Micah L. Sifry is the Visiting Murrow Lecturer of the Practice of Press and Public Policy. He is the co-founder of Personal Democracy Media, which produces the annual Personal Democracy Forum and techPresident.com, an annual conference and daily website (respectively) that cover the ways technology is changing politics, government and civil society. Sifry also speaks and writes widely on the topics of technology, politics and transparency and consults on how political organizations, campaigns, non-profits and media entities can adapt to and thrive in a networked world. He is the author or editor of six books, most recently WikiLeaks and the Age of Transparency (ORBooks, 2011); the former associate editor of The Nation magazine, and a graduate of Princeton University (BA Politics, 1983) and New York University (MA Politics, 1989). He lives with his wife and two children in Hastings-on-Hudson, New York.
Sifrys work with Personal Democracy Forum and TechPresident have won him wide recognition. In awarding TechPresident the 2007 Knight-Batten Award for Innovation in Journalism, the judges said, “The site not only reports on, but encourages, citizens to participate more directly in the political process. It’s an amazing source of information from a non-traditional news outlet.” The Washington Post has called TechPresident “the Internet citizenry’s new consensus taker,” and has recognized PdF as the worlds largest annual gathering of political technology geeks.
As a consultant, Sifry has been a senior technology adviser to the Sunlight Foundation since its founding in 2006, and has played a central role in crafting its overall mission and strategy, and assisting in its growth to the leading national transparency organization in the country, with nearly forty staff members and a budget of $8.5 million. He also joined the board of directors of Consumers Union in October 2010.
