Personal Democracy Forum

Expert in non-traditional communication methods. A graduate of the University of Gdansk and Poznan University of Economics. As a scholar of the prestigious Joseph Conrad Scholarship program also studied at the London Business School, UK. In 2005-2009 head of communication department in Wirtualna Polska (second biggest portal in Poland). Previously, PR Manager at NIVEA Poland and Young Digital Planet. Currently working with the media house Universal McCann as Chief Inspiration Officer. Originator of award-winning campaigns based on non-traditional communication methods. Member of the jury in the advertising and promotional contests such as Polish Advertising Competition KTR, Media Trendy Competition, YC Eurobest, Blog of the Year, Superbrands. Member of Creative Communication Cluster. Member of the Board of Experts ThinkTank Polska. Columnist at Sukces magazine. In 2013, awarded by Geek Girls Carrots with Srebrna Marchewka (Silver Carrot) for being a role model woman working with new technologies. Author of http://hatalska.com blog about non-traditional advertising considered to be one of the most influential blogs in Poland.

Natalie has spent the last 15 years at the crossroads of social movements and technology, and is currently a Fellow at Institute for the Future in Palo Alto and an advisor to the Aspen Institute’s Future of Work Initiative. She’s transformed and run some of the largest digital teams in the country, including President Obama’s successful effort of pass health reform, and built two organizations from scratch. Most recently, Natalie co-founded and launched Peers to support people who are working in the sharing and on-demand economy. Prior to Peers, she was the CEO and co-founder of Rebuild the Dream, a platform for people–driven economic change, with Van Jones. Previously, Natalie served as digital director for President Obama’s Organizing for America (OFA) and the Democratic National Committee. She built and directed the team responsible for the president’s message and fundraising through social, mobile, and email communication with the President’s millions of supporters. Natalie built the first digital department at the Sierra Club and served as the deputy organizing director for MoveOn.org.

Co-Founder and Journalist, Hromadske.TV (Public) – an initiative of the Ukrainian journalist to create online public broadcasting system in Ukraine. Former Head, Foreign News Desk, INTER, the biggest Ukrainian TV channel. As an independent Ukrainian international correspondent, has reported on major political and social events from nearly 50 countries. During the last years, has been focused on post-Arab spring developments in the Arab world. Cooperates with a number of Ukrainian and international media, including Esquire Ukraine, Ukrainska Pravda, the Ukrainian Week magazine, 1+1 TV Studio, Ukraina TV, Tand Golos Stolytsi Radio, Open Democracy Russia, RTL-Netherlands. Teaches Global Journalism, Kyiv Mohyla School of Journalism. MA in Global Journalism, Orebro University, Sweden; John Smith Fellow

Nate Silver is a statistician, a political forecaster, and the founder of FiveThirtyEight.com, which has since 2010 been a blog of The New York Times. He’s known for his incredible accuracy, correctly predicting the presidential winner in 49 states in 2008, and in all 50 states in 2012. On 2012’s election night, FiveThirtyEight accounted for 20% of NYTimes.com traffic.

He’s been honored with numerous accolades, including Time’s 100 Most Influential People of 2009, Rolling Stone’s 100 Agents of Change, the 2008 Weblog Award for Best Political Coverage, and the 2012 Webby Award for Best Political Blog.

He’s a prolific author, with titles that include “The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail – but Some Don’t” (2012), “Baseball Prospectus” (an annual publication since 2003), and “Mind Game: How the Boston Red Sox Got Smart, Won a World Series, and Created a New Blueprint for Winning” (2005). He’s notable in the world of baseball for creating the famous PECOTA (Player Empirical Comparison and Optimization Test Algorithm) system. He holds a BA in Economics from the University of Chicago.

Nicco Mele is an entrepreneur, angel investor and consultant to Fortune 1000 companies. He’s one of America’s leading forecasters of business, politics, and culture in our fast-moving digital age.

Born to Foreign Service parents, Nicco spent his early years in Asia and Africa before graduating from the College of William and Mary in Virginia with a bachelor’s degree in government. He then worked for several high-profile advocacy organizations where he pioneered the use of social media as a galvanizing force for fundraising. As webmaster for Governor Howard Dean’s 2004 presidential bid, Nicco and the campaign team popularized the use of technology and social media that revolutionized political fundraising and reshaped American politics. Subsequently, he co-founded EchoDitto, a leading internet strategy and consulting firm, whose non-profit and corporate clients have included Barack Obama’s successful Senate campaign, the Clinton Global Initiative, Sierra Club, UN World Food Programme, St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, AARP, and Medco. Nicco is also on the faculty at the Harvard Kennedy School where he teaches graduate-level classes on the internet and politics.

Nicco’s first book, The End of Big: How The Internet Makes David The New Goliath, will be published by St. Martin’s Press in Spring 2013. In it, he explores the consequences of living in a socially-connected society, drawing upon his years of experience as an innovator in politics and technology.

Since his early days as one of Esquire Magazine’s “Best and Brightest” in America, Nicco has been a sought-after innovator, media commentator, and speaker. He serves on a number of private and non-profit boards, including the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard. Nicco is also co-founder of the Massachusetts Poetry Festival.

Nick is the General Manager for Policy at Union Square Ventures. In this role, he works with USV portfolio companies on public policy and regulatory issues and with internet advocates to support the health of the open web.

Previously, he led an incubator for technology & media businesses at the intersection of cities and data at OpenPlans, which, among other things, built NYC’s real-time bus data platform. Nick is an advisor to the Data & Society Institute and the Data-Smart Cities Initiative at the Harvard Kennedy School, and has been a visiting scholar at the MIT Media Lab, an affiliate at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard Law School.

Nick Judd is the managing editor of Personal Democracy Media’s techPresident, where he has been a writer and editor since 2009. Prior to joining Personal Democracy Media, he covered local politics, government and breaking news for The Riverdale Press in the Bronx and The Jersey Journal in Jersey City, N.J., and also served a brief stint as a research assistant at the nonpartisan policy think tank Center for an Urban Future. His work has also appeared in Yahoo News, The Newark Star-Ledger, and City Limits, among others. Judd managed candidate relationships and media partnerships for “10 Questions,” PDM’s online citizen engagement project for the 2010 midterm elections. He graduated magna cum laude from New York University with a bachelor’s degree in journalism and metropolitan studies.

Nicholas Merrill founded Calyx Internet Access Corporation in 1995. Calyx Internet Access was one of the first commercial Internet service providers operating in New York City. Within a few years, Calyx opened a sister company in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. Calyx pursued relationships with and worked with many non-profit organizations on a pro bono basis and also had a number of blue chip for-profit businesses in its client roster.

In 2004, after receiving a demand for information from the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), Nick became the first party to ever challenge the National Security Letters provision of the USA PATRIOT Act. Nick and Calyx filed suit against the US Department of Justice and became involved with using the legal system and the media to resist illegal government requests for information on Internet users. For six and a half years, Merrill and the ACLU tirelessly challenged the orders contained in the letter as well as the associated non-disclosure (“gag”) order. The litigation resulted in the judicial invalidation or narrowing of several controversial surveillance provisions, and it led to significant legislative changes as well. It also led to a Department of Justice internal investigation that uncovered thousands of instances of abuse.

In 2010, after winning a partial release from the gag order, Nick founded The Calyx Institute – a non-profit organization whose goal is to reform the Telecommunications industry with regard to privacy and freedom of expression. When he learned about Nick’s plans, Sascha Meinrath of the New America Foundation immediately asked to join the Calyx advisory board, writing, “I do think this is the sort of transformative and disruptive project that could reverberate nationally and beyond. […] It’s the sort of project that would yield huge rewards if successful, but because it’s also high risk, is most likely to appeal to Silicon Valley types.”

Nick is a recipient of the ACLU’s Roger Baldwin Medal of Liberty and the Bill of Rights Defense Committee’s Patriot Award.

He has written two Op-Ed pieces for the Washington Post, one of which was the only anonymous op-ed ever published in the paper. He has been profiled in the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times, Wired, Forbes, and has appeared on National Public Radio.

Nick Sinai is U.S. Deputy Chief Technology Officer at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. In this role, Nick helps lead the President’s Open Data Initiatives to liberate data to fuel innovation and economic growth. Nick previously served at the FCC, where he led a team at the National Broadband Plan exploring how broadband and advanced communications can help the nation achieve its goals of energy independence and energy efficiency. Prior to the Obama Administration, Nick was a venture capitalist at Polaris Partners and Lehman Brothers Venture Partners (now Tenaya Capital). Nick also served in executive and advisory roles with two Boston area start-up technology companies, and served as a senior advisor to the Massachusetts Clean Energy Center. He earned an M.B.A from the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, and an A.B. from Harvard University.

Nicolas is passionate about teaching and is one of France’s main actors of the “active learning” field. Noting that “learning by doing” is a source of pleasure and fosters a superior performance among students, in 1999 he created and led Epitech, an enterprise that became the epitome of excellence for IT learning in France.
A fierce opponent of an educational system he knows by heart (he studied at Henri IV, Stanford, EPITA HEC) but that failed to reinvent itself and identify the true digital talents, Nicolas looks further with the creation of 42. 42 is free school open to all talents, but also a peer-to-peer school with no limits in its future development.

As part of the international hacking world and founder of companies specialized in computer security, Nicolas invites young people to work on the borders: being non-aligned to power, disruptive, highly committed to sharing.

Nicolas Vanbremeersch is the founder and CEO of Spintank, an online corporate and public communication agency.

He is a famous French blogger, known as “versac”, author and columnist for Les Echos, Slate.fr, France Culture, BFM TV.
He is the author of “De la Démocratie Numérique”, an essay on how the web is changing politics (Editions du Seuil, 2009).”

Nicole Aro is the AFL-CIO Digital Strategies deputy director. Before this, Nicole worked as the Organizing Director at the Sunlight Foundation, and as an online organizer at Organizing for America and the DNC. Prior to organizing, she taught middle school in Philadelphia and has a bachelor’s degree in Interdisciplinary Studies from the University of Chicago.