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.
Mary Hodder is CEO of Dabble, an early stage startup developing video web services. She is an information architect and interaction designer, developing extreme usability methods, and creating usability for web service companies with social media sites. She has worked with companies in open source, photo sharing, blog aggregation and search, legacy media and was at Technorati before leaving to start her company. She has written reports on blog search and recently one on New Media for the American Press Institute. She is a blogger at Napsterization, involved in issues with ‘live web’ spam control, weighting of blogs and topic communities, tagging, video blogging, and user generated content. She was an original author at bIPlog (the first UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism blog, on the topic of intellectual property, security and privacy). She has a Master’s in Information Science from the School of Information at UC Berkeley.
Masahiko Aida is Lead Survey Research Scientist at Civis Analytics, where he is the firm’s methodology brain, defining the methodological standard for data collection, sampling, mixed mode research, questionnaire design, sample matching and adaptive testing. He is one of the earliest member of analytic movements from the progressive communities. He has spoken at numerous conferences and wrote papers on the topic of survey methods and modeling.
Masha Gessen is a Russian and American journalist and author. Her most recent book is The Man Without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin. She is editor in chief of Vokrug Sveta, a publishing house that includes Russia’s oldest continuously published magazine, which she also edits, and a range of innovative multimedia publications. She is the founder of The Protest Workshop (Masterskaya Protestnykh Desystviy), an offline/online organizing effort that has played a key role in the Russian protests starting in December. She writes a weekly column on Russia for the New York Times/International Herald Tribune web site.
Matt Bai writes on Washington and national politics for the New York Times Magazine. His coverage of the 2004 presidential campaign included cover stories on the Republican machine in Ohio and the future of Democratic politics, as well as a cover profile of John Kerry that was featured in “The Best American Political Writing 2005.” Since joining the magazine as a contributing writer in July 2002, he has profiled such figures as Karl Rove, Gary Hart, Lincoln Chafee and Howard Dean, and he has written on such topics as the Democrats’ rural problem and the fiscal crises in the states.
Bai is currently at work on a book about Democratic politics, which will be published by Henry Holt in 2007. His personal essay in the anthology “I Married My Mother-in-Law… and Other Tales of the In-Laws We Can’t Live With—And Can’t Live Without,” published by Riverhead Books in 2006, was also featured on the cover of the Los Angeles Times Magazine.
Before joining the New York Times Magazine, Bai, 37, spent five years as a national correspondent for Newsweek, where his work included the magazine’s cover story on the shootings at Columbine High School in Colorado. In 2001, Bai was a fellow at Harvard’s Institute of Politics at the Kennedy School of Government, where he led a seminar on the next generation of political journalism. His international experience includes coverage from Iraq and Liberia.
Before joining Newsweek, Bai was a city desk reporter for The Boston Globe, where he covered breaking news and law enforcement. He began his career as a speechwriter for for UNICEF. He is a graduate of Tufts and Columbia’s Graduate School of Journalism, where the faculty awarded him the prestigious Pulitzer Traveling Fellowship. He lives with his wife and son in Washington.
Matt Lewis is Director of Operations for Townhall.com, the largest conservative online opinion, news and community site in America.
He has managed campaigns ranging from School Board to U.S. Congress in states ranging from Maryland to North Dakota.
For four years, Matt served as Director of Grassroots for The Leadership Institute, a national non-profit conservative training organization — where he managed the execution of all program aspects including conducting schools throughout US.
Matt has spoken for groups such as American University’s Campaign Management Institute and the RNC’s Campaign Management College.
He has authored articles for publications such as Politico, Personal Democracy Forum, and Campaigns & Elections Magazine.
In 2002, Campaigns & Elections Magazine selected Matt as a “Rising Star of Politics.”
Matt Mitchell is a hacker, security researcher, operational security trainer, developer and data journalist who founded and leads CryptoHarlem, impromptu workshops teaching basic cryptography tools to the predominately African American community in upper Manhattan. Matt trains activists and journalists (as an independent trainer for Global Journalist Security) in digital security. His personal work focuses on marginalized, aggressively monitored, over-policed populations in the United States.
Matt is a 2016 Mozilla Foundation / Ford Foundation Open Web Fellow, embedded at Color of Change, a civil rights / social justice organization. He is also an Internet Freedom Festival 2016 Fellow, a New America 2016 CyberSecurity Initiative Fellow, and an advisor to the Open Technology Fund. Previously, Matt worked as a data journalist at The New York Times and a developer at CNN, Time Inc, NewsOne/InteractiveOne/TVOne/RadioOne, AOL/Huffington Post, and Essence Magazine.
