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.
Democracy activist, open source sustainer, co-founder at Open Collective and Chair of DemocracyEarth Foundation. She worked in politics in Argentina with The Net Party, a party she co-founded and helped develop DemocracyOS, technology for democracy around the world. YCombinator Alum, Young Global Leader of the World Economic Forum, globe-trotter and Roma’s mum. Now based in NYC.
Piotr Waglowski, also known as VaGla, is a Polish lawyer, open government activist, poet, publicist and webmaster, researcher of communication processes in the paradigm of social constructionist and academic teacher specializing in media education.
For over 15 years he’s edited his private Internet service VaGla.pl, ‘Prawo i Internet’ (Law & Internet), which is dedicated to the legal aspects of the information society. A founding member of the Internet Society Poland, he’s recognized as one of the first Wikipedians in Poland. He’s a member of the Polish Informatization Council and a former council member of the Polish Chamber of Information Technology and Telecommunication. He’s involved in several organisations, including the Center for Analysis at the ePaństwo Foundation // ePF, which is co-organizing PDF PL-CEE.
Piotr is a laureate of several prizes, eg: Internet Citizen of the Year 2001, Bronze Cross of Merit in 2005, Info Star 2010, and nominated for Internet Standard 2011 – “for almost 15 years of writing blog-portal on law and Internet, for consequent support of the freedom in The Net, for describing in easy-to-understand form difficult legal subjects, for initiating substantive discussions, for the contribution to the research on copyright law in Internet”. In 2012, he received a prize from Accessible Cyberspace Forum “for exceptional contribution to the accessibility of Internet”.
Rachel Weidinger is an artist, researcher, and organizer. She labors to illustrate what is possible, and to build equitable uses of power.
In 2011, Rachel founded Upwell. The ocean was our client. As ED, she led the development of Big Listening practices coupled with campaigning across a distributed network of influencers. The project aggregated power for movements and immediately redistributed that power through networks. Upwell’s work was grounded in both offline community organizing and online community management. It concluded operations in March 2015.
Recent appointments include Creative Dissent Fellow at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts and Arts & Culture for Economic Development Residency at PolicyLink. Rachel is presently engaged in a body of work called Missing infrastructures/ digital security.
Rachel holds an MFA-Social Practice from the California College of the Arts, a B. Phil in Interdisciplinary Studies from Miami University, and completed coursework for an MA in Arts Policy & Administration at Ohio State.
Rachna Choudhry is co-founder of POPVOX.com. After ten years of advocacy and lobbying for several national non-profit organizations, she realized that there is a huge disconnect between people and our lawmakers in Washington. Frustrated from not feeling heard, people bang the drum louder — or simply give up on the policy-making process entirely. In 2010, Rachna met her co-founder, a Congressional staffer who understood the frustrations of lawmakers who were getting bombarded by generic petitions to Congress or impersonal form letters — and the idea for POPVOX was born.
Rachna holds a Bachelor’s degree in Political Science from UCLA, and a Master’s in Public Policy from Georgetown University’s McCourt School of Public Policy. She is based in Washington, DC and hails from the San Francisco Bay Area.
Since launching in 2011, POPVOX won the social media category at South by Southwest, was ranked #10 on Mashable’s Major Tech Contributions From Entrepreneurial Women and was honored at the 2012 Tribeca Disruptive Innovation Awards. POPVOX has helped close to 400,000 verified constituents share their personal stories and experiences with their lawmakers in Washington. In 2014, Rachna ranked #6 in Digital Citizenship Project’s Digital Citizens of the Year.
In June 2014, the Library of Congress selected POPVOX for inclusion in the official digital archives of the United States. Now, every letter written by individuals to their Members of Congress are preserved as part of our nation’s historical record
Raina is a co-founder of Mavin, a recently launched startup focused on creating a platform for increasing mobile data access in emerging markets. She previously served with Robert Bole as Co-Directors of Innovation at the BBG, the world’s largest international media organization. The new leadership team advanced the BBG’s mission to reach global audiences and brought in agile development, public-private partnerships and innovation under the Obama Administration. Prior to that she was the Senior New Media Advisor in the State Department’s Office of eDiplomacy, Diplomatic Innovation Division. She also founded and advised several non-proftis focused on international development. Previously, Raina led the conversion of Wieden+Kennedy New York to a full-service digital agency in her role as Director of Digital Strategies and spent a decade in digital advertising. Raina has consulted with The Knight Foundation,ONE.org Microsoft, Burberry, Nike, Nokia, Levi’s, Unilever, Nestle, Avaya, IBM, Intel, Cantor Fitzgerald, Johnnie Walker, The Walt Disney Company, Match.com, ING Direct, ONE.org, Mentos, JWT, ABC Family, EA, ESPN, Brand Jordan, and several other organizations.
Rakeen Mabud is the Program Director of the Roosevelt Institute’s 21st Century Economy and Economic Inclusion programs. She manages the Institute’s work on job creation, contingent work, the racial wealth gap, and intersectionality and economics. At Roosevelt, she has written about Universal Basic Income and the future of work, and managed the publication of Hidden Rules of Race: Barriers to an Inclusive Economy. She also co-authored Roosevelt’s paper on digital equity, Wired: Connecting Equity to a Universal Broadband Strategy. Her writing has appeared in The Guardian, The Hill, and Teen Vogue.
Ramya Raghavan leads news and civics programming at Google. In previous years, she led political and nonprofit outreach at YouTube and served as head of brand marketing for Google in Europe, the Middle East and Africa. Prior to joining Google, Ramya worked on digital campaigns and communications at the Center for American Progress. She is a graduate of the University of Michigan and currently serves on the board of National Voter Registration Day.