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.
Projects
The two biggest projects I’ve worked on, other than my writing, have been Personal Democracy Forum and Civic Hall.
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.