Personal Democracy Forum

Gigi B. Sohn is the President and CEO of Public Knowledge, a nonprofit advocacy organization that seeks to ensure that our communications system promotes fundamental democratic principles and cultural values including openness, access, and the capacity to create and compete. She is frequently quoted in the press and has appeared on numerous national and local, broadcast, cable and radio programs. Gigi is a Senior Adjunct Fellow at the Silicon Flatirons Center for Law, Technology and Entrepreneurship at the University of Colorado Law School. She currently is the Co-Chair of the Broadband Internet Technology Advisory Group (BITAG) and serves on the boards of the Telecommunications Policy Research Conference (TPRC) and the Sports Fans Coalition. The Next Web recently named Gigi one of “20 of Tech’s Most Underrated Founders.”

Gilad Lotan is the VP of Research and Development at SocialFlow, a New York City company that uses science and real-time data to help businesses earn greater attention and engagement on Twitter and Facebook. Previously, Gilad served as a program manager at Microsoft’s FUSE labs. Past work includes ‘Retweet Revolution’, visualizing the flow of information during the 2009 #IranElection riots, and a 2011 IJOC study investigating the relationship between mainstream media and social media channels during the Tunisian and Egyptian revolutions. Gilad’s work has been presented at TED, IXDA, Summit Series, Berkeley BCNM and published at HICCS, CHI and ICWSM.

Gina Glantz is the founder of genderavenger.com Her career in politics and organizing has been distinguished by innovative use of technology. In 1974, Ms. Glantz ran the first congressional campaign to use computer technology in canvassing voters. She went on to manage state and national campaigns. In 1985, Ms. Glantz founded Martin & Glantz, a firm specializing in grassroots organizing and strategic communications. In 1989, the firm organized the largest Supreme Court amicus brief to date signed by governors and state legislators. In 1999, the Bill Bradley for President campaign, which she managed, successfully petitioned the FEC to allow Internet credit card matching contributions. Senator Bradley became the first candidate to raise a million dollars over the web. While serving as Senior Advisor to the President of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) from 2001 to 2009, Ms Glantz created sinceslicedbread.com, an online contest of ideas that attracted participation from every congressional district in the country.

Ms. Glantz was a Fall, 2009 Institute of Politics Fellow and a Shorenstein Center Visiting Adjunct Lecturer in 2011 and 2012. In 1981 she participated in the HKS program for Senior Executives in State and Local Government. Ms. Glantz graduated from the University of California at Berkeley in 1965. She serves on the boards of Oxfam-America and DEMOS, a progressive think tank, and was Chair of Planned Parenthood Action Fund from 2010-2013.

Serial organizer/shit stirrer/campaign tech innovator/grandmother. First campaign managed: 1974 surprise win by Democrat against longest serving Republican in the House. Last campaign: not-so-surprising defeat of Bill Bradley by Al Gore for the Democratic presidential nomination. Founded Martin&Glantz, specializing in grassroots organizing and communications strategies. Stint at Service Employees International Union. Harvard Kennedy School Institute of Politics Fellow and Shorenstein Center Adjunct Lecturer. Founded GenderAvenger, a community that ensures women are represented in the public dialog. Demos, Oxfam-America and TurboVote Board Member.

Giovanni Menduni teaches at the School of engineering at Polytechnic of Milan.
In his own words: “Spatial data analisys, sensors, visualization, especially for the prevention of natural disasters, they have always been my job. I have often dealt with floods, landslides and earthquakes, but not only.
I developed the environmental sustanaibility and innovation policies of the City of Florence with Mr. Renzi when he was the Mayor, and I cooperated in lot of innovation cases in my country.
My vision is open, based on the sharing of data, research and ideas. No ifs, ands or buts”

Gleb Kanunnikau is an interface designer with a background in marketing/CRM and education. He has worked in at Philips Electronics, developed online solutions for the Economist group and other media organizations, and taught seminars and workshops on web technologies for the media and infoactivists in dozens of cities of Eastern Europe, former Soviet Union/Central Asia. Gleb speaks five languages and actively participates in the meetup and hackerspace community by organizing social hackathons for web developers, open source activists, electronic gadget makers, architects and anyone interested in the intersection of online and offline, culture and technologies.

Greg Bloom is a Civic Imagination Fellow with Civic Hall Labs. He is the founder of Open Referral, which is promoting open access to resource directory data (i.e. information about the health, human, and social services available to people in need). Before Open Referral, Greg managed communications for Bread for the City, the District of Columbia’s pre-eminent anti-poverty service provider. He is a certified cooperative developer and a dedicated community organizer, with more than a decade of experience in GOTV, class-action labor lawsuits, municipal budget battles, death penalty abolition campaigns, community wireless networks, and even a backyard chicken legalization movement. His writing has been published in In These Times, Civic Quarterly, Personal Democracy Forum, and Code for America’s Beyond Transparency.

Gregory Asmolov is a PhD candidate at the Media and Communication department at the London School of Economics and Political Science. His PhD research investigates the role of crowdsourcing platforms in natural disasters. In particular he is interested how similar Internet platforms and applications are used in order address the same crisis situations (e.g. floods, wildfires, missing people) in different countries. (For list of his publications please check: http://lse.academia.edu/Asmolov

). Gregory is a visiting lecturer at Media and Communication department at the Higher School of Economics (Moscow). He conducts trainings and gives lectures about social and political role of new media, and in particular role of crowdsourcing for addressing social issues. He has consulted on information technology, new media, and social media projects for The World Bank and Internews Network, and worked as a research assistant at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society, Harvard University. 

Gregory is a co-founder of Help Map, a crowdsourcing platform, which was used to coordinate assistance to victims of wildfires in Russia in 2010 and won a Russian National Internet Award for best project in the “State and Society” category. He also participated in development of crowdsourcing platform for coordination of mutual aid in crisis situations Rynda.org and a number of other projects. Gregory has previously worked as a journalist for major Russian newspapers Kommersant and Novaya Gazeta, and served as news editor and analyst for Israeli TV.

Greta Byrum (gretabyrum.com) is a poet, an urban planner, and a Field Analyst for the Open Technology Initiative at the New America Foundation, where she works on telecommunications policy and collaborative technology design strategies. She is currently working with groups in Philadelphia and Detroit to build community-owned mesh wireless networks as well as digital literacy and entrepreneurship support. Most recently she has spoken about community mesh networks and the digital divide at the Annenberg School of Communication at the University of Pennsylvania, Columbia University’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation, Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government, and Harvard Law School’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society. As a co-founder of curatorial team dBfoundation (dBfoundation.org) and Nobody Books (nobodyzone.com), Greta has created and curated exhibitions, sound designs, and transmissions in museums, galleries, and theaters in NY, LA, DC, Philadelphia, Minneapolis, Cairo, and Dallas. She holds an MS in Urban Planning from Columbia University, an MFA in poetry from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and an MA in Literature from Johns Hopkins.

Born in Rome, a degree in Physics, Guglielmo Celata is Chief Technology Strategist at OpenPolis, an independent association that promotes open government.
In his own words: “I’m incurably lazy and procrastinator, but only until I find what I’m passionate about. I can convey enthusiasm to those around me and I love to confront with others to dissect the issues, dismantled and reassembled on the basis of a strictly logical thread. I’m excited by the possibilities offered by the collaborative development of open software and hardware.

Guido Romeo is data&business editor of the Italian edition of Wired and coordinator of the iData project of the Fondazione Ahref.
He is co-founder of Diritto di Sapere (Your Right To Know), a non-profit project advocating an Italian FOIA, and founder of Hacks/Hackers Italy in Milan.
He graduated from the University of Bologna and holds a journalism degree from the Ecole Supérieure de Journalisme in Lille, France and a masters in communications. In 2004 he was Armenise-Harvard science-writer fellow at the Harvard School of Medicine and winner of the Astra Zeneca award for science communication.

In 2007 he won the Piero Piazzano science and environment reporting award and the Amundsen prize for coverage of climate change. In 2009 he was awarded the Voltolino, Italy’s most prominent prize for science reporting.

For Nòva24, the science and technology insert of Il Sole 24 Ore, he managed Città illuminate (enlightened cities), a series of reports and conferences on development and growth in urban centres investing in innovation and creativity.
He was also producer and co-host on Radio24 of NòvaLab24, the daily programme on research, innovation and creativity.

Gunnar Grímsson is CEO and Co-Founder of the Citizens Foundation of Iceland, which provides open-source civic engagement platforms and won the pan-Europe e-democracy award at the 2011 World e-Gov Forum.

Created in 2008 in the wake of Iceland’s economic collapse and loss of trust in politicians, the Citizens Foundations main goal is to encourage citizen participation in governance. Their key offering is the “Open Active Democracy” platform, which helps citizens debate and prioritize issues. A notable incarnation is Betri Reykjavik (or “Better Reykjavik”), which launched a week before elections in Iceland’s capital city, achieved a participation rate of 40% among voters, and became integrated permanently into the city’s administration. The Citizens Foundation offers a global version, Your Priorities, free for all countries in the world.

Gunnar has been working in webdesign since ’94, was Icelands first commercial webmaster and has since then taught interface and web-design in many Icelandic universities and colleges. Since ’97 he’s worked as a freelance webdesigner and consultant for, amongst others, the University of Iceland, the Icelandic Parliament, National Archives of Iceland, Reykjavík Arts Festival, Icelandair, Icelandic Supreme Court and the Central Bank of Iceland. He’s especially proud of being chosen the Geek of the year 2011 in Iceland along with his partner Robert Bjarnason.