Personal Democracy Forum

Katie McAuliffe is Federal Affairs Manager at Americans for Tax Reform and Executive Director of Digital Liberty. She focuses her research and advocacy efforts on telecom/technology issues, such as spectrum allocation, internet taxation, electronic communications privacy reform, and tech/telecomm reform. In the telecom field she has experience from not only the legislative side, but the industry perspective as well. Before staffing Congressman Cliff Stearns’ (R-Fla.) DC office in various capacities (Staff Assistant/Legislative Correspondent and Budget Legislative Assistant) she spent time as a radio station professional in the US and abroad. Her commentary has been published in The Hill, U.S News & World Report, Townhall.com and The Daily Caller. She received her Master of Mass Communications with a Telecommunications Policy focus from the University of Florida and her B.A. from Virginia Tech. Follow her blog, www.DigitalLiberty.net, and on Twitter: @DigitalLiberty and @1KMCA

In her role as NFIB’s grassroots program manager, Keeley facilitates member involvement on a range of small-business issues, working closely with NFIB’s policy team to craft messaging and action alerts that support the organization’s legislative priorities. She coordinates integrated issue campaigns in support of policy initiatives, utilizing new technologies like social media, text messaging and digital advertising. Keeley manages an expanding grassroots network of more than 10,000 small-business owners and primes those activists for roles as media spokespeople, citizen lobbyists and witnesses for hearings on Capitol Hill.

Kendall is the CEO and Founder of Polis, a startup working to revolutionize mobile canvassing and democratize campaign analytics. Having been elected to local office and managed a state legislative race, Kendall has a unique perspective on the technical challenges that running an effective field operation represent for the average campaign. Seeing the potential of technology to level the playing field and improve voter outreach led her to found Polis, where she has become an expert at raising money, managing teams and selling to campaigns. Prior to her work at Polis, Kendall worked as a management consultant, where she advised the executives of multi-national corporations and Fortune 500 companies.

Kenneth started his activism in the early eighties as a teenager, working in his neighborhood for tenants’ rights and decent housing, targeting the St. Louis Housing Authority. He went on to work for COOL, a national campus-based student organizing program, and then moved to Boston where he worked for the Ten Point Coalition, Interaction Institute for Social Change, and Third Sector New England, as well as being on the Board for Resource Generation.Most recently he has been a trainer and a consultant, primarily on issues of organizational development and community building. He first realized the need for a more “designerly” approach to community work while developing parts of the Boston Community Building Curriculum for The Boston Foundation. This workshop asked community activists and residents to think about creative ways to work with their community assets – existing social relationships, individual’s gifts and skills, and untapped local resources. Many community residents remained locked in conventional nonprofit approaches to working with community assets. They weren’t obliged to, they just knew no other way. He realized then that activists needed new tools to redesign approaches for community change, which led him to build a design studio for social activism.

Kentaro Toyama is W.K. Kellogg Associate Professor of Community Information at the University of Michigan School of Information, a fellow of the Dalai Lama Center for Ethics and Transformative Values at MIT, and author of Geek Heresy: Rescuing Social Change from the Cult of Technology. Previously, he was a researcher at UC Berkeley and assistant managing director of Microsoft Research India, which he co-founded in 2005. At MSR India, he started the Technology for Emerging Markets research group, which conducts interdisciplinary research to understand how the world’s poorer communities interact with electronic technology and to invent new ways for technology to support their socio-economic development. The award-winning group is known for projects such as MultiPoint, Text-Free User Interfaces, and Digital Green. Kentaro co-founded the IEEE/ACM International Conference on Information and Communication Technologies and Development (ICTD) to provide a global platform for rigorous academic research in this field. He is also co-editor-in-chief of the journal Information Technologies and International Development. Prior to his time in India, Kentaro did computer vision and multimedia research at Microsoft Research in Redmond, WA, USA and Cambridge, UK, and taught mathematics at Ashesi University in Accra, Ghana. Kentaro graduated from Yale with a PhD in Computer Science and from Harvard with a Bachelors degree in Physics.

Kenyatta Cheese is a professional internet enthusiast best known for co-creating the web series and internet meme database Know Your Meme, often cited as the go-to resource for tracking and understanding internet culture.

Kenyatta is also a creative technologist having pioneered early work in online video, activist media, and art and technology. He created some of the web’s first videoblogs in Durban Diaries and BrowseTV, built operations and infrastructure for the first online video network in Rocketboom, created open source wireless backpack streaming technologies for protest and conflict zones with WiFiTV, and organized communities at the intersection of art, media, and technology at both Unmediated and the Eyebeam Center for Art and Technology.

Currently, Kenyatta is co-founder and Creative Director at Everybody at Once, a consultancy dedicated to audience development for media, entertainment, and sports where he develops and supports fan communities for shows like Doctor Who, Top Gear, and Orphan Black.

Kerri is the founder of CTZNWELL, a movement to mobilize the wellbeing community into a powerful force for change. She spent seven years as Executive Director of the non-profit Off the Mat, Into the World and currently serves as strategic advisor. She is relentless in her commitment to elevating leaders, groups and projects to next-level social change makers through her work with The Catalyst Collective, an innovative consultancy designed for mission-based individuals, groups, and organizations that want to be successful and make a difference in the world. Kerri was on the fast track in the marketing world until 9/11 hit, when she lost her stepdad, a NYC fireman. That was the wake up call that got Kerri off the “should” path and into purpose. To her surprise, yoga was the most powerful source of healing and transformation during that time. She took the leap and became a renowned yoga teacher who has been on a crusade ever since to elevate wellbeing and help others discover their greatest potential.

Keya Dannenbaum is founder and CEO at ElectNext, an award-winning civic startup that translates open political data into embeddable tools for digital news media.

Keya has long been a political person (which is totally different from a political junkie, as she likes to point out). She studied and worked in politics as a Stanford undergrad and Princeton Ph.D., internationally as a Fulbright Scholar in Colombia and a Melman Fellow in India, nationally in the 2008 Presidential election, and locally for the Mayor of New Haven, CT. She is a junkie for Manchester United, Elvis Presley and the Insanity DVDs.

Kimberly Bryant is the Founder and Executive Director of Black Girls CODE, a non-profit organization focused on introducing girls of color (ages 7-17) to the field of technology and computer programming with a concentration on entrepreneurial concepts. Ms. Bryant has enjoyed a very successful professional career as a Biotechnology Engineer in a series of technical leadership roles for various Fortune 100 companies such as Genentech, Merck, and Pfizer. Ms. Bryant serves on the National Champions Board for the National Girls Collaborative Project, and the National Board of the NCWIT K-12 Alliance. In August 2012, Kimberly Bryant was also given the honor of receiving the prestigious Jefferson Award for Community Service for her work to support communities in the Bay Area with Black Girls Code, and was selected by Business Insider in 2013 on its list of The 25 Most Influential African-Americans in Technology.

Affectionately known as “Dr. Goddess,” Kimberly C. Ellis, Ph.D. is a Scholar of American and Africana Studies, an Artist, Activist and Entrepreneur. She is an international thought leader on culture, gender, social technology and the digital humanities; and has been named one of the top “People of Color Impacting the Social Web,” one of the “Top Ten Women in Social Media” and one of the “Most Influential Black Women on Twitter.” Thus, she is a staple at conferences such as Netroots Nation, the Personal Democracy Forum, Blogging While Brown, Blogalicious, Black Thought 2.0 (Duke University), BlogHer and South by Southwest (SXSW); and presented stellar, featured panels at #SXSW including, “#SCANDAL: How Television’s Hottest Show is Fueled by Social Media,” “The Bombastic Brilliance of Black Twitter 2.0” and “A Conversation with Gina Prince-Bythewood” (Love and Basketball, The Secret Life of Bees, Beyond The Lights). She is also the creator of the tweetchat, “The Color of #GameofThrones,” which opens and closes every season of the show under the popular hashtag, #DemThrones.

A published author, speaker and producer, Dr. Goddess has successful campaigns under her belt and engages in digital strategy, civic tech and social media training, as well as consults on Social TV under “Fierce Star Media.” Her writings and appearances can be found across the internet, from Ebony, Essence and BlackEnterprise, to HuffPostLive, Alternet, Al Jazeera America and radio programs on Sirius/XM, NPR, BBC_WHYS, Voices of Russia and MomsRising as well as in the Women’s Media Center’s “SheSource” Directory. Dr. Goddess served as the Digital Director of the National Black Theatre Festival, the co-founder of #AskaSista, the founder of the civic tech project, #BlackPoliticsMatter, the author of the upcoming book, “The Bombastic Brilliance of Black Twitter (2009-2016),” and the producer of “You’re Beautiful to Me” (#YBTM), a feature documentary film about the journey with her Mother’s dementia.

As an artist and world traveler, Dr. Goddess has lectured and/or performed on Martha’s Vineyard, at the Virginia Center for the Arts, at the Banff International Center in Canada and in Jamaica, China and Dubai. Recently, she served as the closing, plenary panel speaker on “Black Twitter, the Digital Humanities and #Charleston,” at the Association for the Study of the World African Diaspora Conference (ASWAD) in Charleston, South Carolina. And most recently, she returned from South Africa, wherein she bore witness and participated in the #FeesMustFall Movement. In March 2016, she gave an IGNITE talk on “The Bombastic Brilliance of Black Twitter” at SXSW in Austin and in June 2016, she will give a keynote faculty address on “Black Twitter” for the National Endowment of the Humanities, Digital Humanities Institute at Purdue University.