Personal Democracy Forum

Ben Wizner (@BenWizner) is director of the ACLU Speech, Privacy & Technology Project. He has litigated numerous cases involving post-9/11 civil liberties abuses, including challenges to airport security policies, government watchlists, extraordinary rendition, and torture. He has appeared regularly in the media, testified before Congress, and traveled several times to Guantánamo Bay to monitor military commission proceedings. Ben is a graduate of Harvard College and New York University School of Law and was a law clerk to the Hon. Stephen Reinhardt of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit. He is also Edward Snowden’s legal advisor.

Ben Knight is a co-founder of Loomio, an online tool for collaborative decision-making built by a team of open-source developers, facilitators and activists in New Zealand. Ben has an academic background in the evolution of collective intelligence, a practical background in grassroots community organising, and a passion for the potential of technology to spur positive social change. He was closely involved with the Occupy movement in 2011, which exposed him to the massively empowering results of collective decision-making on a large scale, and the possibility that online tools could make participatory democracy a part of everyday life.

Ben is the co-founder and Chief Technology Officer of Mobile Commons, where he is responsible for product development, system architecture, and technical operations. He is one of the leading pioneers shaping how organizations successfully use mobile for healthcare, advocacy, fundraising, organizing, and other forms of communication.

Ben has 15 years of experience building Internet applications of all shapes and sizes. He spent much of his career building distributed software for B2B customers. With a background in both the financial and medical industries, he has extensive experience with high-availability systems with a focus on security and data sensitivity. As a software engineer at Bloomberg LP, Ben developed their trading system, search engine, and web services. After Bloomberg, he worked at ShadowTV, transcoding, indexing and streaming hundreds of terabytes of video data for government and corporate customers.

He earned a BS in electrical and biological engineering and a Master’s in medical image processing, both at Cornell University. After completing his studies, he took a position as a Visiting Scientist, developing medical software used in clinical trials for lung cancer screening and image analysis tools used in General Electric’s CT scanners.

Ben lives on a small urban farm in Brooklyn with his wife Arin and sons Gabriel & Ezekiel. He can usually be found coding, biking, or rock climbing. He sits on the board of ioby.org and advises nonprofits on effective uses of technology.

Benoît Thieulin is the founder and managing director of the industry-leading Digital and Social Media Agency La Netscouade (www.lanetscouade.com). In 2013, he was appointed chairman of the official Conseil National du Numérique / French Digital Council.
As a social web expert, Benoît Thieulin has been an active witness of the deep changes introduced by the digital revolution in communications and society since the beginning of the 2000s.

As managing director of La Netscouade, Benoît Thieulin takes part in designing innovative communications platforms making a creative use of social media for Government, Media and corporate communications. He recently contributed to the design of the the French Government open-innovation platform Faire-Simple.gouv.fr. Benoît was one of the creators of Mediapart.fr, a leading collaborative independent online media, and now focuses on the interactions between social media and TV. He is advising several private companies on their digital transformation strategies.

In 2007, Thieulin directed the presidential candidate Ségolène Royal’s digital campaign. As a member of the think tank Terra Nova, Benoît played a key role in a 2009 mission aiming at fact-finding innovation in the US presidential campaign.
Former manager in the French Government’s digital communications, he played a critical role in helping the Prime Minister’s services to shift to social media practices.

Benoît teaches Empowerment through technology in the Paris Institute of Political Science Sciences Po.

Benoit Wirz is Director of Venture Investments at the John S. & James L. Knight Foundation where he manages the Knight Enterprise Fund, a venture fund that invests in early-stage startups that improve access to quality, useful information.

Prior to Knight, Wirz was a founder of U.S. Global, where he helped take tech, energy & manufacturing from startup to profitability. He also served as vice president of strategic planning for a manufacturing company, FLT Glass, and as vice president of business development for U.S. Global Synfuel, which invested in and developed energy companies and synthetic fuel projects. Prior to that, Wirz was an investment banker with Jefferies & Company and a reporter with Asahi Shimbun.

Wirz completed his MBA at INSEAD in Fontainebleau, France, and received a MA and a BA from Stanford University. He speaks French, Spanish and, on good days, Russian.

Berin Szoka is the President of TechFreedom. Previously, he was a Senior Fellow and the Director of the Center for Internet Freedom at The Progress & Freedom Foundation. Before joining PFF, he was an Associate in the Communications Practice Group at Latham & Watkins LLP, where he advised clients on regulations affecting the Internet and telecommunications industries. Before joining Latham’s Communications Practice Group, Szoka practiced at Lawler Metzger Milkman & Keeney, LLC, a boutique telecommunications law firm in Washington, and clerked for the Hon. H. Dale Cook, Senior U.S. District Judge for the Northern District of Oklahoma.

Szoka received his Bachelor’s degree in economics from Duke University and his juris doctor from the University of Virginia School of Law, where he served as Submissions Editor of the Virginia Journal of Law and Technology. He is admitted to practice law in the District of Columbia and California (inactive).

He has served on the Steering Committee for the D.C. Bar’s Computer & Telecommunications Law Section, and currently serves on the FAA’s Commercial Space Transportation Advisory Committee (COMSTAC). Szoka has chaired, and currently serves on, the Board of Directors of the Space Frontier Foundation, a non-profit citizens’ advocacy group founded in 1988 and dedicated to advancing commercial opportunity and expansion of human civilization in space.

He blogs for the Technology Liberation Front.

A well-known proponent of open government, data transparency, and utilization, Beth Blauer is a true visionary and the nation’s leading expert in implementing government “stat” programs. She has helped to design and bring Socrata’s GovStat platform to all levels of federal, state, and local governments as well as non-profit organizations and international NGOs. She is also renowned for her leadership of Maryland’s innovative performance management program, StateStat.

Beth Simone Noveck is a visiting professor at NYU Wagner. She served in the White House as the first United States Deputy Chief Technology Officer and founder and director of the White House Open Government Initiative (2009-2011). UK Prime Minister David Cameron appointed her Senior Advisor for Open Government. She served on the Obama-Biden Transition Team and was a volunteer advisor to the Obama for America campaign on issues of technology, innovation, and government reform. Also a visiting professor at the MIT Media Lab, Dr. Noveck is on leave as professor of law and founder of the Institute for Information Law and Policy at New York Law School.

She focuses her scholarship, activism and teaching on the future of democracy in the 21st century. Professor Noveck directs the Governance Lab funded by a grant from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation and the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. Housed at NYU Wagner, the Gov Lab accelerates and assesses progress toward smarter, more collaborative and decentralized governance.

A graduate of Harvard University and Yale Law School, she was named one of Foreign Policy’s “Top Global Thinkers for 2012,” “100 Most Creative People in Business” by Fast Company magazine, ” Top 25 Game Changers” by Politico and one of the “Top Women in Technology” by Huffington Post. A Fellow of the National Academy of Public Administration, she spoke at TEDGlobal 2012 on the future of government.

Her book Wiki Government: How Technology Can Make Government Better, Democracy Stronger and Citizens More Powerful (Brookings Institution Press 2009), appeared in Arabic, Chinese, Russian and in an audio edition. She is also co-editor of The State of Play: Law, Games and Virtual Worlds (NYU Press 2006). Her new book, The Networked State will appear with Harvard University Press. She tweets @bethnoveck and (very occasionally) blogs at the Cairns Blog.

Beth S. Carpenter manages AARP’s social marketing, reaching targeted audiences with the story of AARP’s work helping 50+ Americans achieve their real possibilities. Since 2008, Beth has been an integral part of creating the legal and organizational framework for a social team that today reports over 100 million impressions in an average month. She has successfully led ambassador activation launches on social, and has made AARP’s voice part of conversations ranging from Michael Jordan’s 50th birthday to the Emmys. In 2013, her work was nominated for a Digiday “Best Facebook Marketing Campaign” award, a campaign that made its average viewer a third more likely to join AARP, according to Nielsen measurements.

Betsy Aoki is a 20‐year veteran of Web technology and online community applications. Mary Jo Foley of CNET once called her a “Microsoft Woman to Watch” for her work in launching Microsoft’s corporate blogging platforms, a Live Q&A consumer question‐and‐answer site, and pioneering the Xbox Live Indie Games platform. Lured to the marketing side to launch Bing, Aoki devised the new search engine’s social media strategies and outreach programs for startups, educators, and influencers, earning a Webby for Bing’s site dedicated to education reform.

Now back in Bing engineering, she currently leads Bing’s Election 2016 effort.

Betsy is the Program Director for the Governance Initiative at the Democracy Fund, a private foundation that fosters the highest ideals of the American republic – government of, by, and for the people. She leads the Democracy Fund’s grant making to organizations building bridges across the ideological divide and seeking out ways for our government to solve problems in the face of increased polarization. Current grantees of the Governance Program include the Bipartisan Policy Center, the Aspen Institute’s Congressional Program, and the Faith & Politics Institute.

Betsy brings more than 25 years of experience on Capitol Hill to the Democracy Fund. She worked for two decades for her hometown congressman, Christopher Shays of Connecticut, taking a leading role in helping Rep. Shays build bipartisan coalitions to balance the federal budget in 1995-96 and to establish the 9-11 Commission and implement its recommendations. She also supported the enactment of the Congressional Accountability Act, a provision of the 104th Congress’ “Contract with America,” which applied labor, civil rights, and workplace safety laws to Congress.

From 1996-98, Betsy was also Deputy Director of the Congressional Management Foundation, a non-partisan organization that works directly with Members and staff to enhance their operations and interactions with constituents. Betsy oversaw day-to-day operations of the Foundation and developed numerous guides and resources that provide Members with critical information, from how to establish and run Washington and district offices to best practices for setting strategic priorities over the course of a term.

Following Shays’ departure from Congress in 2008, Betsy left the Hill briefly to work for Amnesty International, where she was Managing Director of Government Relations and then Deputy Executive Director for Advocacy, Policy, and Research. She returned to Congress to lead the staffs of Congressmen Mike Turner and later Bobby Schilling of Illinois before signing on as Congressman Andy Barr’s chief of staff in 2012. In 2014, she was awarded the Cresswell Congressional Staff Leadership Award from the Stennis Center for Public Service.

Betsy is a graduate of Williams College, where she was named a Mead Scholar of American Studies, has attended courses at Harvard’s Kennedy School and is a founder of the Form of 1981 Memorial Fund at her alma mater, Groton School, to support student financial aid. She and her husband, David, live in Washington with their two sons.

Bettina has a background in global governance and cultural diplomacy. Her interest in engaging the future by looking at the past has led her to projects across the world: she has written for Georgetown University Press on German nationalism, researched the Tamil diaspora, and produced cultural radio shows for NPR in Berlin. Bettina received her MSc from Oxford University and BS from Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service. Governance design, futures thinking, and how to grow the public imagination inform much of her research and project areas at the Institute for the Future, including in launching the Governance Futures Lab. As a Public Foresight Strategist at IFTF, Bettina works on a variety of strategic initiatives that push for foresight in the public realm, including the Future of Philanthropy, the Future of Learning, and the Future of Work. Bettina’s current research examines the roles of creative social spaces in developing new models for generating value and systemic change.

Betty coordinates the Media Action Grassroots Network (MAG-Net) where she manages our national media justice network of over 100 grassroots community organizations, coordinates nine regional chapters and curates the media justice learning community. She has over 15 years of community organizing, media activist, and filmmaking experience.

Betty has additionally worked as a labor organizer for the Chinese Staff and Workers’ Association, an immigrant rights workers center in New York City’s Chinatown. She is also co-founder of National Mobilization Against Sweatshops (NMASS), a 15 year-old multi-racial workers center. Betty is a board member for Deep Dish TV and Third World Newsreel, two media organizations that nationally distributes radical videos and films.

Betty has appeared on several local and national news outlets, and has been featured in such publications as the New York Daily News, the Financial Times, Stress magazine, Brooklyn Bridge, and City Limits.

When she is not working Betty can usually be found talking about her love of Brooklyn (born and raised), working on her creative projects, or finishing her MFA in Integrated Media Arts.