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.
Nicole Sanchez was, until very recently, Managing Partner of the Kapor Center for Social Impact (Kapor Center), an organization relentlessly pursuing creative strategies to leverage tech for positive, progressive change.
For the past 20 years, she has been a serial entrepreneur, having founded several organizations focused on social justice issues. She is now the CEO of Vaya Consulting, a firm teaching tech companies how to recruit, retain, and promote diverse talent.
She holds an undergraduate degree from Stanford University and an MBA from UC Berkeley. After graduating from Stanford, Nicole spent several years at City Year, building a US-based “domestic Peace Corps.”
She then returned to Stanford and helped build the Stanford Center on Ethics, where she co-founded “Hope House Scholars,” bringing Stanford professors to teach humanities to recently-incarcerated women in the local community. Nicole also founded an organization teaching American students about global poverty alleviation and yet another working on American “achievement gap” issues in public schools.
Nicole is the mother of two, and lives in Berkeley CA.
Nitika Raj does social justice work for the same reason she prays – to seek truth and build peace and dignity for all. She is the founder and principal of Moksh Consulting, through which she offers organizational consulting and professional coaching services. Her areas of expertise are facilitation, resource mobilization and donor organizing, anti-oppressive organizational development, staff and board development, and coaching with a focus on building up the resiliency and power of marginalized communities.
Previously she was on staff at Resource Generation for 4 years as Director of Racial Justice, and before that as a National Organizer of young people of color with wealth. Her other work experiences include ChangeLab (a grassroots political lab focusing on U.S. racial justice politics and the role of Asian Americans), API Chaya (a South Asian organization addressing domestic violence in Washington state), Kirkland Police Department Family Violence Unit, and the VOICE anti-violence project at Georgia Tech. Nitika is currently on the board of the Astraea Lesbian Foundation for Justice, a global LGBTQ human rights foundation. She is former board member and chair of Trikone Northwest in Seattle and also a co-founding member of the Queer and Trans POC Yoga Collective in Seattle.
Nitika’s writings have been published in Tikkun magazine (2013), Criptiques: an anthology of writing on disability (2014), Anti-Oppressive Social Work Practice (2014), Queering Sexual Violence (2016), and various online forums. Nitika has edited and produced two zines for social justice organizations – 33 Cups of Chai (for Chaya in 2010), and To the Left and Write (for Western States Center in 2010). She has shared her poetry and creative non-fiction on several stages in Seattle and New York. In 2015 Nitika co-founded the Yoni ki Raat Collective and show, a theater production to raise awareness about issues of gender, sexuality, and violence in the South Asian community.
Born in India and raised in Kuwait, she currently lives in and loves from Brooklyn, NY.
Currently setting roots in Pittsburgh, PA by way of Washington, DC (hometown), Niq specializes in building and sustaining diverse communities focused on volunteer engagement. They spent 2013-2017 working with the graduate students and faculty of the University of Pittsburgh to launch concurrent academic labor union campaigns. Niq moonlights as co-coordinator of a local scholars-at-large network and is a Managing Editor for EFNIKS, a digital magazine highlighting the experiences and lives of LGBTQ+ people of color.
On their downtime, Niq enjoys bingeing true crime podcasts before bed, following every “baby animals” account on the internet, and reading all the YA and graphic novels held in the Carnegie public libraries.
Norman is a Professor in the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University and an entrepreneur. He is well known for his pioneering research in mobile and social networking, mobile security and privacy, machine learning and artificial intelligence. Norman is a co-creator of Livehoods.org, an urban computing service that analyzes social media data to help understand the dynamic nature of cities.
At Carnegie Mellon University, Norman is director of the Mobile Commerce Lab and co-director of the School of Computer Science’s PhD Program in Computation, Organizations and Society. He has authored around 200 scientific publications, including a 2002 best-selling book on “M-Commerce: Technologies, Services and Business Models”, which anticipated many of the developments that took place in this space over the past ten years. In the late nineties, he served for two years as Chief Scientist of the European Union’s 550 million Euro initiative in e-Work and e-Commerce, an initiative that led to the launch of over 200R&D projects involving a total of about 1,000 European companies and universities.
Norman is also co-founder, chairman and chief scientist of Wombat Security Technologies, a leading provider of cyber security training software products and anti-phishing filtering solutions
Olga Aivazovska is coordinator of the Civil Network OPORA NGO, international expert in electoral matters, parliamentarism and development of draft laws. Ms. Aivazovska was a team-lider of national nonpartisan observation missions in Ukraine with over 20,000 activists involved from 2010 to 2016, and participated in electoral observation in more than 10 countries of Europe. Olga represents Ukraine in political subgroup of the Trilateral Contact Group (Ukraine-Russia-OSCE) settling the conflict in Eastern Ukraine, is a Member of the National Unity Council under the President of Ukraine, and Board Member of the Ukrainian Think Tanks Liaison Office in Brussels. Was included in top 100 most influential and most successful women of Ukraine in 2014 and 2015 (according to political editions the Focus magazine and the Novoe Vremia).
Omar Wasow, 34, is the executive director of BlackPlanet.com at Community Connect Inc. and a technology analyst for WNBC and NPR. Omar also works to demystify technology issues through regular TV and radio segments on shows like NBC’s Today, CNN’s Aaron Brown and NPR’s former Tavis Smiley Show. Omar tutored Oprah Winfrey in her first exploration of the Net in the 12-part series Oprah Goes Online. As a result of his active participation in a number of social issues, particularly the charter school movement, Omar was selected to be a fellow in the Rockefeller Foundation’s Next Generation Leadership program. In Fall 2003, a K-5 charter school that Omar helped found opened in his hometown of Brooklyn.
Orsolya Vincze is a researcher and development coordinator at K-Monitor, a Hungarian anti-corruption NGO. K-monitor truly believes in an information society and the power of investigative journalism. Almost all of its projects are connected with information and communication technologies as well as professional and community journalism. Previously, she worked as an editor at a social science journal, where she became interested in the political aspects of the information society. She received a JD degree from Eötvös Loránd University in 2006.
Oscar Morales Guevara, joven Ingeniero Colombiano, fue el creador del grupo Facebook “Un Millón de Voces contra las FARC”, desde donde lideró la GRAN MOVILIZACIÓN MUNDIAL CONTRA LAS FARC que tuvo lugar el 4 de Febrero de 2008. Esta protesta es considerada la más grande demostración anti-terrorista de toda la historia, con más de 12 millones de participantes en más de 200 ciudades de todo el mundo. Junto con varios de sus compañeros, Oscar co-fundó la Fundación Un Millón de Voces, manteniendo vivo el clamor popular que exige a las FARC la liberación de todos los secuestrados que aún permanecen en cautiverio, y el fin de las acciones terroristas. En Septiembre de 2008, Oscar fue invitado por el fundador de Facebook Mark Zuckerberg como expositor en las oficinas centrales de Facebook en Palo Alto, California. También fue conferencista en el evento Advertising Week 2008 en la ciudad de Nueva york, donde discutió sobre el uso de las redes sociales. Un Millón de Voces contra las FARC inspiró además la creación de la Alianza de Movimientos Juveniles (AYM), una organización que reúne movimientos de todo el mundo que usan las redes sociales para promover causas contra el terrorismo, la violencia, la opresión y el extremismo. Las cumbres de AYM fueron patrocinadas por Howcast.com, Facebook, Google, MTV, YouTube, Access 360 Media, y el Departamento de Estado de los Estados Unidos, entre otros. En Mayo de 2009, Oscar fue conferencista en el evento Google Zeitgeist 2009 en Londres. Habló al lado de varios de los Presidentes de las 500 más importantes compañías del mundo según la revista Fortune, los fundadores de Google, y Sus Altezas Reales el Príncipe Carlos de Gales, el Príncipe Felipe de Asturias, y el Príncipe Haakon de Noruega. En este evento se debatió sobre el rol de los ciudadanos en la política, y como el Internet y las redes sociales están moldeando la manera como la gente se comunica. Posteriormente, Oscar fue nombrado como el más joven Consejero de One Young World, una iniciativa respaldada por Kofi Annan, el Arzobispo Desmond Tutu, Sir Bob Geldof, Mohamed Yunus, y otros. En Febrero de 2010, Oscar participó en la primera cumbre anual de One Young World, llevada a cabo en Londres. Esta cumbre reunió a más de 800 jóvenes líderes sobresalientes que representaron a 106 naciones. Desde Febrero 25 de 2010, Oscar fue nombrado como el Primer Visiting Fellow en el programa de Libertad Humana del Instituto George W. Bush en Dallas, Texas. Este nombramiento fue hecho por el ex Subsecretario del Departamento de Estado, honorable James K. Glassman, y por el ex Presidente de los Estados Unidos George W. Bush. Oscar reside actualmente en Dallas, Texas.
Palak Shah is the Social Innovations Director of the National Domestic Workers Alliance (NDWA). NDWA is the leading organization working to build power, respect, and fair labor standards for the 2.5 million nannies, housekeepers and senior caregivers in the U.S.
She is also the Founding Director of Fair Care Labs, the innovation arm of the domestic worker movement. Fair Care Labs experiments with entrepreneurial, market-based, and private sector strategies to improve working conditions, services and employment opportunities for domestic workers.
Palak has a diverse career spanning the private, public and social movement sectors. Most recently, Palak served as a leader at Wellmont Health System, an eight hospital health system in Northeast Tennessee and Southwest Virginia. Palak developed the health care system’s strategic responses to the Affordable Care Act and the rapidly changing healthcare environment. Palak was previously a member of Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick’s Administration, serving as a member of the governor’s budget team and then as the Commonwealth’s Deputy Director of Performance Management. Palak previously worked in the private sector as a management consultant at Accenture’s strategy practice.
Palak is a graduate of the well-known organizing academy at the Bus Riders Union in Los Angeles. She has worked at Political Research Associates, Oakland Rising, and Generation Five. In 1996, Palak co-founded VISIONS Worldwide, an internationally-recognized NGO focused on the HIV/AIDS crisis in India. Palak received a dual degree in Political Science and Broadcast Journalism from Northwestern University. She received a Masters in Public Policy from the Harvard Kennedy School, where she was awarded the prestigious Public Service Fellowship and Presidential Scholarship.
