Participants

Martín Abregú is Ford Foundation’s director of Human Rights and Governance. Working with program officers in New York and in nine regional offices around the world, his team focuses on advancing economic and social rights, promoting transparent, effective and accountable government, reforming global financial governance and strengthening human rights worldwide.

Bill Adair is the creator and editor of PolitiFact, which won the Pulitzer Prize for National Reporting in 2009. He oversees 35 writers and editors who work for PolitiFact National and its 10 state sites around the country. He has won the Everett Dirksen Award for Distinguished Coverage of Congress, the Society of Professional Journalists Sigma Delta Chi Award and the Manship Prize for New Media in Democratic Discourse.

Elena Agapie is a PhD candidate in Computer Science at the School of Engineering and Applied Science, Harvard.

Denise E. Agosto is an associate professor in the College of Information Science & Technology at Drexel University. Her research interests focus on youth information practices, with emphases on teens’ online social interactions and how public libraries can best support teens’ digital information behaviors. Visit http://youthonline.ischool.drexel.edu/ to learn more about her current research projects.

Kendra Albert is a research assistant at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society.

Cristóbal Joshua Alex is a program officer at the Ford Foundation where he works on increasing democratic participation in the United States, with an emphasis on voter registration and mobilization, voting rights and public policies.

Joaquin Alvarado joined American Public Media | Minnesota Public Radio in January 2010 as Senior Vice President for Digital Innovation. Alvarado leads strategic development of APM’s Public Insight initiatives, as well as developing models for deepening audience engagement, widening digital reach and increasing digital revenue growth across all operating divisions.

Aviva Argote is the Executive Director of the Hauser Center for Nonprofit Organizations at Harvard University.

Amar Ashar is the Berkman Center’s Program Coordinator, and serves on its core staff.

Orlando Bagwell is director of the Ford Foundation’s JustFilms initiative, a new effort supporting emerging and established filmmakers whose work addresses the most urgent social issues of our time. His distinguished career as an independent filmmaker and producer spans more than 25 years. Recognition of his work includes four Emmy Awards and numerous Emmy nominations, three George Peabody Awards and the 1994 New York Film Festival Grand Prize. He holds a master’s degree in broadcast journalism and a bachelor’s degree in film, both from Boston University.

Jonathan Barzilay directs the Freedom of Expression unit at the Ford Foundation, overseeing the Foundation’s work in Media, Arts & Culture, and Religion in the Public Sphere. Previously, he spent 25 years in the media business, and held executive positions at ABC, CBS, and Qualcomm. He is a graduate of Harvard College and Columbia Law School.

Sunny Bates. Operating at the nexus of executives, scientists, artists, creators, entrepreneurs, educators, philanthropists and visionaries worldwide, Sunny Bates provides the energy fueling countless game-changing ventures in media, technology, business, the environment and the arts. A magnet for talent, passionate about innovation, strategically savvy and adept at identifying investors, Sunny plays lead roles ranging from member of TED’s influential Brain Trust to guiding muse for crowd-sourced, creative projects funder KickStarter.

Matthew Battles is a fellow with metaLAB (at) Harvard, an academic and creative collaborative devoted to the exploration of technology in the arts and humanities, hosted by the Berkman Center. He has written about discourse in networked culture for such venues as The Boston Globe, The Nieman Journalism Lab, and The Atlantic Monthly. He is the author of Library: an Unquiet History (Norton 2004); his forthcoming books include Letter by Letter (W. W. Norton), a sentimental and natural history of writing, and a short story collection, The Sovereignties of Invention (Red Lemonade). On Twitter, he’s @matthewbattles.

Emily Bell is a Professor of Professional Practice & Director, Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia University. She was was director of digital content for Britain’s Guardian News and Media from 2006 to 2010.

Yochai Benkler is the Berkman Professor of Entrepreneurial Legal Studies at Harvard, and faculty co-director of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society. Before joining the faculty at Harvard Law School, he was Joseph M. Field ’55 Professor of Law at Yale. He writes about the Internet and the emergence of networked economy and society, as well as the organization of infrastructure, such as wireless communications.

Lisa Bennett is the communications director at the National Organization for Women, where she has worked since 1995. Lisa oversees NOW’s media relations efforts, online communications, print publications and overall messaging strategies. She works extensively on a broad range of media justice issues, addressing the media’s portrayal of women, news coverage of feminist issues, employment and management opportunities for women in telecommunications, and women’s access to technology.

Joshua Benton is director of the Nieman Journalism Lab. Before spending a year at Harvard as a 2008 Nieman Fellow, he spent 10 years in newspapers, most recently at The Dallas Morning News. His reports on cheating on standardized tests in the Texas public schools led to the permanent shutdown of a school district and won the Philip Meyer Journalism Award from Investigative Reporters and Editors. He has reported from 10 foreign countries, been a Pew Fellow in International Journalism, and three times been a finalist for the Livingston Award for International Reporting.

Nolan Bowie is Adjunct Lecturer in Public Policy and a Senior Fellow of the Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy. From 1986 to 1998 he was an Associate Professor at Temple University, School of Communication and Theater. His primary policy concerns are issues regarding equity and fairness in the allocation of and access to information (literacy, education, and knowledge) in all formats via digital and analog communication technology.

Helen Brunner is Director of the Media Democracy Fund, a donor collaborative of twelve foundations that grew out of research conducted by the Ford Foundation, the Phoebe Haas Charitable Trust, and the Albert A. List Foundation on how to increase philanthropic investment in media policy. She previously served as program consultant to Albert A. List Foundation’s Freedom of Expression, Arts and Telecommunications Policy and Advocacy Programs from 1996-2004. She has served on numerous boards of directors, including the Progressive Technology Project, the National Association of Artists Organizations and the National Campaign for Freedom of Expression.

Herbert Burkert is President of the Research Center for Information Law at the University of St.Gallen Switzerland and has been a Berkman Fellow and Visiting Professor at Harvard Law School in fall 2011.

James Burns is a Co-Founder of metalab (at) Harvard, a research unit dedicated to innovation and experimentation in the arts, media and humanities, and the Chief Technology Officer at Zeega, an open-source html5 platform for creating interactive documentaries and inventing new forms of storytelling. His previous work includes the collaborative documentary project Mapping Main Street, which interrelates open media feeds from across the web into thematic and geographic pathways. James also holds a PhD in Economics from Harvard University; his work in economics investigates topics in Game Theory, Market Design and Decision Theory.

Diane Chang is a Master in Public Policy candidate at Harvard Kennedy School focusing on applying digital technologies to news reporting and consumption.

Sidharth Chhabra is a Ph.D. student at School of Information, University of Michigan. He is part of multidisciplinary Balance project, which aims to create a healthy environment of opinions. His current research focuses on recommender systems, text mining and information economics, particularly in the areas of news recommendation. He is presently working on technological interventions which nudge people to read more and diverse.

Don Chen is a Senior Program Officer at the Ford Foundation. He works on reforming the rules that shape municipal and regional growth by pursuing integrated approaches to affordable housing, public transportation, land use and community planning. Don joined the Ford Foundation in 2008. Previously he was the founding executive director and CEO of Smart Growth America, where he led efforts to create the National Vacant Properties Campaign and the Transportation for America Campaign, and orchestrated a merger with the Growth Management Leadership Alliance.

Harris Chen is currently a Taiwanese public prosecutor at Chiayi District Prosecution Office, specializing in IP crimes, sexual crimes, drug trafficking and insurance fraud. Prior to his service as a prosecutor, Harris had practiced law as legal consultant for the Airforce,court notary and attorney at law.

Justin Clark is a junior web developer at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society.

Michael Conover is a Ph.D. student studying complex systems analysis at the Indiana University School of Informatics and Computing’s Center for Complex Networks and Systems Research. A lead developer for the Truthy project, Michael’s work blending large scale computational analyses with media and political theory has been featured on National Public Radio and in The Wall Street Journal, Science Magazine and the Communications of the ACM.

Rocio L. Córdoba is Co-Founder and Executive Director of California Latinas for Reproductive Justice (CLRJ). She has served as a reproductive justice, gender equity and civil rights attorney and advocate on the national, state and local levels for over 18 years. She is a Founding Team member of EMERJ (Expanding the Movement for Empowerment and Reproductive Justice) and serves on the national SisterSong Women of Color Reproductive Health Collective’s Management Circle, the National Latina Institute for Reproductive Health Policy Advisory Committee, and CSULA’s Center for the Study of Genders and Sexualities Advisory Board.

Sandra Cortesi has been a lead Fellow for the Youth Media Project at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society since October 2009, where she is responsible for coordinating policy, research, and educational initiatives related to youth and media.

Sasha Costanza-Chock is Assistant Professor of Civic Media in the Faculty of Comparative Media Studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (cms.mit.edu), co-PI of the Center for Civic Media (civic.mit.edu), and a Fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society. In the past, Sasha worked extensively with the Indymedia Video Distribution Network, the Transmission video activist network, and the campaign for Communication Rights in the Information Society. He is a cofounder of Mobile Voices (VozMob.net) and a board member of Allied Media Projects (http://alliedmediaconference.org). Sasha has a doctorate from the Annenberg School for Communication & Journalism at the University of Southern California.

Susan Crawford is the (Visiting) Stanton Professor of the First Amendment at Harvard’s Kennedy School, a Visiting Professor at Harvard Law School, and a columnist for Bloomberg View. She served as Special Assistant to the President for Science, Technology, and Innovation Policy (2009) and co-led the FCC transition team between the Bush and Obama administrations. She is a member of Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s Advisory Council on Technology and Innovation.

Manuel Culetsu is a grants administrator at the Ford Foundation.

Alan Davidson is a Visiting Scholar at MIT’s Technology and Policy Program. Until this February he was Director of Public Policy for Google in the Americas, where his seven-year tenure included opening and building Google’s Washington DC office. He was previously Associate Director at the Center for Democracy and Technology.

Nicholas Diakopoulos is an independent researcher and consultant in New York City. His research interests span human-computer interaction, social computing, visualization, and journalism. He received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the School of Interactive Computing at Georgia Tech, where he helped launch the program in Computational Journalism. He was also a Computing Innovation Fellow at Rutgers University School of Communication and Information from 2009-2011.

Judith Donath synthesizes knowledge from fields such as urban design, evolutionary biology and cognitive science to build innovative interfaces for on-line communities and virtual identities. A Harvard Berkman Faculty Fellow and formerly director of the Sociable Media Group at MIT Media Lab, she is known internationally for her writing on identity, interface design, and social communication.

Alister Doyle has worked as Reuters Environment Correspondent since 2004, mainly covering U.N. negotiations including the Copenhagen summit in 2009 and the science of climate change. A British citizen based in Oslo, the job has taken him to places ranging from the Arctic to Antarctica, where he was on the last flight to land on a part of the Wilkins Ice shelf before it collapsed in early 2009. Previously, he had postings with Reuters in Paris, Central America, Brussels and London in a career stretching back to 1982. He is a graduate of Oxford University where he studied French and Spanish.

John Dunbar is Managing Editor for financial and political news at the Center for Public Integrity. For the past two years, he was director of the “Connected” project at the Investigative Reporting Workshop at American University, investigating the political influence of the telecommunications and media industries. Prior to the Workshop, he reported on media and technology issues and the financial meltdown for the Washington bureau of the Associated Press.

Carla Ohringer Engle serves as the President of Progressive Strategies. She  specializes in coalition building, working to get new organizations and campaigns up and running, and fundraising and communications strategy. Some highlights of Carla’s experience include serving as Executive Director of American Family Voices, Director of the Progressive Donor Network, as part of the Renaissance Weekend team, and as part of the Democratic National Committee’s finance team during the 2000 election as the Director of the Federal Victory Fund and as a Regional Finance Director, working in and overseeing activities in a number of key states.

Bruce Etling directs the Internet & Democracy Project at the Berkman Center. Before joining Berkman, Bruce was the Director of USAID’s Office of Democracy and Governance in Kabul, Afghanistan. He has also worked on democracy programs for USAID in Russia and Cambodia. Before USAID, he worked on a large independent media development program in the NIS and Central and Eastern Europe for the International Research & Exchanges Board (IREX). He first joined Harvard Law School as part of the Afghan Legal History Project at the Islamic Legal Studies Program.

Ernesto Falcon has been the Director of Government Affairs for Public Knowledge since 2010. His work involves informing Members of Congress and Congressional staff on Capitol Hill of the impacts policies involving copyright law and telecommunications law will have on the public interest. Ernesto came to PK from the office of Rep. Bart Stupak (D-MI), where he worked for three years as the senior legislative assistant dealing with issues related to the House Energy and Commerce Committee’s Subcommittee on Communications, Technology, and the Internet. Ernesto previously worked for Rep. Earl Blumenauer (D-OR) for three years as a technology manager and legislative assistant.

Rob Faris is the Research Director of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University. His recent research includes Internet content regulation, state censorship and surveillance practices, broadband and infrastructure policy, and the interaction of new media, online speech, government regulation of the Internet and political processes.

Jim Fingal is the co-author of the book The Lifespan of a Fact, a book Publishers Weekly describes as “very apropos in our era of spruced-up autobiography and fabricated reporting,” adding that “this is a whip-smart, mordantly funny, thought-provoking rumination on journalistic responsibility and literary license.” He worked several years as a fact-checker and editorial assistant at The Believer and McSweeneys, where he worked on the titles What is the What, Surviving Justice, Voices from the Storm, and others. He currently lives in Cambridge and works as a software developer.

Samantha Finn is affiliated with the Department of Computer Science at Wellesley College.

Terry Fisher is the Faculty Director of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society. He is also the WilmerHale Professor of Intellectual Property Law at Harvard Law School.

Ken Freedman is the Station Manager of WFMU, the longest running and most renowned freeform radio station in the U.S. Under his guidance, WFMU became independent of Upsala College, WFMU’s original owner. Freedman also developed WFMU’s internet presence, making it one of the most popular and forward looking internet radio stations in the U.S. He recently founded the Free Music Archive, an online music library and social site based on curated music licensed under alternative copyrights such as creative commons licenses. Freedman has served on the board of public science and technology companies and is a technology advisor to the National Federation of Community (NFCB) broadcasters.

Tom Freedman is President of Freedman Consulting, LLC, where he acts as an advisor to leading political figures, corporations, and non-profit organizations developing policy ideas that become part of an effective strategic message. He has served in the Clinton Administration as Senior Advisor to the President, and prior to that as Special Assistant to the President for policy planning. He has also served as a member of the 2008 presidential Obama-Biden Transition Project on the Technology, Innovation, and Government Reform Policy Working Group. He is an honors graduate of Carleton College, and a graduate of the University of California at Berkeley where he was Editor-in-Chief of the California Law Review. He is also a senior fellow at the Washington-based Progressive Policy Institute.

Judith Freeman is the co-founder and Executive Director of the New Organizing Institute. In 2008 worked on the Obama campaign. Previously, she was the senior political strategist at the AFL-CIO, where she also co-founded the Analyst Institute. During the 2004 presidential election, she worked on the Kerry campaign. She works with political campaigns, unions and non-profit organizations on organizing, targeting, strategy and technology infrastructure. She worked for 5 years in technology at the University of Chicago where she also organized with social justice organizations.

Carlotta Gall is a Senior Correspondent with the New York Times, based in Afghanistan and Pakistan since 2001. She is currently undertaking a Nieman Foundation fellowship at Harvard University, 2011-2012.

Peter Galison is Pellegrino University Professor of the History of Science and of Physics at Harvard University. In 1997 Galison was awarded a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Fellowship; won a 1998 Pfizer Award (for Image and Logic: A Material Culture of Microphysics) as the best book that year in the History of Science; and in 1999 received the Max Planck and Humboldt Stiftung Prize.

Urs Gasser is the Berkman Center for Internet & Society’s Executive Director. Before joining the Berkman Center in this capacity, he was Associate Professor of Law at the University of St. Gallen (Switzerland), where he led the Research Center for Information Law as Faculty Director. His research and teaching focuses on information law and policy and the interaction between law and innovation.

Tom Glaisyer coordinates the Media Policy Program at the New America Foundation’s Open Technology Initiative. Through tracking media policy initiatives at the federal level, and innovative efforts in local communities across the country. Glaisyer’s research focuses in particular on policies to reform public media, increase independent reporting on issues of public interest, and help citizens access and engage with high-quality information.

Joe Goldman leads Omidyar Network’s efforts to increase the responsiveness of democracy in the United States by reducing the influence of money in politics, improving the ability of voters to make informed decisions, and increasing civil discourse across the political spectrum. Before joining ON, Joe served as the interim executive director at the Campaign for Stronger Democracy, a coalition that encourages collaboration among a wide array of democracy reform advocates. Joe was also the Vice President of Citizen Engagement at AmericaSpeaks, where he directed and consulted on some of the largest public deliberations in the world.

Bruno Goncalves is an associate research scientist at the Laboratory for the Modeling of Biological and Technical Systems at Northeastern University. Bruno  completed his joint PhD in Physics, MSc in C.S. at Emory University in 2008, following which he joined the Center for Complex Networks and Systems Research at Indiana University as a post-doctoral research associate. His research activity focuses on using computational, visualization and data analysis methods for the study of Complex Systems in a multidisciplinary context.

Lucas Graves is a PhD candidate in communications at Columbia University and a research fellow at the Media Policy Initiative of the New America Foundation. This fall he joins the faculty of the School of Journalism & Mass Communication at the University of Wisconsin – Madison.

Eszter Hargittai is a Fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society and an Associate Professor of Communication Studies and Faculty Associate of the Institute for Policy Research at Northwestern University where she heads the Web Use Project. She received her Ph.D. in Sociology from Princeton University where she was a Wilson Scholar. Her research focuses on the social and policy implications of digital media with a particular interest in how differences in people’s Web-use skills influence what they do online.

Maya Harris is vice president for the foundation’s Democracy, Rights and Justice program. She leads the program’s worldwide efforts to strengthen the rule of law, improve government transparency and accountability, and create opportunities for civil society to thrive and fulfill the promise of human rights. She also oversees the foundation’s regional programming in Brazil, Mexico and Central America, and the Andean Region and Southern Cone.

Catherine Havasi is a research scientist in computational linguistics and machine learning at the MIT Media Lab where she runs the Digital Intuition group. She co-founded the Open Mind Common Sense project, which uses crowdsourced information about the world to understand natural language text and make computers easier to use. She received her PhD from Brandeis University in 2009 for research in machine learning and natural language processing, and a masters from MIT in 2004 for cognitive modeling in developmental psychology.

Rebekah Heacock is a Project Coordinator at the Berkman Center, where she works on the Digital Public Library of America planning initiative, the OpenNet Initiative, and a number of other projects.

Jeff Hermes is the Director of the Citizen Media Law Project and is a Fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society. He received his J.D. degree from Harvard Law School in 1997. Prior to Berkman, Jeff assisted a wide array of clients in First Amendment, media, intellectual property and Internet law issues as a partner in the litigation practice of Brown Rudnick LLP and later as counsel to Hermes, Netburn, O’Connor & Spearing, P.C. in Boston. Over the last fourteen years, Jeff has represented an international media network and its subsidiaries, major metropolitan newspapers, local broadcasters on television and radio, Internet-based publishers and social media networks.

Perry Hewitt is Chief Digital Officer of Harvard University. She is an established leader in digital marketing communications, with deep experience in the corporate and not-for-profit sectors. As Chief Digital Officer, Perry is charged with Harvard University’s efforts to develop a comprehensive digital communications strategy and approach, as well as to establish best practices for content, multimedia, and technology.

Peter Himler is a founding principal at the Flatiron Communications LLC, which he formed in 2005 after years in senior media leadership positions at several highly respected global PR firms – including Hill & Knowlton, Burson-Marsteller and Edelman Worldwide. Flatiron helps established and emerging companies capitalize on the latest communications technologies and strategies.  He also serves as president of the Publicity Club of New York, is active with the New York Tech Meetup, and sits on the boards of Social Media Week New York and the Communications and Media Studies Program at Tufts University from where he holds a B.A. in Political Science and French.

Becky Hogge is a UK-based writer and activist, author of Barefoot Into Cyberspace: Adventures in Search of Techno-Utopia, Director (non-exec) of the Open Knowledge Foundation and erstwhile leader of the Open Rights Group. She attends this event on behalf of the Open Society Foundations Information Program, for whom she has worked as a consultant researcher for several years, and with whom she is currently working on a project to investigate themes relevant to this event.

Sun Huan is a first-year graduate student at Comparative Media Studies of MIT, and research assistant at Center for Civic Media and NGO2.0 Project. She received a B.A. in Journalism from Tsinghua University, Beijing. Her research interest lies in the rise of digital media and its socio-political implications on China.

Muzammil M. Hussain is based at the University of Washington, Seattle. He is a researcher at the Center for Communication and Civic Engagement, and instructor at the Department of Communication. His research investigates information infrastructure and social organization, and digital media and political participation. His teaching covers multimedia journalism and information networks. More information about his research and instruction can be found here: http://mediaresearchhub.ssrc.org/muzammil-hussain/

Tim Hwang is a junior partner at Robot Robot and Hwang, specializing in legal engineering and development. He formerly was a researcher at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society, and currently studies at Berkeley Law. He is the founder of The Web Ecology Project, The Awesome Foundation, ROFLCon, and was a co-host on The Tim & Diana Show.

Alfred Ironside has been Director of Communications for the Ford Foundation since January 2006. He joined the foundation from the United Nations, where he had served as Chief of Media Relations for UNICEF. He began his career as a radio reporter for stations in Indianapolis and Philadelphia. He spent three years in the U.S. Foreign Service as a press officer stationed in East Berlin, and four years as a disaster relief spokesman for the American Red Cross. He holds undergraduate degrees in political science and communications from Butler University, and a Master’s in Media Administration from Syracuse University.

Kathleen Hall Jamieson is the Elizabeth Ware Packard Professor of Communication at the Annenberg School for Communication and Walter and Leonore Annenberg Director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania. She is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, the American Academy of Political and Social Science and the International Communication Association. She is founder of the new political literacy site, www.FlackCheck.org, which uses parody and humor to debunk false political advertising, poke fun at extreme language, and hold the media accountable for their reporting on political campaigns.

LaShawn Jefferson is a program officer at the Ford Foundation and works on gender rights and equality, focusing on policies and practices that promote respect for women’s human rights, with a particular focus on the economic rights and economic participation of low-income women and women of color.

Marion Just is the William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of Political Science at Wellesley College and a research associate of the Joan Shorenstein Center on Press, Politics and Public Policy at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. She is a consultant to the Project for Excellence in Journalism, a member of the advisory board of the Reform Institute, and the editorial board of the Harvard International Journal of Press Politics.

Sheila Kaplan is a Lab Fellow at the Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard University. She is a veteran, prize-winning investigative reporter and television producer, who covers the intersection of money, politics, lobbying, and the environment/public health. Her Safra Center project examines institutional corruption at the Environmental Protection Agency. Her book, From the People Who Brought You Cancer, which focuses on the science and politics of chemicals that damage the brain, will be published later this year by Basic Books.

Becky Kazansky is a graduate student at the Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP) at NYU, and currently serves as a consultant for the Advancing Media Rights and Access Initiative at the Ford Foundation.

Surina Khan is the Ford Foundation’s first Program Officer for LGBT Rights. She joined Ford in 2011 and since then has shaped the Foundation’s new LGBT Rights Initiative which focuses on securing and advancing the rights of LGBT people. Prior to joining the Ford Foundation, Surina served in a variety of leadership positions to advance LGBT rights and gender equity.

Kilolo Kijakazi is Program Officer at the Ford Foundation, where her work focuses on building economic security for working families. Before joining the Ford Foundation in 2003, she was a senior policy analyst for the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a program analyst for the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Food and Nutrition Service, and a policy analyst for the National Urban League. She received a Ph.D. in public policy from George Washington University, an M.S.W. from Harvard University, and a B.A. from Binghamton University.

Eugene (Gene) Kimmelman joined the Antitrust Division of the United States Department of Justice on April 20, 2009, when he was appointed to serve the Division as its Chief Counsel for Competition Policy and Intergovernmental Relations. In that role, he serves as one of the Assistant Attorney General’s principal advisors on civil enforcement and competition advocacy matters, including those matters involving the telecommunications, health care, technology, and agriculture sectors. Mr. Kimmelman also serves as the Assistant Attorney General’s principal advisor on all issues involving intergovernmental coordination and collaboration.

George Ko is a co-founder of Politoscape (www.politoscape.com), a news agregator that sorts articles based on the political spectrum from the very left to the very right.  He and his team hope that Politoscape can empower web users to generate discussion around politics and help elect better officials.  He is a freshman at Harvard concentrating in Computer Science.

Johanna Chao Kreilick manages the Justice and Human Rights domain of practice at the Hauser Center for Nonprofit Organizations at Harvard University.

Kate Krontiris leads the Innovations in Governance practice for Reboot, a social impact consultancy, with whom she is co-author for a forthcoming report on investments in technology in Tunisia, to be published by the World Bank. She is currently pursuing a graduate degree in public policy and management at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government and the MIT Sloan School of Management. She shares her musings on digital beauty, design, and the future at katekrontiris.tumblr.com.

Nicholas Lange is an autism research biostatistician and well-recognized national and international scientist with a long track record of expertise in longitudinal brain development, volumetric brain imaging, diffusion tensor imaging, functional MRI and immunocytochemistry. He is an associate professor at the Departments of Psychiatry and Biostatistics at the Harvard University Schools of Medicine and Public Health, and Director of the Neurostatistics Laboratory at McLean Hospital.

Chauncy Lennon is a program officer at the Ford Foundation and focuses on helping low-income workers gain economic security through access to good-quality jobs that offer benefits and opportunities for promotion. The goal of his grant making is to help working families overcome poverty and achieve self-sufficiency through improved work supports such as the earned income tax credit, and building employer support for policies that promote retention and advancement.

Austen Levihn-Coon specializes in helping non-profits leverage emerging innovations in communications technology, social media, multimedia and mobile to win advocacy campaigns. He has a background in grassroots campaigning and social movement theory, both of which contribute to his current work at Fission Strategy overseeing the strategic design, development, and implementation of online campaigns, social media apps, websites, and infographics.

Nathaniel Levy joined the Berkman Center as a Project Coordinator in 2011, focusing primarily on the Youth and Media project, the Digital Public Library of America, and research efforts related to cyberbullying and digital citizenship.

Andrew Lippman is an Associate Director of the MIT Media Lab. He currently heads the Lab’s Viral Spaces research group, which examines scalable, real-time networks whose capacity increases with the number of members. He also co-directs MIT’s interdisciplinary Communications Futures program.

Gilad Lotan is the VP of R&D for SocialFlow, a New York based startup that develops technology that optimizes content for social media channels. Previously, Gilad served as a program manager at Microsoft’s FUSE labs. Past work includes ‘Retweet Revolution’, visualizing the flow of information during the 2009 #IranElection riots and a 2011 IJOC study investigating the relationship between mainstream media and social media channels during the Tunisian and Egyptian revolutions.

Mike Lux is the co-founder and CEO Progressive Strategies, and a founding member of Democracy Partners. He is the author of the book, “The Progressive Revolution: How the Best in America Came to Be.”

Colin Maclay is the Managing Director of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University. His broad aim is to effectively and appropriately integrate information and communication technologies (ICTs) with social and economic development, focusing on the changes Internet technologies foster in society, policy and institutions.

Jerry Maldonado is a Program Officer at the Ford Foundation. Jerry helps manage the foundation’s investments in affordable housing, regional economic development, and planning and land use innovation in metropolitan regions across the country.

Prathima Manohar is the Founder & President of the Urbanism think tank “The Urban Vision”. Prathima is an architect, critic, writer and a TV Journalist. Prathima holds a bachelors degree in Architecture. She was awarded Stanford University’s prestigious Draper Hills Fellowship bestowed to rising international stars who work on issues related to Democracy and Development in 2011. She is a Harvard Kennedy School Ash Center Fellow where she researches & studies the use of ICT for Good Governance.

Wayne Marshall is a techno-musicologist, internet annotator, imagined community organizer.

J. Nathan Matias (@natematias) develops technologies for media analytics, community information, and creative learning at the MIT Center for Civic Media, where he is a Research Assistant. Before MIT, Nathan worked in UK startups, developing technologies used by millions of people worldwide. He also helped start the Ministry of Stories, a creative writing center in East London. Nathan was a Davies-Jackson Scholar at the University of Cambridge from 2006-2008.

Lori McGlinchey is senior program officer for the U.S. Transparency and Integrity Fund of the Open Society Foundations, where she is responsible for grantmaking in media and broadband policy, journalism, access to information, and government transparency. She also serves on the steering committee of the Media Democracy Fund and on the board of Grantmakers in Film and Electronic Media. Before OSF, Lori was director of programs for the Yiddish Book Center and worked with KCRW Santa Monica as producer of the 13 hour NPR series Jewish Short Stories from Eastern Europe and Beyond.

Patrick Meier (PhD) is the Director of Crisis Mapping at Ushahidi and the co-Founder of the Crisis Mappers Network. He previously co-Directed Harvard’s Program on Crisis Mapping and Early Warning. Patrick has a PhD from The Fletcher School, a Pre-Doc from Stanford and an MA from Columbia University.

Filippo Menczer is a Professor of Informatics and Computer Science and the Director of the Center for Complex Networks and Systems Research at the Indiana University School of Informatics and Computing. He also has courtesy appointments in Cognitive Science and Physics, and is affiliated with the Center for Data and Search Informatics and the Biocomplexity Institute. He is also the Lagrange Senior Fellow at the ISI Foundation’s Complex Networks Lab in Torino, Italy.

Panagiotis “Takis” Metaxas is a Professor of Computer Science and Founder of the Media Arts and Sciences Program at Wellesley College. Currently, he is a Visiting Scholar at Harvard University’s Center for Research on Computation and Society (CRCS). He holds a M.Sc. and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Dartmouth and has been a visiting scientist at MIT and at the Sydney University, Australia.  Since 2010, he has been on the faculty of the Albright Institute for Global Affairs.

Ellen S. Miller is the co-founder and executive director of the Sunlight Foundation, a Washington-based, non-partisan non-profit dedicated to using the power of the Internet to catalyze greater government openness and transparency. She is the founder of two other prominent Washington-based organizations in the field of money and politics — the Center for Responsive Politics and Public Campaign — and a nationally recognized expert on transparency and the influence of money in politics.

Seth Mnookin is a Lecturer in MIT’s Graduate Program in Science Writing. His most recent book, The Panic Virus: The True Story Behind the Vaccine-Autism Debate, is a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. He is also the author of two other books: the national bestseller Feeding the Monster (about the Boston Red Sox) and Hard News (about The New York Times).

Chris Mooney is a science and political journalist, blogger, podcaster, and experienced trainer of scientists in the art of communication. He is the author of four books, including the New York Times bestselling The Republican War on Science and the forthcoming The Republican Brain: The Science of Why They Deny Science and Reality (April 2012). He blogs for “Science Progress,” a website of the Center for American Progress and Center for American Progress Action Fund, and is a host of the Point of Inquiry podcast.

Eni Mustafaraj is a Norma Wilentz Hess Fellow of Computer Science at Wellesley College. Her research at the intersection of the social web and political campaigning has uncovered interesting misuses of the medium, such as political tweetbots, the influence of vocal minorities, and efforts to influence traditional media reporting. She is working toward building computational tools that will make it easier to discover such events. Mustafaraj holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the Philip University of Marburg.

Neha Narula is a PhD candidate at MIT’s Computer Science and Artifical Intelligence Laboratory, working on internet security and web application scalability.  Previously she was a Senior Software Engineer at Google, where she built and designed a distributed storage system and worked on security for Native Client, a system for running native code inside the browser.

Aaron Naparstek is a leading livable streets advocate and the founder and former editor-in-chief of Streetsblog, an online publication providing daily coverage of transportation, land use and environmental issues in New York and other cities. Launched in 2006, Streetsblog has played a significant role in transforming New York City transportation policy and galvanizing a livable streets movement that is pushing for a more people-centered, less automobile-oriented approach to transportation planning and urban design in communities all around the world. Naparstek is currently living in Cambridge, Massachusetts as a Harvard University Loeb Fellow.

Charles Nesson is the William F. Weld Professor of Law at Harvard Law School and the founder of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society and of the Global Poker Strategic Thinking Society.

John Nery, a newspaper editor and opinion columnist from the Philippines, is currently a Nieman Fellow in Harvard University. His interests are political journalism and colonial history; he is the author of “Revolutionary Spirit: Jose Rizal in Southeast Asia” and is currently researching the American turn to empire. He started blogging in 2005, and serves on his newspaper’s multi-media convergence task force.

Craig Newmark is the founder of craigslist and craigconnects.org. He’s called the press “the immune system of democracy” and seeks to restore trust in news by restoring serious, practical factchecking.

Caroline Nolan is a Project Manager at the Berkman Center who has worked on a variety of initiatives and events since she joined the Center in May 2007. She currently contributes to Berkman’s Law Lab project, Cloud Computing series, work on the Global Network Initiative, in addition to other efforts.

Brendan Nyhan, an assistant professor in the Department of Government at Dartmouth College, conducts research on political scandal and misperceptions about politics and health care. He also blogs about politics and the media at brendan-nyhan.com and is the New Hampshire campaign correspondent for Columbia Journalism Review. Previously, he was co-editor of Spinsanity, a non-partisan watchdog of political spin that was syndicated in Salon.com and the Philadelphia Inquirer, and co-author of All the President’s Spin, a New York Times bestseller that Amazon.com named one of the ten best political books of 2004.

Kara Oehler is a radio documentary producer, media artist, and interactive designer. Her work over the past decade has focused upon pushing the boundaries of narrative journalism both on the air and across multiple platforms, combining investigative storytelling with participatory media, building new systems and opportunities for education and artistic practice, and consulting others on imagining new futures of digital media.

Eric M.K Osiakwan is an Executive Secretary for the African ISP Association and a Technology Enterpreneur. He has over 10 years experience helping setup ISPs in 32 African countries. Eric co-authored the “Open Access Model” which has become a global model for the communication industry. He has also served as the Chief Operating Officer of the Ghana New Ventures Competition, a board member of the Free Software and Open Source Foundation for Africa (FOSSFA), and was part of Ghana Connect. Eric is studying towards an MSc at the Royal Holloway University and is currently a Visiting Fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society.

Alejandra Owens is the Managing Editor of the AARP Blog and blogs weekly on a variety of hot news topics.

John Palfrey is the Henry N. Ess Professor of Law and Vice Dean for Library and Information Resources at Harvard Law School. He is also the Faculty Co-Director of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society. His research and teaching is focuses on internet law, intellectual property, and international law.

James Paradis is the Robert M. Metcalfe Professor of Writing and Humanistic Studies and Interim Director of the Comparative Media Studies Program at MIT. He works on problems of the mutually-influential rise of professionalism and vernacular culture, the public reception of science, and the way in which fields of expertise are represented in popular media.

Andrew Phelps is a staff writer at the Nieman Journalism Lab. He is also the inventor of Fuego, a magical app (and Twitter feed) for keeping up with the future of news. Andrew used to be a reporter for WBUR and KPBS public radio.

Wendell Potter, a contributing writer to the Huffington Post, is also an author, media analyst and corporate watchdog. After a 20-year career as a corporate public relations executive, Wendell left his job as head of communications for one of the nation’s largest health insurers and became a vocal critic of insurance company abuses. In widely covered testimony before the Senate Commerce, Science and Technology Committee in June 2009, Wendell disclosed how insurance companies, as part of their efforts to boost profits, have engaged in practices that have resulted in millions of Americans being forced into the ranks of the uninsured.

Andrew Puddephatt is a founding Director of Global Partners & Associates. He has worked to promote human rights for twenty years and has specific expertise in freedom of expression, transparency, the role of media and digital communications in society, and implementing human rights. Andrew has played a leading role in securing a Bill of Rights for the UK and in January 2003 was awarded an OBE for services to human rights. He holds several Board positions in the non-profit and public sector: he is Chair of Danish-based International Media Support, a Danish based NGO that provides emergency support to journalists in conflict areas; a trustee of the Sigrid Rausing Trust; chair of UK organization Coordinated Action Against Domestic Abuse; and he is on the board of the European Council for Foreign Relations.

Andrea Isabel Quijada is the Executive Director of the Media Literacy Project. With more than a decade of experience as a media literacy trainer, and more than 18 years as a community organizer, Andrea has a deep passion for media justice. She presents nationally and internationally on the impact of media on culture, politics, and technology, serves on the Leadership Team of the national Media Action Grassroots Network, and is a 2010 alum of Women’s Media Center Progressive Women’s Voices. She is an advisory board member of Generation Justice (formerly KUNM Youth Radio Project), and is on the Board of Directors for Enlace Comunitario.

Ari Rabin-Havt is Executive Vice President at Media Matters.

Kristina Redgrave is a Master in Public Policy candidate at the Harvard Kennedy School where she focuses on the intersection of technology, policy and social change.

Mitchel Resnick directs the Lifelong Kindergarten group at the Media Laboratory at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.  His group develops new technologies to engage people (particularly children) in creative learning experiences.

Paul Resnick is a Professor at the University of Michigan School of Information. He previously worked as a researcher at AT&T Labs and AT&T Bell Labs, and as an Assistant Professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management. He received the master’s and Ph.D. degrees in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from MIT, and a bachelor’s degree in mathematics from the University of Michigan.

Elspeth Revere is Vice President of Media, Culture, and Special Initiatives of the John D. & Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. Her responsibilities include support for media in a technologically changing environment; arts and culture in Chicago; grants in response to special opportunities, and the Foundation’s program of institutional grants. Prior to joining the Foundation in 1991, she was President of the Woodstock Institute, a nonprofit policy research organization working to increase private sector investment in low-income neighborhoods, Director of Program Development for the city of Chicago’s Department of Housing, and a Senior Planner in the Department of Development and Planning.

Lourdes Rivera is a program officer at the Ford Foundation  and works on sexuality and reproductive health and rights issues. Her grant making focuses on building a more diverse and inclusive movement in the fields of reproductive justice and sexual and reproductive health and rights, that both reflects the needs of marginalized groups and helps secure legal and policy advances in the field.

Rashad Robinson serves as Executive Director of ColorOfChange. With nearly 900,000 members, ColorOfChange is the nation’s largest online civil rights organization. During his tenure at ColorOfChange, Rashad has overseen several successful campaigns on criminal justice, economic justice, internet freedom and media accountability freedom — recently leading the effort to end Pat Buchanan’s tenure as a paid MSNBC contributor. A recognized expert on how popular culture impacts American attitudes and values, he has served as a thought leader, widely sought-out speaker and strategist on utilizing media to shift public opinion concerning progressive and civil rights issues.

Thais Rucker is with the Digital Cabinet at the Rio Grande do Sul (Brazil) Governor’s Office.

Christian Sandvig is an Associate Professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and a Faculty Associate of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society.  Sandvig’s research focuses on the development of new information technology infrastructure. His work has examined such topics as wireless Internet design and use, expanding broadband access, the difference between rural and urban Internet users, and the role of government in the provision of broadband service.

Molly Sauter is a graduate student in the Comparative Media Studies program at MIT, and a research assistant at the Center for Civic Media at the MIT Media Lab. Her research focuses on hacker culture, technology, and practice; transgressive modes of political engagement online; internet law and regulation; and the philosophy of technology.

Dan Schultz (@slifty) is a graduate student at the MIT Media Lab in the Center for Civic Media working on an automated BS detector called “Truth Goggles: Automatic Incorporation of Context and Primary Sources for a Critical Media Experience.” Before coming to the lab Dan was trained to think in terms of systems at Carnegie Mellon University, and was awarded a Knight News Challenge grant in 2007 to write about “Connecting People, Content, and Community” on the PBS Idea Lab.

Andy Sellars is a Staff Attorney with the Citizen Media Law Project and an Employee Fellow at the Berkman Center. He studies Internet free speech and intellectual property matters, and helps run the CMLP’s Online Media Legal Network, a pro bono referral clinic for online journalism ventures and digital media creators.

Jesse Shapins is a media theorist, documentary artist, and social entrepreneur whose work has been featured in The New York Times, Metropolis, PRAXIS and Wired, cited in books such as The Sentient City and Networked Locality, and been exhibited at MoMA, Deutsches Architektur Zentrum and the Carpenter Center for Visual Arts, among other venues.

Jake Shapiro is founding CEO of Public Radio Exchange (PRX Inc.), an award-winning nonprofit whose mission is to harness technology to bring compelling content to millions of people. Since its launch in 2003 PRX has been an innovator in public media, pioneering new distribution models, developing mobile applications, and investing in significant stories and programs from new voices. In 2010 Jake was elected to the Ashoka Fellowship, supporting his social entrepreneurship work in new media. Prior to PRX, Jake was Associate Director of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society, where he remains on the Fellows Advisory Board.

Aaron Shaw is a Fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society and a Ph.D. candidate in the Sociology Department at UC Berkeley. His research focuses on political and economic dimensions of collective action online.

Micah Sifry is the editorial director of Personal Democracy Media and techPresident.com; senior technology adviser to the Sunlight Foundation; and the Murrow Visiting Lecturer at the Shorenstein Center of the Harvard Kennedy School this spring. He also has a little Tumblr blog devoted to good and bad questions that needs some help at http://qstionist.tumblr.com/ .

Ivan Sigal is the Executive Director of Global Voices, a non-profit online global citizens’ media initiative. Previously, as a Senior Fellow at the U.S. Institute of Peace, Sigal focused on how increased media and information access and participation using new technologies affect conflict-prone areas. He spent over ten years working in media development in the former Soviet Union and Asia, supporting and training journalists and working on media co-productions, and also working as a photographer.  He has a masters’ degree from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, and an undergraduate degree from Williams College.

Craig Silverman is editor of Regret the Error and adjunct faculty for the Poynter Institute, where he writes about media errors, press accuracy and accountability, and fact checking. He is the author of Regret the Error: How Media Mistakes Pollute the Press and Imperil Free Speech, and an editorial advisor to Canadian news startups OpenFile.ca and Spundge.

David Skok is the managing editor of Global News Online, which is the online division of one of Canada’s largest broadcast news companies. David is currently a Nieman Journalism Fellow at Harvard University, the first digital journalist in Canada selected for this honor. His main area of study is how news organizations can build and sustain successful business enterprises using technological disruption strategies developed by Harvard Business School professor, Clayton Christensen.

Melanie Sloan serves as Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington’s (CREW) Executive Director and is a nationally recognized expert on congressional ethics. Prior to starting CREW, she served as an Assistant United States Attorney in the District of Columbia where, from 1998-2003, she successfully tried cases before dozens of judges and juries.
Fabricio Solagna is with the Digital Cabinet at the Rio Grande do Sul (Brazil) Governor’s Office.

Alicia Solow-Niederman is a project coordinator at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society.

Monisha Som is a senior account manager at Spitfire Strategies, where she provides communications guidance, planning, and execution for foundations and nonprofit organizations on a wide range of issues from criminal justice and media policy to children’s health and ocean conservation. For the past several years, she has worked with leaders across the telecommunications policy field with strategy, messaging and communications implementation support.

Matt Stempeck is a researcher at MIT Media Lab’s Center for Civic Media. He’s currently studying and building in the areas of tracking media diets, popping filter bubbles, and has just launched LazyTruth, an inbox widget designed to fight the misinformation spread by viral emails.

Tom Stites was a 2010-11 fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University and is the founder and president of the Banyan Project.

Natalie (Talia) Jomini Stroud (Ph.D., Annenberg School for Communication, University of Pennsylvania, 2006) is an Assistant Professor of Communication Studies and Assistant Director of the Annette Strauss Institute for Civic Participation. She is interested in how the media affect our political behaviors and attitudes and how our political behaviors and attitudes affect our media use. Her recent book, Niche News: The Politics of News Choice  explores the causes, consequences, and prevalence of partisan selective exposure, the preference for likeminded political information.

Zephyr Teachout is an associate professor of law at Fordham University. An immensely talented and creative scholar, Professor Teachout brings a rich background in laws governing political behavior, both domestically and abroad, as well as the insights of her original work on corruption and its constitutional history.

Marta Tellado is Vice President of Communications at the Ford Foundation.

Holly Teresi is on staff at the New Organizing Institute.

Jenny Toomey is a Senior Program Officer at the Ford Foundation whose work focuses on ensuring that media policy and infrastructure serve the public. Her grant making supports efforts to preserve the open architecture of the Internet and expand access, transparency, innovation, creativity and participation.

Joseph Torres is a Senior External Affairs Director at Free Press and lobbies in Washington to ensure that the nation’s media and telecommunications policies serve the public interest. He also works to build new coalitions to broaden the base of the media reform movement. Joseph writes frequently on media and Internet issues and is the co-author of the News for All the People: The Epic Story of Race and the American Media. Before joining Free Press, Joseph worked as deputy director of communications and media policy at the National Association of Hispanic Journalists and was a journalist for several years.

Chi Chu Tschang lived and worked in China for over a decade. He was an award-winning journalist, who has written for the South China Morning Post, Bloomberg News, Straits Times and BusinessWeek. As a China correspondent, Chi-Chu has written a number of articles about China’s water issues, including “A French Water Company’s Cautionary Tale in China”

Kori Urayama is a project coordinator at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society.

William Uricchio is Professor and Director of the MIT Comparative Media Studies Program and professor of Comparative Media History at Utrecht University in the Netherlands.

Hugo Van Vuuren is a Berkman Fellow and a student at the Harvard Graduate School of Design.

Benjamen Walker is the host of the program “Too Much Information” a radio show (and podcast) about life in the information age. He reports on many of the issues and topics of the day (Wikileaks, Anonymous, online porn, surveillance, net neutrality) but he also throws in conspiracy theories, fiction and interviews with ordinary people trying to make sense of their digital selves.

Darren Walker is Vice President for Education, Creativity and Free Expression at the Ford Foundation, where he oversees grant making in public education reform, higher education, arts and culture, media, sexuality and reproductive health and religion.  He joined the Ford Foundation in 2010 after serving as vice president at the Rockefeller Foundation and chief operating officer of the Abyssinian Development Corporation.He is a graduate of the University of Texas at Austin in 1982 and its Law School in 1986. He is a member of the boards of the Arcus Foundation, Friends of the High Line, the New York City Ballet, the Foundation for Art and Preservation in Embassies and the International Fellows Program.

Kai Wright (@kai_wright) is a writer and editor in Brooklyn, NY, whose work explores the politics of sex, race and health. He’s an Alfred Knobler Fellow of The Nation Institute. His investigative reporting and news analysis appears regularly in The Nation, The Root and The American Prospect, among other publications. Kai is also author of Drifting Toward Love: Black, Brown, Gay and Coming of Age on the Streets of New York, as well as two books of African-American history.

Jonathan Zittrain is Professor of Law at Harvard Law School and the Harvard Kennedy School of Government, Professor of Computer Science at the Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, and co-founder of the Berkman Center for Internet & Society. His research interests include digital property and content ownership, privacy, Internet intermediaries, human computing, and technology in education.

Ethan Zuckerman is director of the Center for Civic Media at MIT, and a principal research scientist at MIT Media Lab. He is co-founder of Global Voices, an international citizen media network that translates, amplifies and shares participatory media from the developing world.

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