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.

Joi Ito

Joichi Ito is the Director of the MIT Media Lab. He is a Board Member of The New York Times Company, on the Board of The MacArthur Foundation, The Knight Foundation, Creative Commons and co-founder and board member of Digital Garage an Internet company in Japan. He is on board of a number of non-profit organizations including The Mozilla Foundation and WITNESS. He has created numerous Internet companies including PSINet Japan, Digital Garage and Infoseek Japan and was an early stage investor in Twitter, Six Apart, Wikia, Flickr, Last.fm, Kickstarter, Path and other Internet companies. He is the Guild Custodian of the World of Warcraft guild, We Know (http://weknow.to/). He is a PADI IDC Staff Instructor, an Emergency First Responder Instructor and a Divers Alert Network (DAN) Instructor Trainer.

Ito was named by Businessweek as one of the 25 Most Influential People on the Web in 2008. In 2011, he was chosen by Foreign Poicy Magazine as one of the “Top 100 Global Thinkers”. In 2011, he received the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Oxford Internet Institute in recognition of his role as one of the world’s leading advocates of Internet freedom. In 2011 and 2012, Ito was chosen by Nikkei Business as one of the 100 most influential people for the future of Japan.

Jon Gosier

Jon Henke

Jon Lebkowsky

Jon Lebkowsky is CEO of Polycot, which provides information management consulting to businesses and nonprofit organizations. Jon was co-founder and CEO of one of the first virtual corporations, FringeWare, Inc. and is currently president of EFF-Austin. Jon is also a co-founder of the Open Source Business Alliance, the Austin Wireless City Project, and the national Social Software Alliance. Jon serves as an advisor for the annual South by Southwest Interactive conference and serves on the Advisory Board for the University of Texas Science, Technology, and Society Program. He is Vice-President of the Board of Directors for Austin Wireless and a member of the board of advisors for San Antonio-based SalsaNet. Jon contributes to weblogs at weblogsky.com, smartmobs.com, worldchanging.com and greaterdemocracy.org.

Jon Sotsky

Jonathan Sotsky serves as the director of strategy and assessment at the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation where he manages research and evaluation initiatives across the foundation’s work in civic innovation, journalism and media, and the arts. Jon has led the production of pioneering field-building research publications, including reports analyzing the growing civic tech movement and a benchmarking study of business model metrics and innovative practices among startup nonprofit news ventures. He previously consulted with Mission Measurement where he partnered with social sector organizations to develop performance measurement systems and data-driven approaches to managing their programs. Before that, he was a financial management consultant in the media practice at IBM. Jon serves on the boards of DataKind and Media Impact Funders. He graduated magna cum laude from Cornell University with a bachelor’s degree in applied economics.

Jon Worth

Jon Worth is a Berlin-based blogger and consultant.

His blog is one of the longest running blogs about the European Union, and EU democracy and party politics.
Now a member of the Grüne (Green Party) in Germany, he has previously run web campaigns for Harriet Harman, Diane Abbott and Ken Livingstone in the UK.

His current clients include the European Commission and European Food Safety Authority, and he is a visiting lecturer at the Graduate Institute, Geneva, and the University of Maastricht.

Jonah Peretti

Jonah Sieger

Jonah Seiger has deep roots in the Internet world. In 1994, he helped found and served as Communications Director for the Center for Democracy and Technology (CDT), a leading non-profit organization focusing on civil liberties and democratic values online. While at CDT, The New York Times described him as “a trench warrior in the battle to democratize cyberspace,” in reference to his role in the landmark Supreme Court case establishing broad First Amendment protection for the Internet.
In 1997 Seiger co-founded Mindshare Internet Campaigns, LLC and built the company into one of the country’s leading providers of Internet services for public affairs. Seiger previously worked on Internet-related policy issues with the Electronic Frontier Foundation and with Congressman Edward J. Markey (D-MA) on the House Subcommittee for Telecommunications and Finance from 1993 to 1994. He is the founder and Managing Partner of Connections Media LLC, an Interactive agency focused on political, public affairs, and corporate communications campaigns.
An Adjunct Professor at the George Washington University Graduate School of Political Management, Seiger teaches a course on political communications strategies for the Internet.

Seiger currently serves on the boards of the New Democrat Network, the Media Access Project, and the Academy of Hope, an adult literacy center in Washington DC. He holds a B.A. in psychology and religion from the University of Michigan.

Jonathan Adelstein

Jonathan Askin

Jonathan Betz

Jonathan Betz is the engineering manager for Crisis Response and Civic Innovation in Google’s Technology for Social Impact team. These teams have launched products to help users affected by crises including Hurricane Sandy, the Boston Marathon bombings, and Typhoon Yolanda, as well as election information products to help voters in countries including India, Australia, Germany, and the United States.

Jonathan has previously worked in several areas of Google, most notably web search, where he developed and launched Google’s first products for information extraction and retrieval over structured data. He has also held multiple engineering leadership roles in venture-backed startups in New York City.

Jonathan holds a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science, with University Honors, from Carnegie Mellon University.

Jonathan Capehart

Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Jonathan Capehart is a member of The Washington Post editorial board and writes about politics and social issues for the PostPartisan blog. He is also an MSNBC Contributor. Capehart was deputy editorial page editor of the New York Daily News from 2002 to 2004, and served on that paper’s editorial board from 1993 to 2000. In 1999, his 16-month editorial campaign to save the famed Apollo Theatre earned him and the board the Pulitzer Prize for Editorial Writing. Capehart left the Daily News in July 2000 to become the national affairs columnist at Bloomberg News, and took a leave from this position in February 2001 to serve as a policy adviser to Michael Bloomberg in his first successful campaign for New York City mayor.

Jonathan Carson

Jonathan Carson co-founded BuzzMetrics, the online word of mouth research firm, in 1999, and serves as its President and Chief Executive Officer. Previously, Jonathan founded and served as President of Intercities, Inc., a Washington, D.C.-based interactive development and consulting firm. In 1995, Jonathan co-founded Outer Sound, an award-winning music site that he successfully sold in 2000. Jonathan previously worked for the Georgetown University Center for Business-Government Relations, as the lead researcher on numerous projects. Jonathan is a frequent speaker on Internet issues to educational and industry groups, including the Drug Information Association, the CTPAA, the Arthur W. Page Society, Harvard Business School, Carnegie Mellon, and the Pentagon.

Jonathan Garthwaite

Jonathan Garthwaite is editor-in-chief of Townhall.com where he oversees editorial operations of the biggest conservative opinion, news, and community site on the Web with over 115 partners, 60 columnists, podcasts and millions of active readers. Garthwaite has served as Townhall.com’s Editor since 1998. In addition to that he worked at The Heritage Foundation in several Internet-related capacities including Director of Online Communications, where he managed Heritage’s web presence at heritage.org and developed Heritage’s Intranet at heritage.net. Prior to Heritage, Garthwaite did internships with the Leadership Institute, Colorado State Representative Mark Paschall. Garthwaite received his undergraduate degree from Colorado State University.

Jonathan Smucker

Jonathan Zittrain

Jonathon Morgan

Jordan Raynor

Jordan Raynor is a Co-founder of Citizinvestor – a crowdfunding platform for local government projects. Jordan has spent his career solving real problems in government and politics through technology. Jordan most recently served as Client Director at Engage – deemed a “mega interactive agency” by Mashable. At Engage, Jordan led work on the Voting Information Project (VIP) – an initiative of Pew, Google and Microsoft that works with election officials to put polling place location data in uniform format. In 2010, Jordan led work on foursquare’s “I Voted” project from within VIP. Jordan was honored as a Google Fellow at the 2010 Personal Democracy Forum.

Jorge Dominguez

Fundador y CEO de la Red de Diarios Ciudadanos, grupo medial con mayor cobertura digital del país, presentes en 14 regiones y pioneros en el mundo hispano en periodismo ciudadano. Consultor en áreas ligadas a Social Media en proyectos nacionales como internacionales, co- fundador de Atina Chile, participó en los proyectos de “ciudades del siglo XXI” como Salmanca Wi Fi, destacado como uno de los 100 líderes del Mercurio, elegido con los Diarios Ciudadanos como una de las 50 innovaciones en el libro “Made Chile”, líder Avina. Comunicador Social, casado, 3 hijos.

Jose Antonio Vargas

Jose Vargas

Joseph Torres

Joseph advocates in Washington to ensure that our nation’s media policies serve the public interest and builds coalitions to broaden the media reform movement’s base. Joseph writes frequently on media and Internet issues and is the co-author of the New York Times bestseller News for All the People: The Epic Story of Race and the American Media. Joseph also serves on the board of directors of the Center for Media Justice and the National Association of Latino Independent Producers. Before joining Free Press, Joseph worked as deputy director of the National Association of Hispanic Journalists and was a journalist for several years. He earned a degree in communications from the College of Staten Island.

Josh Cohen

Josh Cohen is a software professional, gay activist and the Founder and Chairman of the Open Supporter Data Interface Project (OSDI). Josh was involved for 20 years in the corporate software industry with a concentration in Open Standards Wonkery. Josh has lead or participated in standards efforts for Microsoft , Netscape, and UPS, among others. He first cut his teeth in the IETF Working Group for HTTP. Later he was the Vice Chairman of the Board for DMTF.org and has participated in ISO in efforts including SOAP (At least is wasn’t CORBA), systems management, and Cloud Standards.

In 2012 Josh served as the Director of Technology for Washington United for Marriage, the 2012 campaign for Marriage Equality in Washington State. Since then he has provided technical consulting to a number of campaigns.

The OSDI effort seeks to define common API and data structures for interoperability among products in the progressive cause-based, campaign and non-profit marketplace. The existence of a common API will reduce customer costs related to moving data between different systems, lower integration costs and enhance the ability of innovators to create products for the marketplace.

Josh Klein

Joshua Klein is a technologist who uses systems thinking to create alternative methods of succeeding in divergent fields. He is most widely known for his project designed to train crows to fetch lost change, but has also used this method to write two books (a science fiction novel and a business book), participate in several startups, work for the US Intelligence Community, and speak at conferences such as Davos and TED. Klein’s speeches and articles frequently center on hacking as a theme, in which he reappropriates the term from its common misconception (as executing malicious computer attacks) to instead emphasize the unorthodox reworking of existing systems (systems thinking) for mutual benefit. This theme is elaborated on in his speeches to explain how he was able to achieve exploits such as publishing a book by giving it away for free, training crows to fetch coins, and reworking the employee/employer relationship.

Josh Koenig

Josh Koenig is an open source developer, blogger and political organizer. He was a co-founder of the DeanSpace project (precourser to CivicSpace) and Music for America, a national non-profit promoting progressive politics and participation to the Millennial generation. He specializes in the Drupal content management platform, big ideas, bold statements, and building networks for change.