Public Lab Wiki documentation



Board of Directors

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The Public Lab nonprofit received 501(c)3 status on October 24, 2013 (retroactive to January 2, 2012). The current board members of Public Lab include:

Catherine Bracy Catherine Bracy is a civic technologist and community organizer whose work focuses on the intersection of technology and political and economic inequality. She is the co-founder and Executive Director of the TechEquity Collaborative, an organization in Oakland, CA that seeks to build an inclusive tech ecosystem in California’s Bay Area.

She was previously Code for America’s Senior Director of Partnerships and Ecosystem where she grew Code for America’s Brigade program into a network of over 50,000 civic tech volunteers in 80+ cities across the US. She also founded Code for All, the global network of Code-for organizations with partners on six continents. Catherine built Code for America’s civic engagement focus area, creating a framework and best practices for local governments to increase public participation which has been adopted in cities across the US.

During the 2012 election cycle she was Director of Obama for America's Technology Field Office in San Francisco, the first of its kind in American political history. She was responsible for organizing technologists to volunteer their skills for the campaign’s technology and digital efforts. Prior to joining the Obama campaign, she ran the Knight Foundation’s 2011 News Challenge and before that was the administrative director at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society. She is on the board of directors at the Citizen Engagement Lab and the Public Laboratory.

Andrea Chen is the Co-Founder and Executive Director of Propeller: A Force for Social Innovation, a social innovation incubator in New Orleans focused on systemic change in sectors such as food access, water, public health, and education. Propeller has accelerated 50 new ventures that have generated over $20mm in revenues and financing in the last 3.5 years. Propeller's 10,000 s.f. Propeller Incubator facility is now home to over 80 socially minded companies. Andrea was named “40 Under 40” by Gambit Magazine, 2010 City Business Women of the Year, and is an appointed board member of the New Orleans Business Alliance, the official economic development arm of the City of New Orleans. She completed her B.A. at Stanford University and M.Ed. at UNO and Harvard Graduate School of Education.

Eymund Diegel is a South African trained urban planner who first became interested in real time mapping technologies when creating maps for constantly changing informal settlements in Africa. With the digital technology revolution, he is exploring how personal media devices, such as cell phones, can create network maps of how people live in their communities, and how those "density trails" can provide more accurate mapping. He lives by the Gowanus Canal, a polluted Superfund site in Brooklyn, NY, where he works with community groups to create time lapse "digitally transparent" maps, for neighbors to better understand what was historically under their feet, and what they can do about it.

Janet Haven Director of Programs, Data and Society

Micah L. Sifry is co-founder and editorial director of Personal Democracy Media, which produces the annual Personal Democracy Forum conference on the ways technology is changing politics, and techPresident.com, an award-winning blog on how politicians are using the web and how the web is using them. In addition, he consults on how political organizations, campaigns, non-profits and media entities can adapt to and thrive in a networked world. He is a senior technology adviser to the Sunlight Foundation, which he helped found in 2006, and also serves on the board of Consumer Reports. He is the author or editor of six books, most recently Wikileaks and the Age of the Transparency (OR Books, 2011), and in the spring of 2012 he began teaching at Harvard’s Kennedy School.

From 1997-2006, he worked closely with Public Campaign, a non-profit, non-partisan organization focused on comprehensive campaign finance reform, as its senior analyst. Prior to that, Micah was an editor and writer with The Nation magazine for thirteen years. He is the author of Spoiling for a Fight: Third-Party Politics in America (Routledge, 2002), co-author with Nancy Watzman of Is That a Politician in Your Pocket? Washington on $2 Million a Day (John Wiley & Sons, 2004), co-editor of Rebooting America (available online for free download at rebooting.personaldemocracy.com), and co-editor of The Iraq War Reader (Touchstone, 2003) and The Gulf War Reader (Times Books, 1991). His personal blog is at micah.sifry.com and you can follow him on Twitter at @mlsif.

Past Board Members:

Dr. Christine Walley, 2011-2015. Chris is an Associate Professor of Anthropology at MIT. She conducts research on environmental politics in both East Africa and the United States. Her first book Rough Waters: Nature and Development in an East African Marine Park (Princeton University Press, 2004) explored contestation over Tanzania?s first national marine park as well as competing conceptions of nature and development found among international environmental organizations, island residents, and national government officials. Her second book Exit Zero: An Anthropologist?s Account of Family and Class in Southeast Chicago (forthcoming, University of Chicago Press) considers the environmental implications of the rise and fall of the steel industry on Chicago?s Southeast Side and engages with questions of environmental justice.

Bobbie L. King Jr., 2012-2014. Bobbie is an associate in the corporate finance group of Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom LLP's New York office. From 2011 to 2013, he was an associate in the US corporate group of Skadden's London office. From 2010 to 2011, he was an associate in the general corporate practice of Skadden's Boston office. Prior to joining Skadden, he served as deputy finance director of Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick's re-election campaign and as an adjunct professor at Emerson College. He has also served as Public Lab's legal counsel since its incorporation in 2011.

Mikel Maron, 2011-2012