Personal Democracy Forum

Lilia Tamm is Program Director of the Open Debate Coalition, a group made up of progressive, conservative, and Silicon Valley leaders dedicated to making electoral debates bottom-up to better reflect the will of the people. Lilia spent her early career helping the progressive movement make the leap from traditional field organizing to harnessing the power of the grassroots online with groups including MoveOn.org, SEIU, Tuition Relief Now, and Environmental Action. In 2008 she served as National Blog Outreach Director and Statewide Youth Vote Director for California’s No On Prop 8 campaign, and founded the Courage Campaign Equality Program. Lilia returned to school in 2009, studying business and leadership as a graduate student at Stanford and rapidly accelerating technologies as a student and teaching fellow at Singularity University. Following her time there, she joined the founding team of mobile app start-up Connect.com and grew it to over 1 million users. Lilia trains adult students on a variety of subjects, from design thinking to fundraising to giving and receiving feedback in the workplace.

Lina Srivastava is the founder of CIEL,a social innovation strategy group in New York City, and the co-founder of Regarding Humanity. ​Catalyzing social impact through culture, the arts, innovation, and technology, Lina​ creates narrative-based social change initiatives with NGOs, global institutions, and independent media creators, combining both field experience with skills in community engagement and narrative design. Lina has worked with social impact organizations such as UNESCO, the World Bank, AARP, UNICEF, Internews, and Apne Aap, and has worked on social impact campaigns for independent media projects, including Oscar-winning Born into Brothels, Oscar-winning Inocente, Sundance award winning and Social Impact Media Award winning Who Is Dayani Cristal?, and UN Women Gender Equality Champion winning Priya’s Shakti. She is a Steering Committee Member of Donor Direct Action, and on the Advisory Board for Tech 4 Good​, and is on faculty in the Master’s of Design for Social Innovation at SVA. Lina is a frequent speaker, including presentations and workshops at such conferences as the International Journalism Festival, the Tribeca Film Festival, the BOND International Development Conference, SOCAP, and the Inter-American Development Bank.

Lindsea K. Wilbur, born and raised in the countryside of Hawai’i, is professionally curious about storytelling, the lived experience of governance, and emerging technology.

Following her inquiries into alternative governance systems, she’s gone from a network of underground tunnels beneath Paris to New York City’s MacArthur and Knight Foundation-funded Governance Lab to the deep playa at the Burning Man Art and Music Festival.

In August 2013, sponsored by Institute for the Future, she took Governance Futures Lab’s Inventors Toolkit across America with the Millennial Trains Project. Exploring what it means to do human-centered political design, she used this hands-on tool to explore citizen systems and futures thinking in 7 cities and regions: the Bay Area, Salt Lake City, Denver, Omaha, Chicago, Pittsburgh, and Washington, D.C.. She is helping design the next Millennial Trains Project journey, which will take place August 2014 and travel from Portland to New York City.

She also serves as Resident Futurist in the Planetary Collective, and is an affiliate at the Institute for the Future and the Hawai’i Research Center for Futures Studies.

Lindsey Franklin is the Program Manager for New Media Ventures, a national network of early stage investors supporting startups that create progressive political change.

She is also the co-founder of ecoVC, a social venture designed to help startups grow with sustainability built into their core. An emeritus board member for San Francisco’s Young Women Social Entrepreneurs, she has guest lectured at Monterey Institute for International Studies and Middlebury College on business model generation and social entrepreneurship.

Lindsey cut her political chops during the 2008 Presidential election, where she coordinated three different climate campaigns during the primaries before working for President Obama’s Campaign for Change in Michigan. She received her BA from Middlebury College in Environmental Studies and Philosophy.

Co-founder and Director of Community Development at the Public Laboratory for Open Technology and Science (publiclab.org), and Co-Founder and Co-Director of TreeKIT (treekit.org), Liz Barry develops tools and methods for collaborative research and advocacy. Barry holds degrees in landscape architecture and urban design, and teaches at Columbia University as well as Parsons the New School for Design. She is a 2015 GovLab Academy Citizen Science Coach, a 2012-2014 Fellow of the Design Trust’s Five Borough Farm project, and speaks internationally on the subjects of peer production and urban environmental management. Her previous work ranges from planning international new cities in the Wall Street office of Skidmore, Owings and Merrill, to coordinating youth urban agriculture enterprise at the Durham Inner-city Gardeners (DIG). Her formative experiences include traveling around the country to catalyze interaction among strangers with a “Talk To Me” sign – a project that received international press including the New York Times, AP, CNN, Oprah and NPR’s This American Life. She co-runs a hackerspace in Brooklyn and likes to play outside.

Liz Mair is a communications expert, new media adviser, political consultant and blogger, who writes principally about politics, with additional commentary on sports, travel and other assorted topics. She is the founder and President of Mair Strategies LLC.

A libertarian Republican and Arsenal FC fan, Liz served as Online Communications Director at the Republican National Committee during 2008, where she led an aggressive and groundbreaking online media outreach effort aimed at electing John McCain, Sarah Palin and Republicans across the country. During the 2010 cycle, she advised Carly Fiorina on online communications. She also consulted for Gov. Rick Perry during his presidential run.

Liz was born and raised in Seattle, Washington, and lived in the United Kingdom for ten years. There, she earned an MA in International Relations from the University of St. Andrews and attended law school, ultimately practicing corporate law in the City of London for three years. Liz also holds a certificate in Political and Social Sciences from the Institut d’Etudes Politiques de Paris.

Lois Beckett has been a reporter for ProPublica since 2011. She covers the intersection of big data, technology and politics. Her recent work focused on the role of data analysis and targeted advertising in the 2012 campaign. Her story on Minnesota’s data-collecting “Grandma Brigade” looked at how sophisticated modeling techniques still depend on old-school local organizing. Before joining ProPublica, she wrote for the SF Weekly and the Nieman Journalism Lab.

Lorelei is the founder or director of six projects and organizations in Washington, D.C. with the purpose of building a more inclusive and informed democracy. She currently leads the Resilient Democracy project, a coalition working to make sure that Congress succeeds in the information Age.

Lori Adelman is a writer and advocate for gender equity. She currently co-runs Feministing.com a community run by and for young feminists and is the head of communications at Planned Parenthood Global.

Luciano Floridi is Professor of Philosophy and Ethics of Information at the University of Oxford, Senior Research Fellow and Director of Research at the Oxford Internet Institute, and Governing Body Fellow of St Cross College, Oxford. He is also Adjunct Professor, Department of Economics, American University, Washington D.C.

His main areas of research are the philosophy of information, the ethics of information, computer ethics, and the philosophy of technology.

Among his recognitions, he has been awarded a Fernand Braudel Senior Fellowship by the European University Institute (2015) and the Cátedras de Excelencia Prize by the University Carlos III of Madrid (2014-15). He held the UNESCO Chair in Information and Computer Ethics and the Gauss Professorship at the Academy of Sciences in Göttingen.

He is a recipient of the APA’s Barwise Prize, the IACAP’s Covey Award, and the INSEIT’s Weizenbaum Award. He is an AISB and BCS Fellow.
In 2012, he was Chairman of EU Commission’s “Onlife Initiative” and is currently one of the five members of Google’s Advisory Board on “the right to be forgotten” (2014).

His most recent books are: The Fourth Revolution – How the infosphere is reshaping human reality (Oxford University Press, 2014), The Ethics of Information (Oxford University Press, 2013), The Philosophy of Information (Oxford University Press, 2011), The Cambridge Handbook of Information and Computer Ethics (editor, Cambridge University Press, 2010), and Information: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2010). (picture courtesy of Tim Muntinga)