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.
Aline is an public policy analyst, working at the Italian Ministry of Economy and Finance.
Interested in experimenting ways to bring the management of democracy back into the public realm, she has been actively promoting open data and civic monitoring projects.
She participates to one of Italy’s major open government initiatives, OpenCoesione.
This open data portal accounts for over hundreds of thousand ongoing projects financed by EU structural funds and targeted national resources, worth approximately 10 billion euros per year. Through the publication of open, detailed and high-quality information on individual projects, OpenCoesione reaches out for citizen engagement.
It is further powered by Monithon, a tool for civic partners and individual citizens to press forward and report on malpractice, but also to collaborate in making all these projects work, by accelerating their completion and understanding how they respond to local demand.
Aline is also vice-president of the Openpolis association, committed to enable free access and understanding of public information on political activities, as well as on public finance.
Allison Hayward is an attorney and writer in the Washington DC area. She specializes in campaign finance and related issues. She also blogs at www.skepticseye.com and writes for the Personal Democracy Forum.
Previously she served as counsel to former FEC Chairman and Commissioner Bradley A. Smith. Prior to that, she was in private practice with the Sacramento firm Bell, McAndrews & Hiltachk and the Washington DC firm Wiley, Rein and Fielding. Her writing has been published in National Review, the Weekly Standard and in law journals. Her forthcoming book, “Struck Dumb: The History and Consequences of Campaign Finance Reform” will be published this summer by AEI Press.
Althea Erickson is director of public policy at Etsy, the marketplace for creative people to buy and sell unique goods. Althea leads Etsy’s government relations and advocacy efforts, focusing on educating and advising policymakers on the issues that micro-entrepreneurs and creative businesses face. She is also responsible for developing and advancing Etsy’s position on issues ranging from taxes and regulation, to open Internet and free trade, to IP and privacy policies.
Prior to joining Etsy, Althea was the advocacy and policy director at Freelancers Union, where she helped build the membership into a powerful political constituency, leading its successful campaign to repeal unfair tax laws. She also launched Freelancers Union’s Political Action Committee and promoted legislation to protect freelancers from unpaid wages. Previously, Althea worked at the Rockefeller Foundation, where she focused on strategies to build economic security within the U.S. workforce. She has a B.A in government and public policy from Wesleyan University.
Amanda is a consultant for nonprofits and social change organizations with particular expertise in civic and social engagement, training, and new programs and startups. She has more than a decade of experience building and scaling high-performing programs and teams that use technology to change the world.
Prior to her consultancy, Amanda worked at Change.org, where she created, led, and scaled several digital organizing programs, leadership development and engagement programs, and digital campaigning training programs for more than 100 million people in 15 countries. Before that, she spent a decade leading advocacy campaigns on human trafficking, domestic violence, sexual assault, genocide, and LGBT rights. Amanda has been a featured speaker at SXSW, and her organizing work has been featured in the Washington Post, BBC, TIME, CNN, and other publications.
In 2016, Amanda co-founded FutureShift — an organization at the intersection of speculative fiction and social change. FutureShift helps organizations and people solve real problems by imagining better futures.
Amanda is currently the communications director of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School. In 2004 she was national director of Kerry-Edwards Media Corps, a grassroots communications and press effort. That project required studying feedback mechanisms online — newspapers, blogs, journals, bulletin boards — and coordinating campaigns to push the campaign’s message in those venues. She later traveled with Zack Exley to Ohio to oversee transfer of tens of thousands of online activists to local field operations. During the primary season, she was national director of Generation Dean, Howard Dean’s official youth outreach effort, overseeing online organizing and communications.
Amanda Padgett has been a Starbucks partner for 8 years, and currently runs field implementation for the Starbucks Retail Brand Partnerships team. Amanda’s career with Starbucks began in Washington, DC, where she attained her degree in International Relations with a concentration in peace and conflict resolution. After 9 years living in Washington, Amanda recently moved to New York to focus on her current role, implementing regional market tests throughout the United States.
Dr. Amen Ra Mashariki is the City of New York’s Chief Analytics Officer and leads the Mayor’s Office of Data Analytics (MODA). Amen Ra Mashariki is navigating the unchartered space of leveraging the city of New York’s data to substantially improve city initiatives such as assisting small business entrepreneurs to gain access to market research based on NYC Open data and doing targeted outreach to ensure NYC students can get enrolled in the Universal Pre-K program. Dr. Mashariki is an accomplished leader within government, private sector and academia with experience in bringing Big Data processing and analytics for large and complex data management efforts. He started his professional careers as a software engineer at Motorola working on over-the-air data transmission projects and led a team of user-interface developers to build components of security features for handheld devices. Most recently, Dr. Mashariki served as Chief Technology Officer at the U.S. Office of Personnel Management. Dr. Mashariki holds a Doctor of Engineering from Morgan State University, a Master of Science in Computer Science from Howard University, and a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science from Lincoln University. Amen is a Brooklyn native and attended Brooklyn Tech High School.
Amy Cohen is the Executive Director of the National Association of State Election Directors (NASED). She previously spent four years with the Pew Charitable Trusts, where she managed the Voting Information Project (VIP), guided national research projects, and forged relationships throughout the corporate and nonprofit sector. Ms. Cohen has a bachelor of arts degree in political science from Washington University in St. Louis and a master of public policy from Georgetown University.
Amy Niles Gonzalez is Founder and President of Blueprint Interactive. A veteran entrepreneur, interactive strategist and management consultant, Amy works with numerous clients on issue advocacy and digital campaigns that leverage data and modeling alongside creative and messaging. Amy was recently selected as 2013 CampaignTech Innovator by Campaigns and Elections magazine.
Prior to Blueprint, Amy served as President of MSHC Partners, Inc. where she managed the overall business as well as led the interactive division. Under her leadership, MSHC’s interactive division grew from three employees to more than twenty, generated record profits and won numerous awards, including the coveted Yahoo! “Big Idea Chair Award.”
Previously, Amy founded and managed the Interactive Marketing group of Capital One, one of the nation’s largest and most diversified financial services companies. She also co-founded Strong Numbers – a software firm – that was recognized as a Top 10 e-Commerce Company in Massachusetts and a finalist in Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s $50K Entrepreneurship Competition. Amy has held management consulting positions at The Boston Consulting Group and McKinsey & Company.
Amy holds a Bachelor of Arts from the University of Pennsylvania and a Masters of Business Administration from the MIT Sloan School of Management.
