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.

Emily Jacobi

Emily Jacobi is Founder and Executive Director of Digital Democracy, a non-profit dedicated to empowering marginalized communities to use technology to defend their rights. Since beginning her career as a youth journalist reporting from Cuba at age 13, for almost two decades Emily has worked to leverage media & technology to connect people across persistent divides. Under her leadership, Digital Democracy has grown from a start-up non-profit to a leader in the technology for human rights space, training grassroots leaders in more than 20 countries, building open source tools with local partners, and recognized by Secretary Hillary Clinton for co-creating the first rape response & women’s health hotline in Haiti. She has presented on the intersection of technology, civic engagement and human rights to US Congress, the State Department, the United Nations, and numerous universities and technology conferences. Emily is a passionate advocate for leveraging technology to achieve a more equitable & democratic future, and putting marginalized communities at the center of the design process.

Emily Leathers

Emily is a Director of Engineering at Causes, where she focuses on data and metrics infrastructure, experimentation, and coordination between the engineering and product teams. Previously, Emily was the lead engineer at Votizen, a startup close to her heart for it’s vision of “fix democracy” and work to help voters leverage their personal networks to elect candidates they believe in. Prior to Votizen, Emily was an engineer at RapLeaf.

Emily May

Emily is an international leader in the anti-harassment movement. In 2005, at the age of 24, she co-founded Hollaback! (iHollaback.org) in New York City, and in 2010 she became the first full-time executive director. Hollaback!’s mission is to give women and LGBTQ folks an empowered response to harassment in public space, and ultimately, to end it. Emily has a Master’s Degree in Social Policy from the London School of Economics, is an Ashoka Fellow, a Prime Movers Fellow, and has won over ten awards for her work including the TEDCity 2.0 Prize. She recently co-founded HeartMob, an online platform designed to provide support for people being harassed online.

Emily Parker

Emily Parker is the author of Now I Know Who My Comrades Are: Voices from the Internet Underground, as well as a digital diplomacy advisor and senior fellow at the New America Foundation. Previously, Ms. Parker was a member of Secretary Clinton’s policy planning staff at the U.S. Department of State, where she covered 21st century statecraft, innovation and technology. While at State, she advised on issues related to Internet freedom and open government. Ms. Parker is the co-founder of Code4Country, the first open-government codeathon between the United States and Russia. She spent over five years working She spent over five years working for the Wall Street Journal, first as an editorial writer in Hong Kong and later as a New York-based editor.She was also a staff op-ed editor for The New York Times. Ms. Parker graduated with Honors from Brown University and has a Master’s from Harvard in East Asian Studies.

Emily Williams

Emin Milli

Emin Milli is a writer and dissident from Azerbaijan, Milli was imprisoned in 2009 for two and a half years for his critical views about the government. He was conditionally released in November 2010, after serving 16 months of his sentence, in part due to strong international pressure on the government of Azerbaijan.

From 2002-2004, Milli was director of the Friedrich Ebert Foundation and also advised the Council of Europe on more than 40 cases of political prisoners in Azerbaijan, many of whom were released following pressure from the Council. Prior to that, he was a coordinator for the International Republican Institute in Azerbaijan. He studied at the University of London’s School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), where he wrote his dissertation on new media and Arab revolutions.

Emma Burnett

Emma Burnett is a digital engagement consultant, writer, speaker, and civic technology evangelist based out of Portland, Maine. Emma advocates for the ethical and effective use of technology to achieve social and community change. They cofounded Code for Maine, a Code for America Brigade, in 2012 and are the cofounder and organizer of Portland’s first-ever Civic Design Fest. Emma currently holds an at-large seat on Code for America’s National Advisory Council. Their niche in the civic tech world is in experimenting with civic innovation on a small scale. They hope to bring techniques of civic hacking to Maine’s yearround island communities and other rural municipalities. You can learn more about Emma’s work here.

Emma Mulqueeny

Emma is the founder of Rewired State and Young Rewired State, and a Commissioner for the Speaker’s Commission on Digital Democracy. She has recently been included in Who’s Who, voted onto the Wired 100 list, Tech City 100, BIMA Hot 100, has been voted one of the top ten women in technology by The Guardian, into the top ten Tech Heroes for Good by NESTA, named as one of the 25 most influential women in IT by Computer Weekly and one of 2014’s 50 most incredible women in STEM.

Emma writes regularly for the British Press, speaks on radio and on television, is best known for her campaign: ‘Year 8 is too Late’ (encouraging girls into technology subjects) and insights into the social digital generation: the 97ers.

Emma Richards

Emma is the Director of Client Relations at SeeClickFix. In this role, Emma plays an integral part in the successful launch of SeeClickFix’s web, mobile and software solutions in cities such as Houston, Minneapolis and Albuquerque. She has also been involved with the integration of SeeClickFix in Chicago, Boston and Toronto through each city’s Open 311 API. Since joining the company in 2011 she has supported their rapidly growing client roster, with 21 million citizens collectively served by their partner municipalities.

Emmanuel Schalit

Enrique Kiko

Engeniero electrónico, artista, investigador en cultura y tecnología. Su interés y actividad se centran en la búsqueda y el desarrollo de mecanismos emergentes de transformación social, que parten de áreas límite del encuentro entre tecnología y sociedad. Es actualmente director de investigación y desarrollo en Alta Tecnología Andina, asociación peruana dedicada a la cultura y la tecnología, desde donde co-funda a finales de 2008 el proyecto Escuelab.org, una escuela-laboratorio ubicada en el centro de Lima, que facilita el desrrollo de procesos interdisciplinares de creación en torno de las nuevas tecnologías. Es además miembro fundador de Tanq, una red de profesionales jóvenes basada en Lima- Perú, dedicada al rescate de experiencias y aprendizajes a través de esfuerzos de escritura colectiva/colaborativa. Ha participado en la elaboración de diversos prototipos tecnológicos experimentales, en forma individual y colectiva, presentados en eventos locales e internacionales. Obtuvo en el 2004 el premio “incentivo a nuevas producciones” en el concurso VIDA de Fundación Telefónica de España. Ha presentado sus trabajos anteriores en eventos como ISEA2002 (Nagoya, Japón), WWVF2004 (Amsterdam, Holanda), VAE2006 (Lima, Perú), entre otros. Desde el 2006 organiza y dirije talleres de creación y reciclaje en torno de la electrónica, la programación y los medios audiovisuales, dirigidos a creadores jóvenes de diversas especialidades.

Enrique Mayorga

Erhardt Graeff

Erhardt Graeff is a sociologist, designer, and entrepreneur. His work explores creative uses of media and technology for civic engagement and learning. His has written about youth digital activism, civic drone design, bots and information privacy, and political memes. He regularly leads workshops on civic media and participatory design for students, teachers, and social entrepreneurs.

As a PhD student in the Center for Civic Media at the MIT Media Lab and an affiliate at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society, Erhardt has contributed to Media Cloud, studying the impact of media activism around the death of Trayvon Martin, and designed Action Path, a location-based app for civic engagement. Recently, Erhardt has worked with Facebook’s Civic Engagement team as a researcher. He is also a founding trustee of The Awesome Foundation, which gives small grants to innovative and promising projects.

Eric Alterman

Eric Barrett

Eric hails from Houston, Texas. In 2005 he moved to Tbilisi to study and found a home. Since then he has worked with a variety of local organizations, including Transparency International Georgia. Since 2011, he has directed JumpStart Georgia with the goal of pushing the boundaries on how civil society can communicate information and data to engage audiences and achieve goals. Using cutting-edge and open-source technologies as well as a design-oriented approach, JumpStart Georgia explores how data-driven visualizations can improve advocacy strategies in Georgia and beyond. A strong advocate for open government and an open data hacktivist, Eric is a self-taught coder and dataist. When he isn’t visualizing data, he is spending time with his 2-year-old daughter.

Eric Boehlert

Eric Frenchman

Eric Gunderson

Eric es el presidente y co-fundador de Development Seed donde dirige proyectos de datos abiertos y consulta sobre la recolección de datos, visualización y mapeo de algunas de las mayores organizaciones internacionales de desarrollo en el mundo. Esta primavera, ayudó a lanzar Data.WorldBank.org y HaitiAidMap.com, dos sitios de datos abiertos centrados en el mapeo de datos. Su más reciente trabajo es en torno a las elecciones en Afganistán e incluye el lanzamiento de AfghanistanElectionData.org. Este año su trabajo lo ha llevado a países como Nigeria, Afganistán, Pakistán y Sudán.

Eric Karstens

Eric Liu

Eric Liu is the founder and CEO of Citizen University, a national nonprofit that promotes and teaches the art of powerful citizenship (www.citizenuniversity.us). He is also the founding director of the Aspen Institute’s Citizenship & American Identity Program. Liu’s books include the national bestsellers The Gardens of Democracy, and The True Patriot, both co-authored with Nick Hanauer, and his most recent, A Chinaman’s Chance: One Family’s Journey and the Chinese American Dream. Liu served as a White House speechwriter for President Bill Clinton and later as the President’s deputy domestic policy adviser. He and his family live in Seattle, where he serves on numerous civic and nonprofit boards and teaches courses on civic leadership at the University of Washington. A columnist for CNN.com and a correspondent for TheAtlantic.com.

Eric Porres

Eric Porres is a founding partners of Pericles Consulting, an online political marketing firm with offices in New York, San Francisco, and Washington DC. In 2004, Pericles developed and executed online media plans for presidential and senatorial campaigns across the country and continues to work with various political organizations. He is also a partner with Underscore Marketing, a fully independent, full-service media agency. Previously, Eric held management positions at AOL Time Warner and Agency.com, and has worked with The Walt Disney Company and LiveTechnology. As a partner with Outrageous Media, he and his partners produced Michael Jackson’s “What More Can I Give” concert in Munich, Germany in 1999 and Paul McCartney’s “Run Devil Run” concert in Liverpool, England in 2000. A graduate of Duke University with degrees in philosophy and markets and management studies, Eric has spent time at MIT/Sloan School of Management to hone his Internet marketing skills.

Eric Schmidt

Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin recruited Eric Schmidt from Novell, where he led that company’s strategic planning, management and technology development as chairman and CEO. Since coming to Google, Eric has focused on building the corporate infrastructure needed to maintain Google’s rapid growth as a company and on ensuring that quality remains high while product development cycle times are kept to a minimum. Along with Larry and Sergey, Eric shares responsibility for Google’s day-to-day operations. Eric’s Novell experience culminated a 20-year record of achievement as an Internet strategist, entrepreneur and developer of great technologies. His well-seasoned perspective perfectly complements Google’s needs as a young and rapidly growing search engine with a unique corporate culture.

Prior to his appointment at Novell, Eric was chief technology officer and corporate executive officer at Sun Microsystems, Inc., where he led the development of Java, Sun’s platform-independent programming technology, and defined Sun’s Internet software strategy. Before joining Sun in 1983, he was a member of the research staff at the Computer Science Lab at Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC), and held positions at Bell Laboratories and Zilog. Eric has a bachelor of science degree in electrical engineering from Princeton University, and a master’s and Ph.D. in computer science from the University of California-Berkeley. In 2006, Eric was elected to the National Academy of Engineering, which recognized his work on “the development of strategies for the world’s most successful Internet search engine company.

Erica Anderson

Erica Anderson joined Google in January to lead News Lab programs in New York City.

Prior to Google, Erica spent four years at Twitter. Recruited in 2011, she was the company’s first news industry hire and became the point person for journalists around the globe. She was the catalyst behind Dataminr for News and led the creation of long codes which allowed journalists in war zones to Tweet from satellite phones.

Before Twitter, Erica worked for CBS News and Katie Couric where she ran Couric’s social media strategy. Erica covered the 2008 Presidential election for MTV News as a mobile citizen journalist. She has a B.A. from Indiana University’s School of Journalism and is passionate about creating opportunities for quality journalism to thrive in this technological age.

Erica Portnoy

Erica Williams