the top ten “Most Influential Thinkers in the World” by MIT, Douglas Rushkoff is the author of Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus: How Growth Became the Enemy of Prosperity. He is founder of the Laboratory for Digital Humanism at CUNY/Queens, where he’s Professor of Media Theory and Digital Economics for the new Masters program in Media and Social Justice. Rushkoff is a prominent advocate for open source solutions to social problems. As a media theorist, he is the originator of the terms “viral media”, “digital natives,” and “social media.” He also wrote the groundbreaking 2003 Demos monograph, Open Source Democracy.

Douglas has written a dozen bestselling books on media, technology, and culture, including Present Shock, Program or Be Programmed, Media Virus, Life Inc and the novel Ecstasy Club, and made PBS Frontline documentaries including Merchants of Cool, The Persuaders, and Generation Like. He wrote the graphic novels Testament, A.D.D., and the upcoming Aleister and Adolf. He lives in New York, and lectures about media, society, and economics around the world. He writes for publications ranging from The Atlantic and Fast Company to CNN.com and The Guardian.

Rushkoff’s latest work, Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus, looks at how the digital economy went wrong and what we can do to reclaim its promise.

Dr. Anthony Marx

Since 2011, Anthony W. Marx has led The New York Public Library, the nation’s largest public library system with 18 million visits per year. At NYPL, he has expanded the Library’s role as an education provider, creating new after-school programs for children and teens, expanding English language, citizenship, computer and coding classes, partnering with Coursera, and improving programming for all ages at NYPL’s 88 neighborhood branches. Under his leadership, the Library has increased access to e-books, partnered with the City’s public schools to enable millions of books to circulate directly to teachers and students, and launched a pilot to provide internet access in low income homes to redress the digital divide. From 2003 to 2011, Marx served as president of Amherst College in Massachusetts, where low-income student enrollment more than tripled during his tenure. Before Amherst, Marx was a political science professor and director of undergraduate studies at Columbia University, and had worked on education in South Africa in the 1980s. Marx has a BA from Yale, an MPA from the Woodrow Wilson School at Princeton University, and a PhD, also from Princeton.

Dr. Ian Bogost

Ian Bogost, assistant professor in the School of Literature, Communication and Culture at Georgia Tech, is a videogame researcher and designer. He teaches in the undergraduate program in Computational Media and the graduate program in Digital Media.

Bogost is interested videogames as cultural artifacts, particularly in how we critique games alongside other media like literature, film, and art; and how games make arguments. He is the author of Unit Operations: An Approach to Videogame Criticism (MIT Press), Persuasive Games: The Expressive Power of Videogames (MIT Press), co-editor (with Matteo Bittanti) of Ludologica Retro: Vintage Arcade Games 1972-1984 (Costa & Nolan), and author of more than fifty articles, book chapters, and conference presentations on videogames, digital media, literature, and film. Bogost is also co-editor (with Gonzalo Frasca) at Water Cooler Games, the online resource about videogames with an agenda, and he is a regular columnist at videogame trade publication Gamasutra. Currently he is finishing a book on the Atari 2600 and a videogame about the politics of nutrition.

Bogost is also the founder of two companies, Persuasive Games, a game studio that designs, builds, and distributes electronic games for persuasion, instruction, and activism; and Open Texture, a publisher of cross-media education and enrichment materials for families.

Bogost’s videogames about social and political issues cover topics as varied as airport security, disaffected workers, the petroleum industry, and tort reform. His games have been played by millions of people and exhibited at venues including Laboral Centro de Arte, Fournos Centre for Digital Culture, Eyebeam Center, Slamdance Guerilla Game Festival, The Australian Centre for the Moving Image, and the Israeli Center for Digital Art. Bogost was co-designer of the first official U.S. presidential election videogame (for Howard Dean, 2003), and he is especially interested in the ways videogames can change the future of politics and public policy.

Bogost has over a decade of experience in digital media production for film, music, games, advertising, and business. Prior to joining He holds a BA degree in Philosophy and Comparative Literature from the University of Southern California, and an MA and Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from the University of California, Los Angeles.

Dr. J. Nathan Matias

Dr. J. Nathan Matias (@natematias) organizes citizen behavioral science for a safer, farer, more understanding internet. A Guatemalan-American, Nathan is a post-doctoral researcher at Princeton University in psychology, the Center for Information Technology Policy, and sociology.

Nathan is founder of CivilServant, a nonprofit that organizes citizen behavioral science and behavioral consumer protection research for the internet. CivilServant has worked with communities of tens of millions of people on reddit and Twitter to test ideas for preventing harassment, broadening gender diversity on social media, responding to human/algorithmic misinformation, managing political conflict, and auditing social technologies. Together with Susan Benesch, Nathan is pioneering industry-independent evaluations on the impact of tech platform policies in society.

In 2017, Nathan completed his Ph.D. at the MIT Media Lab with Ethan Zuckerman on the governance of human and machine behavior in an experimenting society (video) (thesis). Before MIT, Nathan worked in tech startups that have reached over a billion phones, helped start a series of education and journalistic charities, and studied postcolonial literature at the University of Cambridge and Elizabethtown College. His writings have appeared in The Atlantic, PBS, the Guardian, and other international media.

Dr. Katy E. Pearce

Dr. Katy E. Pearce is Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication at the University of Washington and holds an affiliation with the Ellison Center for Russian, East European and Central Asian Studies. Her research focuses on social and political uses of technologies and digital content in the transitioning democracies and semi-authoritarian states of the South Caucasus and Central Asia, but primarily Armenia and Azerbaijan.

Dr. Mark Keida

Mark Keida is the Vice President, Head of Polling at civic engagement platform icitizen. His work experience showcases his specialty in multi-modal qualitative and quantitative research design and execution, with a focus on social and digital innovation. Keida has advised White House staff and Senate leadership on strategic messaging and communications and is a thought leader in polling and trends in political research. Prior to icitizen, he worked for GfK, Anzalone Liszt Research, Lake Research Partners, US Representative Heath Shuler and the AFL-CIO. He holds a Ph.D. in Political Science from Miami University.

Dr. Michael Cornfield

Michael Cornfield, a political scientist, studies campaign politics, the public discourse, and the Internet. Michael currently serves as a Senior Research Consultant to the Pew Internet and American Life Project (www.pewinternet.org), and a senior adviser to RightClick Strategies, a political consulting firm to associations, interest groups, and member-based organizations. He is an adjunct professor at The Graduate School of Political Management of The George Washington University, where he helped found its Semester in Washington Program for undergraduates, and its Institute for Politics, Democracy, and the Internet. Michael 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 (Rowman and Littlefield, 2003). Michael received his B.A. from Pomona College and his Ph.D. from Harvard University.

Dr. Rasha Abdulla

Duncan Meisel

Lead digital campaigner for 350’s groundbreaking Keystone XL campaign, and digital point person for 350’s efforts to mobilize tens of thousands of people at major climate actions in the US over the past 5 years. He has contributed writing on movement building to the Beautiful Trouble collection, Waging Nonviolence and other outlets.

Dymitro Gnap

Dmytro Gnap engaged in investigative journalism for the past five years. Ten years before that worked in television journalism in all positions: from reporter to editor-in-chief. As an investigative journalist he worked on the “Exclamation mark” TV program (TVi-channel). For this program he produced many resonant investigations: “Royal Hunt of Victor Yanokovych”, “Crimean Cedar for President”, “Prosecutros-Rogues” et al. Gnap also was a reporter for the top Ukrainian on-line media “Ukrainska Pravda”. These investigations not only interested the public, but forced the authorities to take appropriate action.

In investigations, Gnap specializes in two subjects: large scale corruption and serious crimes (murder, kidnapping, etc.). He is also one of the activists of the Ukrainian journalist movement “Stop Censorship!” Together with other members of this movement Gnap produces the independent internet broadcast “Hromadske.TV”. He’s provided a number of trainings for young investigative journalists through programs with the US Embassy in Ukraine, European Council, MediaNext etc.

E. Hernandez-Busto

Blogger y ensayista. Nació en La Habana en 1968. Vivió desde 1991 a 1999 en México. Desde 1999 reside en Barcelona, donde ha trabajado como editor y traductor. Ha publicado “Perfiles derechos. Fisonomías del escritor reaccionario” (Península, Barcelona, 2004; III Premio de Ensayo “Casa de América”) e “Inventario de saldos. Apuntes sobre literatura cubana”, (Editorial Colibrí, Madrid, 2005). Coeditó la antología “El fin de los periódicos” (Duomo, Barcelona, 2009). Desde hace 4 años edita Penúltimos Días (www.penultimosdias.com), una de las más importantes bitácoras sobre temas cubanos y coordina esfuerzos de apoyo a la blogosfera independiente cubana. Ha participado en diversos foros sobre activismo digital como el “Cyber Dissidents: Global Successes and Challenges” (George W. Bush Institute, Freedom House & Harvard University) e “Internet at Liberty 2010” (organizado por Google y la Central European University). Colabora frecuentemente en la revista Letras Libres, y el periódico El País, entre otros medios.

Eben Moglen

Ed Bice

Ed Cone

Eddie Tejeda

Eddie is the co-founder of Civic Insight, a service that provides citizens information on the condition and status of homes and properties. He is also the co-founder of a OpenOakland, a civic innovation non-profit, and serves on the City of Oakland’s Public Ethics Commission overseeing government transparency.

Last year Eddie was a 2012 Code for America Fellow. He and his team collaborated with New Orleans to develop BlightStatus, a nationally recognized application that is helping improve communication between citizens and City Hall as they work to alleviate blight.

Before Code for America, Eddie developed Regulation Room, a project by Cornell University Law and federal agencies designed to increase public participation in federal rulemaking. He also worked as a researcher and developer at the Institute for the Future of the Book, a small publishing think-tank and was one of the creators of LittleSis.org, a free database detailing the connections between the country’s most powerful people and institutions. Eddie earned his B.A from Hampshire College with a focus on the digital divide and wrote his senior thesis on power efficient microprocessors.

Eduardo F. Ortiz

Eduardo F. Ortiz is Creative Director, User Experience at the United States Digital Service at the Department of Homeland Security. Eduardo has over 13 years of experience as an engineer, front end developer, and a user experience designer.

Eduardo is a cofounder of BKUX, one of the fastest growing design communities in Brooklyn. He is also a Local Leader for the Interaction Design Association and a volunteer for the Information Architecture. He has spoken at several conferences on topics about measuring user experience, empathy and team building. At DHS, he works with the Program Owner for myUSCIS, a redesigned online immigration experience. Together, they are working to digitize a mostly paper based immigration system, transforming how immigration benefits have been accessed by the public to date.

Eduardo Leoni

Eduardo es un politólogo que co-fundó CongressoAberto.com.br. Se trata de un sitio Web independiente que tiene como objetivo aumentar la transparencia y contribuir a los debates sobre el poder legislativo brasileño, facilitando el acceso a la información y análisis sobre el tema.CongressoAberto.com.br utiliza los datos oficiales proporcionados por varias agencias del gobierno para generar una imagen completa de la función de los parlamentarios y los partidos, haciendo uso de conceptos y métodos de la ciencia política moderna. También es el gerente de investigación en el Instituto Brasileño de Geografía y Estadística (IBGE).