Personal Democracy Forum

Having pioneered distributed organizing tactics as global coordinator of Buy Nothing Day in the late nineties, Tom went on to work private sector where he developed expertise in social media marketing and online stakeholder dialogue. An avowed digital people-power wonk, his insights on the power of networked social movements have led him to speak repeatedly before the leaders of major NGOs and Fortune 500 companies. He also writes frequently on these subjects for The Guardian, Mashable and Mobilisation Lab.

Tom Slee writes about the intersections of technology, politics, and economics. He has a PhD in theoretical chemistry, a long career in the software industry, and his 2006 book “No One Makes You Shop at Wal-Mart” is a left-wing game-theoretical investigation of individual choice and its problems that has been used in university economics, philosophy, and sociology courses.

Recently, Tom has commented extensively about issues surrounding open data, the sharing economy and digital reputation, including pieces in The New Inquiry, Jacobin, and The Literary Review of Canada, as well as on the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.

Tom Steinberg is the founder and director of mySociety, an international non-profit group which aims to help people become more powerful in the civic and democratic parts of their lives, through digital means.

mySociety runs the popular UK transparency websites TheyWorkForYou and WhatDoTheyKnow, and problem-fixing sites FixMyStreet and FixMyTransport.  It also builds open source software to enable international re-use of mySociety’s projects.

Tom’s interest in technology and government comes from an unusual background in both fields. Having worked as a sysadmin and junior think-tank researcher, he became a policy analyst at the Prime Minister’s Strategy Unit from 2001 to 2003. He is a US/UK citizen and currently lives in Oxford.

In 2007 he co-authored the The Power of Information Review with Ed Mayo and the Strategy Unit, and from 2010-2012 was a member of the UK government’s Public Sector Transparency Board. He’s also proud to be an advisor to Code For America.

Tom Tresser is an educator, organizer, creativity champion, public defender and fighter of privatization. He has doing civic engagement and grassroots democracy efforts for over 40 years. His first voter registration campaign was in 1972.

Tom has acted in some 40 shows and produced over 100 plays, special events, festivals and community programs. He was director of cultural development at Peoples Housing, in north Rogers Park, Chicago, where he created a community arts program that blended the arts, education and micro-enterprise. Tom was elected to the Abraham Lincoln Elementary School’s Local School Council and served from 2004 to 2006.

He was a co-founder of Protect Our Parks, a neighborhood effort to stop the privatization of public space in Chicago. He was a lead organizer for No Games Chicago, an all-volunteer grassroots effort that opposed Chicago’s 2016 Olympic bid. He has taught workshops on “The Politics of Creativity – A Call To Service”for arts service organizations in six states. He teaches a number of classes on art, creativity and civic engagement for Loyola University, School of the Art Institute, the Illinois Institute of Technology, and DePaul University. Tom has published a web-based project, “America Needs You!” – about the need for artists to get involved in politics.

Tom was the Green Party candidate for the position of President of the Board of Commissioners of Cook County in November 2010 election. Tom is extremely proud to announce the launch of a new civic project, The CivicLab, a space where activists, educators, coders and designers meet to collaborate, teach, and build tools for civic engagement. The space is located in Chicago’s West Loop at 114 N. Aberdeen.

He is the lead organizer for the TIF Illumination Project that is investigating and explaining the impacts of Tax Increment Financing districts on a ward-by-ward basis. Tom and the TIF Illumination Project are profiled in the cover story of the July 22, 2013 issue of The Nation entitled “Chicago Rising!” Tom consulted with the Rockford Housing Authority on a local economic development program that combines the arts and creative enterprise.

Journalist, associate of the foreign department of the newspaper “Rzeczpospolita”, editor of the portal Eastbook.eu. Trained as an ethnologist and anthropologist. His research led to the Ukraine, where he worked on policy issues (the distance between the authorities and the citizens) and historical issues (UPA Great Patriotic War, the Great Famine). He has worked with the services “dziennikarze.info”, “gildia.pl”, “psz.pl”, “Gazeta Student”, TVP1 and opinion department of “Super Express”. During the Revolution in Ukraine his relations were published in “Rzeczpospolita” and “Dziennik Gazeta Prawna”.

Tracy Dennis-Tiwary is a researcher in psychology and neuroscience who is passionate about using science to drive the digital mental health revolution. She has translated two decades of her research on the anxious brain and the impact of emotions on health into the development of clinically-validated digital mental health tools. Her stress-reduction app Personal Zen has been featured in media outlets such as the Wall Street Journal, CBS, CNN, NPR, Huffington Post, Bloomberg Television, and Lifehacker. Her work in mindfulness-based stress reduction in at-risk youth is the topic of the documentary film “Changing Minds at Concord High.” She explores ideas about growing up and growing old in the digital age in her blog Psyche’s Circuitry and on Medium. She is director of the Hunter College Stress, Anxiety, and Resilience Research Center.

Tracy Van Slyke is the director of the The Culture Lab at Citizen Engagement Lab. The Culture Lab links together strategy, knowledge and technology-based services to help changemakers use culture to advance social progress. As an Opportunity Agenda fellow in 2014, she wrote the report, “Spoiler Alert: How Progressives Will Break Through with Pop Culture.” From 2011-2013, Van Slyke was the co-director of the New Bottom Line, an alignment of leading grassroots organizations that came together to build a fair economy. Previously, she was the director of The Media Consortium, where she worked with the country’s leading progressive independent media outlets to increase their impact. Van Slyke is the former publisher of In These Times magazine. In 2010, she co-authored the book Beyond The Echo Chamber: How a Networked Progressive Media Can Reshape American Politics (New Press).

Travis Moore is the founder and Director of TechCongress, which is incubated at the Open Technology Institute at New America. TechCongress is dedicated to building 21st Century government with technology talent and its first two Congressional Innovation Fellows are now serving in Congress. Travis worked on Capitol Hill for six years and was the Legislative Director for Rep. Henry A. Waxman, helping guide his work on technology, health care and the environment. He founded Congress’ first digital communications fellowship and the institution’s first Congressional staff conference.

Trebor Scholz was born and raised in East Berlin, Germany. At the Russian-language high school that he attended, he worked in the local tool and die factory over the summer. Since then, he has lived in Dresden, Weimar, London, Zurich, San Francisco, Portland, Buffalo, and Tucson. Today, Scholz is an author, educator, and Associate Professor for Culture & Media at The New School where he is chairing The Politics of Digital Culture conference series. Dr. Scholz convened eight major conferences, presented keynotes and lectures at more than 150 conferences worldwide, and held a grant from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. His book on 21st century labor is forthcoming in 2015. Dr. Scholz has co-authored From Mobile Playgrounds to Sweatshop City (with Laura Y. Liu)He is also the editor of several collections including The Internet as Playground and Factory (Routledge, 2013). Together with his partner in life, the artist Jenny Perlin, he is raising two girls in Brooklyn.

Trevor Timm is a co-founder and the executive director of the Freedom of the Press Foundation. He is a writer, activist, and lawyer who specializes in free speech and government transparency issues. He writes a weekly column for The Guardian, and has also contributed to The Atlantic, Al Jazeera, Foreign Policy, Harvard Law and Policy Review, PBS MediaShift and Politico.

Trevor formerly worked as an activist at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Before that, he helped the longtime General Counsel of The New York Times, James Goodale, write a book on the Pentagon Papers and the First Amendment. He received his J.D. from New York Law School.

In 2013, he received the Hugh Hefner First Amendment Award for journalism.

Trey Grayson has served as the Director of the Institute of Politics (IOP) at Harvard University since January 2011 after previously serving six years on the IOP’s Senior Advisory Committee. Grayson served two terms as Kentucky’s Secretary of State from 2004-11. He was elected Secretary of State in November of 2003 in his first run for political office, and at the time of his election, was the youngest Secretary of State in the country. In office, Grayson was recognized as a national leader in elections, civics, business services, and government innovation and served as President of the National Association of Secretaries of State in 2009-2010. An attorney prior to his election, Secretary Grayson graduated with honors from Harvard College (A.B., Government, 1994), where he was an IOP student leader, and from the University of Kentucky (J.D. 1998, M.B.A., 1998). He and his wife, Nancy, reside in Belmont, Massachusetts with their two daughters, Alex and Kate.

Tristan Harris is a design thinker, philosopher and entrepreneur – most recently focused on Design Ethics.

Tristan is rated #16 in Inc Magazine’s Top 30 Entrepreneurs Under 30, a former Mayfield Fellow in Stanford’s Technology Venture Program in Entrepreneurship, and graduated with a B.S. in Computer Science from Stanford University.

Currently he’s developing a framework at Google to help product designers facilitate conscious choices for users. Before this, he was co-founder and CEO of Apture, an instant explanation engine that enabled millions of users to get on-the-fly explanations about any topic without leaving their place on the web. Google acquired Apture in 2011.

Trooper Sanders is senior advisor for public sector initiatives at HelloWallet, a financial guidance technology company. He is also founder of Wise Whisper, a cause consulting practice helping leaders and organizations develop and improve initiatives tackling critical social challenges. Most recently Trooper served as an advisor to U.S. first lady Michelle Obama, leading Mrs.Obama’s efforts supporting America’s military families. He also developed Mrs. Obama’s international youth engagement platform and managed her international public diplomacy efforts, including travel to Africa, Europe and Latin America. Previously, Trooper was domestic policy advisor to former U.S. President Bill Clinton and oversaw the William J. Clinton Foundation’s domestic initiatives spanning economic opportunity and children’s health. During the 2004 election season, he founded Time to Vote, a campaign encouraging employers to provide workers with flexible leave on Election Day. He also served as communications advisor to the American Constitution Society for Law and Policy and, during a fellowship in Germany, worked for the anti-corruption non-profit Transparency International and Ashoka, a non-profit supporting social entrepreneurs. His government service began as a White House policy advisor to Vice President Al Gore and Tipper Gore. His international career began in the United Kingdom as a policy analyst with The Prince of Wales’s Business Leaders Forum (the Forum) where he established the Forum’s presence in Egypt and supported efforts forging ties between the World Bank and business in emerging economies. A native of Detroit, Michigan, Trooper has an undergraduate degree from the University of Michigan and a graduate degree from the London School of Economics.

Van Jones is the co-founder of Rebuild the Dream, a platform for bottom-up, people-powered innovations to help fix the U.S. economy. Under his leadership, Rebuild the Dream has built an active network in all 435 Congressional Districts, signed up over 600,000 members, and crowd-sourced a “Contract for the American Dream.”

As an advisor to the Obama White House, he helped run the inter-agency process that oversaw $80 billion in green energy recovery spending. A Yale Law School graduate, he has a 20-year track record as a successful, innovative and award-winning social entrepreneur. He is a co-founder of three other thriving nonprofit organizations: the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights, Color of Change, and Green For All.

Van’s new book, Rebuild the Dream, is the first to come from a former Obama official, and in it he explores seven major missteps made by the White House and its supporters after Obama’s 2008 victory. He also lays out a game plan for turning anger into action, protest into power and suffering into solutions—so that our economy can respect the 99% and work for the 100%, not just the top 1%.

He is a globally recognized, award-winning pioneer in human rights and the clean energy economy. He was a Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress and American Progress Action Fund, and held a joint appointment at Princeton University as a distinguished visiting fellow in both the Center for African American Studies and in the Program in Science, Technology and Environmental Policy at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs.

Van is on the board of Demos and the Natural Resources Defense Council. He is currently a Visiting Fellow in Collaborative Economics at Presidio Graduate School in San Francisco.

TIME magazine called him one of the 100 most influential people in the world in 2009. In 2011, Rolling Stone magazine named him one of the “12 Leaders Who Get Things Done.” He is also the best-selling author of the definitive book on green jobs, The Green Collar Economy.