XRDS Editors

Issue title: ???

Issue theme: Computer Science and Information Technology in service of democracy.

(1) Using technology to aggregate the voice of the crowd or facilitate a discussion

(Invited, ACCEPTED) Josh Tauberer - Josh is the Chief Technology Officer of PopVox (startup aimed at assisting everyday citizens in making their voice count in Congress) and runs govtrack.us. (Rob Simmons knows Josh – we worked together on a newspaper in college.)

Tad Hirsh – Technology to organize people (protests, etc).

Travis Kriplean – UW PhD student who built the “Living Voters Guide.”

(Consulted) Ben Roswell – Technology and revolution – Egypt as a case study – http://hackforegypt.eventbrite.com/. One of the organizers? An activist? A student participant?

(2) Profile

Either of the next two are excellent for a profile (unless Ed Felten agrees to write of course). Need to update James who’s head of Departments.

(Invited) Ed Felten – Princeton CS and Public Affairs Professor. Chief Technologist of the Federal Trade Commission. (Rob Simmons knows Ed pretty well from college. Potential profile?)

(3) How technology is reshaping journalism

(Invited, ACCEPTED) Sarah Cohen – Pullitzer Prize winning investigative reporter and Knight Professor of the Practice of Journalism and Public Policy.

Nick Diakopoulos – PostDoc at Rutgers. Works on public data, journalism, and quality discourse online (esp. gov topics).

(4) The role of data visualization

(Invited, ACCEPTED) Jerome Cukier - Visualizes and publishes OECD data.

(5) When technology meets policy

(Invited) Beth Noveck – NY Law School Prof. Formerly White House advisor on tech policy. Designed and implemented White House Open Gov. Initiative.

(6) Technological challenges in data transparency

(Invited, ACCEPTED) Luigi Montanez – Might be good for the lab/tutorial section. Staff Programmer at Sunlight Labs, Formerly worked with Howard Dean’s online organization.

(Invited) Mike Klein/Ellen Miller – Cofounders of Sunlight Foundation

(Invited, ACCEPTED) Harlan Yu - One of Ed’s students — led the PACER/RECAP project.

Wikileaks – Too much transparency?

(7) Information systems

Rob Richards – J.D. and UW PhD student who runs a blog and social network on legal informatics, including open data formats, search protocols, and other geeky things.

(8) Legal networks

Daniel Martin Katz (or others from http://computationallegalstudies.com/)

(9) Cryptography for fighting censorship

Eben Moglen – Freedom Box Project (open hardware, crypto, security) http://freedomboxfoundation.org/.

(Invited, ACCEPTED) Prof. Dan Boneh – Gave this course at Stanford http://crypto.stanford.edu/cs294s/, may also be able to recommend one of his students or his collaborators from Tor https://www.torproject.org/. We could cover the projects his students implemented during the course.

(10) Cryptography for secure voting

(Invited, ACCEPTED) Emily Shen – Michael’s contact at Ron Rivest’s lab

(Invited, declined) Rep. Ron Paul - Would probably make a good interview. 2 time Presidential Candidate. Known for organizing followers online and dropping “Money Bombs” (very large cash donations that all come on the same day).

(Invited, Declined) Jon M. Peha - CMU Professor of Engineering and Public Policy. Former Chief Technologist of the Federal Communications Commission and current Assistant Director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy

(Invited, Declined) Larry Lessig - Wants to fix Congressional Fundraising. Thought leader on Creative Commons, Transparency in Gov.

(Invited, Declined) Russ Feingold - Former Democrat Senator from Wisconsin. Currently running a PAC. Central issues include open data/open gov/campaign finance reform (for transparency).

(Invited, no response) Tim O’Reilly O’Reilly is the founder of O’Reilly media and supporter of free software and open source. Also founding advisor of PopVox.