Netroots Nation Speakers for 2009
View our speakers for Netroots Nation 2009 below.
Digby
"Digby" of Santa Monica, California, is a writer and founder of the liberal political blog Hullabaloo (www.digbysblog.blogspot.com).
ColinDelany
Colin Delany is founder and editor of Epolitics.com, a website that focuses on the tools and tactics of Internet politics and online advocacy. Launched in July of 2006, Epolitics.com received the Golden Dot Award as "Best Blog - National Politics" at the 2007 Politics Online Conference.
Delany started in politics in the early '90s in the Texas Capitol. Since then, Delany has worked as a consultant to help dozens of political advocacy campaigns promote themselves in the digital world, and between 2003 and 2007 was the Online Communications Manager at the National Environmental Trust.
KetyEsquivel
Esquivel is the New Media Manager for NCLR (the National Council of La Raza). She has over ten years of experience in the non-profit, private and political sectors. She directed Latino outreach for the Clark Presidential Campaign. Esquivel graduated from Cornell University where she served on the Board of Trustees. She is the founder of www.CrossLeft.org and co-founder of the Institute of Progressive Christianity and the Sanctuary, www.promigrant.org. Her commentary has been featured and quoted in stories for the Wall St. Journal Online, HITN, PBS, XM radio, CNN, Televisa and Univision.
GenJCChristian Homewood
I write political and social satire at the blog, Jesus' General, and run one of the largest groups for progressives, Cafe Wellstone, in Second Life.
Eli Ackerman
A Philadelphia native, Eli decided to stay in New Orleans after attending university there and has since become immersed in the swamp that is New Orleans politics. As an "amateur" blogger and reporter, Eli has extensively covered hurricane recovery issues and helped uncover instances of municipal corruption and waste. Lately, he founded SaveCharityHospital.com and is trying to locate the precise intersection where information meets action.
Spencer Ackerman
Spencer Ackerman is the national-security correspondent for the Washington Independent and runs a personal blog called Attackerman at Firedoglake. He spent September 2008 in eastern Afghanistan, and has reported from Iraq, Guantanamo Bay and other theaters of what used to be called the war on terror. A former staffer for Talking Points Memo, his writing has appeared in Slate, Atlantic, Salon, American Prospect, Jezebel, Survival, World Politics Journal, the Austin American-Statesman, the Internet Food Association, Inside Front, the Washington Monthly, lots of friends' comment sections and other publications.
Jay Ackroyd
Jay Ackroyd is an economist by training, but has spent his career working in IT.
Nowadays he is a principal at inside the culture, a market research firm that uses social media and webcam applications to disseminate authentic, real-time trend data and conduct virtual focus groups, to provide more immediacy and authenticity than traditional focus groups. See
insidetheculture.com.
Jay runs projects in Second Life, where he also hosts a weekly progressive talk show that has featured many Netroots Nation favorites. More information is available at VirtuallySpeaking.ning.com.
He can be found as jayackroyd pretty much everywhere.
Stewart Acuff
Stewart Acuff is Assistant to AFL-CIO President John Sweeney. He champions the Employee Free Choice Act, fighting to restore workers’ freedom to form unions and bargain collectively. Previously, Acuff served as AFL-CIO organizing director, coordinating strategies across the federation’s 56 unions to help working men and women join and form unions.
Prior to joining the AFL-CIO, Stewart’s history in organizing has included the SEIU in Texas and organizations affiliated with ACORN and Citizen Action. He was elected president of the Atlanta Labor Council in 1991 after serving as executive director of the Georgia State Employees Union/SEIU 1985.
Lynn Allen
Lynn Allen is the Communications Director for the Institute for Washington’s Future. She writes on issues related to sustainable agriculture, alternative energy, climate change and it’s impacts, and rural revitalization in Washington State. Lynn has worked as a business consultant and trainer helping develop effective business, leadership and team skills. She has also written extensively at Evergreen Politics, now defunct, assisted community groups with outreach to engage citizens and worked to educate both elected officials and the public on critical environmental and rural revitalization issues. She also writes on a civic engagement blog, Rebuilding Democracy.
LoRayne Apo-Joynt
LoRayne Apo-Joynt is a progressive activist and citizen journalist. She has blogged since 2002 pseudonymously for her own site, as well as for state and national blogs. Having worked for more than 13 years at Fortune 100 companies, she's now a consultant specializing in competitive intelligence and business services.
Jerome Armstrong
Jerome Armstrong began blogging in 2001 at MyDD.com. He was a member of Howard Dean’s 2004 campaign internet team and a senior advisor for Mark Warner.
In 2006, Armstrong co-authored “Crashing the Gate: Netroots, Grassroots and the Rise of People-Powered Politics” and he is a co-founder of SBNation.com, the largest sports-related network of blogs.
A founding partner of WebStrong Group, he has worked with multiple Democratic campaigns and organizations, the Liberal Democrats in the UK, and other political parties outside the US, as a political consultant.
Nan Aron
Alliance for Justice is a national association of more than 80 public interest and civil rights organizations that advances justice for all Americans, strengthens the public interest community's influence and foster the next generation of advocates. Nan is nationally recognized for her vast expertise in public interest law, the federal judiciary and citizen participation in public policy. She is the author of Liberty and Justice for All: Public Interest Law in the 1980s and Beyond and regularly appears as a commentator in national media. Nan has been Executive Producer for several award-winning films produced to educate and empower activists.
Phil Aroneanu
Phil has been a campus clean energy activist and helped
organize Step It Up 2007, the largest national open source
grassroots campaign to stop global warming. He is currently
working on building an international movement, focusing
specifically on mobilizing and educating people in Africa and the Middle East. He co-founded 350.org, a campaign to stitch together a creative, powerful and unstoppable global movement pushing for bold and comprehensive action on climate change on the international level.
David Atkins
David Atkins is a qualitative research consultant (focus group design & moderation) living in Ventura, CA, and writes on DailyKos, Calitics and elsewhere under the pseudonym "thereisnospoon". He is President of the Ventura County Young Democrats, and actively engaged in a variety of local volunteer efforts aimed at unseating Republicans in CA-24, as well as in California's AD-37 and SD-19. Through his company The Pollux Group, he has also consulted with the Los Angeles County Democratic Party to help defeat Republicans in red districts across Southern California.
Robert Bahar
Robert Bahar is the Producer/Co-Writer of the documentary Made in L.A. (MadeinLA.com). The film, which has received an Emmy Award, the Hillman Prize for Broadcast Journalism and a Henry Hampton Award from the Council on Foundations, was praised by The New York Times as “"An excellent documentary...… about basic human dignity". Bahar previously produced and directed the award-winning documentary Laid to Waste, and has line-produced and production managed independent films including ITVS'’s Diary of a City Priest. In addition to his work as a filmmaker, he is the Director/Co-Founder of Doculink, a grassroots and online community of over 2,500 documentary-makers.
Biko Baker
The Executive Director of the League of Young Voters Education, Rob "Biko" Baker is a nationally recognized young leader. In his home community of Milwaukee, he has organized town hall meetings and used the power and agency of art to inform, mobilize, and motivate young people to participate in civic life. Baker has served as the deputy publicity coordinator and young voter organizer for the Brown and Black Presidential Forum. He has appeared on C-SPAN, Fox News and CNN, has interviewed luminaries Cornell West, Russell Simmons, and Howard Dean. Baker is a Ph.D. candidate at UCLA.
Dean Baker
Dean Baker is co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research and author of the recent book Plunder and Blunder: The Rise and Fall of the Bubble Economy. He is frequently cited in economics reporting in major media outlets, including the New York Times, Washington Post, CNN, CNBC, and National Public Radio. He writes a weekly column for the Guardian Unlimited (UK), and his blog, Beat the Press, features commentary on economic reporting. His analyses have appeared in many major publications, including the Atlantic Monthly, the Washington Post, and the London Financial Times.
Radley Balko
Radley Balko is a senior editor and investigative journalist for Reason magazine.
His work on criminal justice and civil liberties has been published in The Wall Street Journal, Playboy, Time, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, and Slate. Balko has also appeared on the BBC, CNN, CNBC, MSNBC and NPR.
Balko's work on paramilitary raids and the overuse of SWAT teams has been widely featured and was cited by Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer's dissent in the case Hudson v. Michigan.
Balko publishes the personal blog, TheAgitator.com. He graduated from Indiana University with a degree in journalism and political science.
Joanne Bamberger
Joanne Bamberger is better known through the blogosphere as PunditMom. She writes about politics from the perspective of a progressive mother at her blog, PunditMom (soon to be at www.punditmom.com), as well as at The Huffington Post, BlogHer, MomsRising, MOMocrats and others. She is a sought after speaker on mothers and political involvement. Bamberger was in the inaugural class of Progressive Women's Voices program at the Women's Media Center. Her book about increased social & political involvement of mothers will be published by Bright Sky Press in the Fall of 2010. You can find her on Twitter@PunditMom.
Jason Barnett
Jason Barnett is co-founder and Executive Director of The UpTake http://theUpTake.org/, a video-based media organization that merges social media strategy and online technology, tools and access to engage and empower citizen journalists.
Since its inception in July 2007, The UpTake has advanced the frontier of news gathering, recently garnering national notoriety through its revolutionary coverage of the 2008 political conventions and the Minnesota U.S. Senate recount and trial between Al Franken and Norm Coleman.
Jason has been interviewed by CNN, NPR, and a myriad of other outlets about The UpTake and its work.
