Personal Democracy Forum

Sara Critchfield is a founding staff member and Editorial Director at Upworthy.com, where she’s currently having a ball! Upworthy, founded by Eli Pariser and Peter Koechley in March 2012, is social media with a mission: to draw attention to the issues that really matter by making them irresistibly shareable.

Sara is passionate about using technology, religion, design, advocacy, pop culture, and even the old-fashioned art of real-life conversation to pursue a more equitable society. In previous lives, Sara worked as the Community Manager at MoveOn.org, co-founded an intellectual property firm, worked on food security programs in Guatemala, and did lots of grassroots organizing for nonprofits in Washington DC. She holds a Master of Nonprofit Administration from the University of Pennsylvania and a Bachelor of Science in Visual Communication from Drexel University.

Sara Horowitz founded Working Today in 1995 to represent the needs and concerns of the growing independent workforce. Working Today built Freelancers Union to pioneer a new form of unionism, and the organization now has 100,000 members nationwide. Freelancers Union seeks to update the nation’s social safety net, developing systems so that all working people can access affordable benefits, regardless of their job arrangements. As executive director, Sara takes an entrepreneurial approach, pursuing creative, market-based solutions to pressing social problems.

In recognition of her efforts to create a self-sustaining organization of flexible workers, Sara was awarded a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Fellowship in 1999. Before founding Working Today, Sara was a labor attorney in private practice and a union organizer with 1199, the National Health and Human Service Employees Union. Prior to joining 1199, Sara was a public defender in New York City.

A lifelong resident of Brooklyn, NY, Sara comes from a long line of labor advocates, including her father, who was a labor lawyer, and her grandfather, who was vice president of the International Ladies’ Garment Workers Union. This family history of involvement in the labor movement led Sara to Cornell University’s School of Industrial and Labor Relations, where she was awarded its labor prize. She later earned a law degree cum laude from the SUNY Buffalo Law School and a master’s degree from Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government.

Sara is a trustee of the Nathan Cummings Foundation and is on the board of the Women’s Housing and Economic Development Corporation. Freelancers Union has been featured throughout the popular and business press, including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Economist, Wired and Fast Company; as well as on NOW with David Brancaccio, NewsHour with Jim Lehrer and National Public Radio’s Talk of the Nation and All Things Considered. Working Today has been recognized four times as one of the leading social entrepreneurs by Fast Company magazine.

Currently, Sarah works as a User Experience Strategist for Accela, helping to design civic and government technology. Alongside working on digital products for the public sector, Sarah advocates for designing data-driven systems with emotional data and human-centered design.

She received her MFA in Interaction Design at the School of Visual Arts and has worked with organizations such as The New York Times, Columbia University, The Santa Monica Public Library, Tribeca Film Institute, and General Electric.

In 2015 Sarah created Civic View, an experiment in emotional data, combining video, GPS, interview transcripts, and biometric data to provide a window into the deeply personal experiences that residents have in their public space. She has also worked on open data initiatives, in particular with the Civic Innovation Lab in Los Angeles.

Sarah is also a public speaker and workshop facilitator. She recently presented on emotional data at Interaction16 in Helsinki. She has also presented at Lincoln Center in New York City and traveled throughout the US and Europe to help folks better understand how to creatively incorporate emotional data into their designs.

Sarah Lai Stirland is techPresident’s senior writer in San Francisco. She’s a veteran legal affairs, business and politics reporter, having covered these subjects for more than 15 years. Her work has appeared in the nation’s most recognized media outlets, which include: Bloomberg Wealth Manager, Business 2.0, CNN, Congress Daily, Good Housekeeping, National Journal, National Public Radio’s On The Media, The New York Post, POLITICO, Portfolio.com, Red Herring, The Village Voice, and Wired.com’s widely-read Threat Level, one of Time’s favorite 25 blogs. Her leading coverage of the historic 2008 presidential campaign and its unprecedented reliance on social media to influence the race at Wired.com was on the daily bookmark list of television and radio producers around the world. She can be reached at: sarah@personaldemocracy.com. Follow her on Twitter @LaiStirland.

As a senior policy counsel for the Open Technology Institute at New America Foundation, Sarah Morris assists in the research and development of policy proposals related to open technologies, broadband access, and emerging technological issues.

Prior to joining New America Foundation, Ms. Morris served as a Google Policy Fellow with the Media Access Project, where she assisted with research and drafting of FCC comments on issues including media ownership, the open Internet and retransmission consent. She earned a B.A. in Political Science and English from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, and a J.D. and LL.M. in Space and Telecommunications Law from the University of Nebraska College of Law, completing her thesis on privacy and security concerns related to Smart Grid technology.

Sarnata Reynolds is an international human rights lawyer and an expert on refugee and migrants’ rights, statelessness and the right to nationality, and the rights of displaced persons during humanitarian crises. Between 2011 and 2016, Sarnata served as both the Senior Advisor on Human Rights and the Program Manager for Statelessness at Refugees International, where she was responsible for leading the organization’s analysis of international humanitarian responses from a human rights perspective. Sarnata conducted field research and produced reports on humanitarian needs and human rights concerns in Bangladesh, El Salvador, Israel, Kuwait, Lebanon, Malaysia, Mexico, Myanmar, South Sudan, and Turkey, among other countries. Sarnata spent the previous four years as Amnesty International USA’s Director for Refugee and Migrants’ Rights, serving as a lead researcher on two groundbreaking reports, and spearheading AIUSA’s policy and advocacy strategies in these areas. Sarnata is a frequent author and her publications include ​Pursuing Protection From Organized Criminal Groups in the Americas (December 2015), and the iBook, Who Is Dayani Cristal: An Examination of Modern-Day Migration (May 2014). She has been a guest on PBS NewsHour, NPR News, CNN International, ABC News, Univision, and NPR’s Latino USA.

Sascha Meinrath is the Director of the New America Foundation’s Open Technology Institute and has been described as a “community Internet pioneer” and an “entrepreneurial visionary.” He is a well-known expert on community wireless networks, municipal broadband, and telecommunications policy. In 2009 he was named one of Ars Technica’s Tech Policy “People to Watch” and is also the 2009 recipient of the Public Knowledge IP3 Award for excellence in public interest advocacy. Sascha is a co-founder of Measurement Lab, a distributed server platform for researchers around the world to deploy Internet measurement tools, advance network research, and empower the public with useful information about their broadband connections. He also coordinates the Open Source Wireless Coalition, a global partnership of open source wireless integrators, researchers, implementors and companies dedicated to the development of open source, interoperable, low-cost wireless technologies. He is a regular contributor to Government Technology’s Digital Communities, the online portal and comprehensive information resource for the public sector. Sascha has worked with Free Press, the Cooperative Association for Internet Data Analysis (CAIDA), the Acorn Active Media Foundation, the Ethos Group, and the CUWiN Foundation.

Sascha serves on the Leadership Committee of the CompTIA Education Foundation as well as the Advisory Council for the Knight Commission on the Information Needs of Communities in a Democracy. He blogs regularly at www.saschameinrath.com.

Sasha Issenberg is columnist for Slate and the Washington correspondent for Monocle, where he covers politics, business, diplomacy, and culture. He covered the 2008 election as a national political reporter in the Washington bureau of The Boston Globe, and his work has also appeared in New York, The New York Times Magazine, The Washington Monthly, Inc., The Atlantic, Boston, Philadelphia, and George, where he served as a contributing editor. “His first book, The Sushi Economy: Globalization and the Making of a Modern Delicacy,” was published by Gotham in 2007.

Sasha Romanosky researches topics in cybersecurity, consumer privacy, information policy, applied microeconomics, and law & economics. He is currently a Microsoft research fellow in the Information Law Institute at New York University School of Law. Sasha holds a PhD in Public Policy and Management from Carnegie Mellon University and a BS in Electrical Engineering from the University of Calgary, Canada. Sasha has published in the Journal of Policy Analysis and Management, the Berkeley Technology Law Journal, coauthored two book chapters and has written other works on information security law and economics. He was a security professional for over 10 years, predominantly within the financial and e-commerce industries at companies such as Morgan Stanley and eBay. Sasha holds a CISSP certification and is the co-author of the Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS), an open framework for scoring computer vulnerabilities.

Scooter Schaefer is a graduate of George Mason University with a degree in political science. After college Scooter began his career in public policy, interning in the office of Congressman Tom McClintock, and things have gone downhill from there.

He previously served as the Director of Communications for ProEnglish, and currently serves as the Assistant Director of Marketing and Digital Communications at the Media Research Center.

Scooter once risked his life to swim to an uninhabited island in Croatia during a backpacking trip around Europe. Now he lives in the suburbs near a Home Depot, drives a Toyota Corolla, and enjoys changing diapers in his free time.

Scott Chacon is a Git evangelist and Ruby developer working on GitHub.com. He’s the author of the Pro Git book by Apress, the Git Internals Peepcode PDF as well as the maintainer of the Git homepage and the Git Community Book. He’s presented for conferences and local groups and has done corporate training on Git across the country.