Projects

This Old Democracy is a regular podcast that explores the ideas, movements, and people working to rescue our faltering political system — and rebuild American democracy on a stronger, more inclusive, and truly representative foundation. 

Micah Sifry is your host, and he’s been on this beat for a long time — from taking on the problem of money in politics, to writing a book about third parties, to tracking how the internet keeps shaking up the system, and more recently, joining the fight against rising authoritarianism and fascism.

This Old Democracy is a podcast produced in partnership with the Center for Ballot Freedom, a cross-partisan nonprofit organization, dedicated to strengthening American democracy.

Listen on Spotify and Apple Podcasts.

From 2004 to 2019, I was the curator of PDF, the country’s leading conference on how technology is changing politics. In addition to sixteen annual events in New York City, which drew a diverse, transpartisan group of politicos, techies, philanthropists, media makers and futurists, I helped run two PDF Europe conferences in Barcelona in 2009 and 2010 and PDF Latin America in Santiago in 2010. Local organizers picked up the banner, creating an annual PDF France event in Paris and PDF Central/Eastern Europe, which continues to run every spring in Warsaw.

In 2015, I co-founded Civic Hall, the home for civic tech in New York City. It rapidly grew to a vibrant hub of several hundred early stage civic entrepreneurs, social change organizers and technologists who gathered daily to support each other and collaborate on tackling a wide range of social problems. Until we were forced to shut down by COVID in early 2020, we hosted tens of thousands of visitors for hundreds of community events, trainings and hackathons. As Civic Hall’s president, I was proud to lead our research and education arm, overseeing the Civicist news-site, running our Organizers-in-Residence program, and producing in-depth reports on topics ranging from global innovation in political debates to how AI can be used for the public good.