IPDI : Institute For Politics Democracy & The Internet

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Seiger Jonah Seiger, Advisory Board Chair
Managing Partner, Connections Media LLC

Jonah Seiger has deep roots in the Internet world. In 1994, he helped found and served as Communications Director for the Center for Democracy and Technology (CDT), a leading non-profit organization focusing on civil liberties and democratic values online. While at CDT, The New York Times described him as “a trench warrior in the battle to democratize cyberspace,” in reference to his role in the landmark Supreme Court case establishing broad First Amendment protection for the Internet.

In 1997 Seiger co-founded Mindshare Internet Campaigns, LLC and built the company into one of the country’s leading providers of Internet services for public affairs. Seiger previously worked on Internet-related policy issues with the Electronic Frontier Foundation and with Congressman Edward J. Markey (D-MA) on the House Subcommittee for Telecommunications and Finance from 1993 to 1994. He is the founder and Managing Partner of Connections Media LLC, an Interactive agency focused on political, public affairs, and corporate communications campaigns.

An Adjunct Professor at the George Washington University Graduate School of Political Management, Seiger teaches a course on political communications strategies for the Internet.

Seiger currently serves on the boards of the New Democrat Network, the Media Access Project, and the Academy of Hope, an adult literacy center in Washington DC. He holds a B.A. in psychology and religion from the University of Michigan.

Doug Bailey
CEO, Freedom's Answer
Founder of Hotline and Bailey-Deardorff

Doug Bailey is the founder and publisher of The Hotline, a bipartisan, online briefing on American politics that “covers the coverage” of campaigns, candidates and issues from TV, radio and 100 daily papers across the country. The Hotline was sold to National Journal, Inc, in 1996. Bailey now continues as a part time consultant. He is also the founder and president of Bailey, Deardourff and Associates, a national political consultant firm.

In 2002, he founded Freedom’s Answer, a nonprofit program intended to create a Youth Voter Corps in every high school in America and conduct the nation’s largest-ever non-partisan voter registration and turnout program among parents, neighbors and friends. He also founded Youth-e-Vote, Inc, the first national registration and online voting in American history. Bailey co-directed the Rolling Cyber Debate, a daily online interchange between the presidential candidates that was carried online by WebWhiteBlue.org and 17 of the largest online traffic centers.

Doug Bailey received an A.B. from Colgate University in 1954 and an M.A., M.A.L.D. and Ph.D from The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University.

Henry Copeland
Founder, BlogAds

In March 2002 Henry Copeland started brainstorming a service to connect bloggers and advertisers. The Blogads domain was registered March 5, 2002, and after six months of prototyping and programming, the service launched August 13.

Today Blogads.com connects nearly 1000 blogs with advertisers ranging from corporate giants to mom&mom T-shirt peddlers. Advertisers include Time Warner, JohnKerry.com, The Republican National Committee, The New Republic, Rhino Records, O'Reilly Media, Bagnews, Paramount Pictures, Random House, Network Solutions, Turner Broadcasting, eChristianWebhosting, Nokia, VH1, and Budget Renta Car.

During the '04 election, Blogads ran hundreds of ads for different candidates and causes, more different political ads than any other single online media. Henry " makes blogs possible ," said leading bloggers.

Henry, 43, grew up in Wooster, Ohio and in 1984 received a BA in history from Yale University after nearly failing classes in economics, math and computer science. After working on Wall Street ('84-91) and in Budapest as a journalist ('91-‘98), in 1998 Henry founded Pressflex.com, the parent company to Blogads. Pressflex today serves as the webmaster for nearly 100 newspapers and magazines across Europe.

Henry has punditized about blog advertising at events including Blogtalk 1.0 in Vienna, Austria, iBreakfast in New York, NY, Blogon in Berkeley, CA, Gnomedex in Lake Tahoe, Nevada, Politics Online in Washington, DC, SXSW twice in Austin, TX, Ad-Tech in San Francisco, Chicago and NYC, Blognashville and Syndicate in NYC and San Francicso.

Steve C. Crosby
Vulcan Enterprises
Vice President, Corporate Communications

Steven C. Crosby oversees Vulcan Inc.’s public relations, government relations, advertising, marketing, media relations, and internal communications efforts. Crosby came to Vulcan from AT&T Wireless, where he served as vice president of corporate communications and public affairs. Earlier, Crosby worked as vice president of the public affairs agency, Burson-Marsteller, in Los Angeles; directed public affairs for the California Forestry Association in Sacramento; and worked as staff coordinator for a member of the California State Assembly and as assistant chief of staff to a former California Assembly Republican leader.

Crosby currently participates in a volunteer capacity on the National Board of Directors of the American Humane Association and on the board of directors for the Los Angeles Family Housing Corporation, among other nonprofit organizations. He earned an undergraduate degree from Santa Clara University and a J.D. degree from Loyola Law School in California.

Becki Donatelli
Chairman, Campaign Solutions

Becki Donatelli was the lead Internet consultant to the McCain for President campaign, and as such directed the successful fundraising campaign that brought the Internet into the forefront of political consulting. The first political consulting firm to raise political donations online, the firm now represents Bush Cheney '04, the Republican National Committee, the National Republican Congressional Committee and a host of Senate, House and gubernatorial campaigns.

Mrs. Donatelli brings three decades of successful business experience as one of the founding partners of the fifteenth largest real estate and property management firm in the Washington metropolitan region before its sale in 1996. She was also a founding director of The George Washington National Bank, later serving as Chairman of the Board of Directors and also Chairman of the bank holding company. She presently serves as a regional director of BB& T Bank. In 1996 she was honored by the Chamber of Commerce as the Business Leader of the Year.

Mrs. Donatelli began her political career with the national staff of the original Citizens for Reagan in 1976. She has worked on the staff of numerous campaigns, at the Republican National Committee and has served as the executive director of a political action committee. She established an Executive Secretariat for the Dole For President campaign and has raised money for every race from local city council to the presidency. Becki Donatelli was appointed to the board of advisors for the Metropolitan Washington Airports Authority by then Governor George Allen and the President's Advisory Committee on the Arts by President George Bush.

Mrs. Donatelli's not for profit fundraising skills were honed during her three year tenure as the Chairman of the Golden Circle Board for the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, as a director of Capital City Opera and President of the Mt. Vernon Children's Theatre. Her fundraising background was essential to the planning and execution of the software development process that brought Edonation.com to the market. She was recently named one of the top 12 most powerful women in direct response marketing by The Non Profit Times.

Becki Donatelli, a native of California, is a 1975 graduate of the University of Southern California with a BA in LAS/International Relations. She lives in Alexandria, Virginia with her husband Frank Donatelli. Their daughter Elizabeth is a recent graduate of the University of Southern California.

Scott Heiferman
CEO, MeetUp.com

Scott Heiferman is CEO of Meetup.com, a global non-partisan platform that helps people organize local monthly real-world gatherings about anything anywhere. Scott co-founded Meetup.com in 2002, Fotolog.net in 2002 (the leading photo weblog platform, used by over a quarter million people and viewed by nearly 1 million people daily) and i-traffic in 1995 (the first online ad agency, a pioneer in search-keyword media placement and now one of the largest online media buyers, with offices in the U.S. and Europe).

Over 1 million people (and growing) have signed up to Meetup with a group of neighbors about knitting, chihuahuas, diabetes, George Bush, and thousands of other topics. Meetup's investors and Board Members include Esther Dyson, Andreas Stavropoulos (DFJ), and Pierre Omidyar (Founder/Chairman, eBay). In 1994, Scott was "Interactive Marketing Frontiersman" at Sony, where he created Sony's first consumer online presence. He graduated from The University of Iowa and has posted a photo on his personal Fotolog every day for three years.

Alex Jones
Shorenstein Center
Director, Harvard University John F. Kennedy School of Government

Alex S. Jones is Laurence M. Lombard Lecturer in the Press and Public Policy and Director of the Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy. He covered the press for the New York Times from 1983-1992 and was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1987. In 1991, he coauthored (with Susan E. Tifft) The Patriarch: The Rise and Fall of the Bingham Dynasty. In 1992, he left the Times to work on The Trust: The Private and Powerful Family Behind the New York Times (also coauthored with Tifft), which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle award.

He has been a Nieman Fellow at Harvard, a host of National Public Radio's On the Media, and is currently the host and Executive Editor of PBS's Media Matters. He is on the Advisory Board of the Columbia Journalism Review, International Center for Journalists, Committee of Concerned Journalists and the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

Cyrus Krohn
Publisher, Slate.com Magazine

Cyrus Krohn is publisher of Slate magazine. He directed the political advertising division for MSN.com, the Microsoft Network, for the 2000 presidential election cycle. Prior to joining Microsoft, Krohn produced programs for CNN's Crossfire and Larry King Live. Previously, Krohn served in the White House as an intern to Vice President Dan Quayle.

Phil Noble, Jr.
President, PoliticsOnline

After working as a Legislative Assistant in the US Senate, in 1979 Phil Noble started Phil Noble and Associates, a political and public affairs consulting firm with offices now in Charleston, S.C., Washington, D.C. and Stockholm, Sweden.

In 1996, Noble founded PoliticsOnline, the premier international company providing fundraising and Internet tools for politics. He has authored two books including the first-ever Guide to the Internet and Politics and numerous articles on the Internet, communications and politics for U.S. and international publications. Currently, Noble is also the publisher of two online political publications, The Weekly PoliTiker and NetPulse.

Noble has served on the Board of Directors of the International, American and the Latin American Association of Political Consultants and was a founding member of the European Association of Political Consultants. He also serves on numerous national and international boards including the World Summit on e-Democracy, The Journal of e-Government, Campaign Finance Institute and Agnes Scott College.

Noble was a Democratic candidate for Lieutenant Governor of South Carolina in 1994 and currently serves as President of the SC Democratic Leadership Council. He lives in Charleston, South Carolina with his wife and two children.

Cliff Sloan
Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive
VP, Business Development & General Counsel

Clifford M. Sloan is Vice President, Business Development and General Counsel of Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive, The Washington Post Company's Internet and new media subsidiary. Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive publishes washingtonpost.com and Newsweek.com. Mr. Sloan oversees all legal matters and business development for the company.

He has served in various government positions, including Associate Counsel to the President of the United States (1993-95), Assistant to the Solicitor General at the U.S. Department of Justice (1989-91), Associate Counsel in the Office of Independent Counsel (Iran-Contra) (1987-88) and Law Clerk to Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens and U.S. Court of Appeals Judge J. Skelly Wright. Mr. Sloan also has taught the law of cyberspace as an adjunct professor at Georgetown University Law Center, George Washington University Law School and American University's Washington College of Law.

Susan Tifft
Terry Sanford Institute of Public Policy
Duke University
Eugene C. Patterson Professor of the Practice of Journalism and Public Policy

Susan Tifft is the Eugene C. Patterson Professor of the Practice of Journalism and Public Policy at Duke University's Terry Sanford Institute of Public Policy. She is the co-author, with Alex Jones, of The Trust: The Private and Powerful Family Behind The New York Times (Little Brown, 1999), which won the A.M. Sperber Award for Exceptional Achievement in Writing and Research and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in biography. Her first biography, also co-authored with Jones, was The Patriarch: The Rise and Fall of the Bingham Dynasty, an acclaimed biography of the family behind the Louisville newspapers (Summit Books, 1991).

Before becoming a journalist, Tifft was a press secretary for the Federal Election Commission and the 1980 Democratic National Convention and a speechwriter for the Carter-Mondale campaign. She also served as director of public affairs for the Urban Institute. From 1982 to 1991 she was a national writer and associate editor for TIME Magazine, where she wrote major articles on politics, economics, foreign affairs and education. She has a master's degree in public administration from the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard. She divides her time between Durham, N.C., and New York City, where she lives on the Upper West Side.

Sean Treglia
Annenberg School for Communication
University of Southern California
Senior Policy Advisor, Democracy Initiatives

Sean P. Treglia joined USC's Annenberg School for Communication in September, 2003 as a senior advisor for democracy initiatives. In this role he designs course agenda and convenes regional workshops to train journalists how to effectively cover campaign finance issues; has organized hearings for the Los Angeles City Council on upcoming cable franchise negotiations; managed a state appointed commission to develop and promote ideas and recommendations for extending the campaign finance laws to online political activities; and teaches a class on media and the First Amendment.

Treglia also serves as a Commissioner on the Los Angeles City Ethics Commission, the local campaign finance and government ethics regulatory body. Immediately preceding his position at Annenberg, Treglia was a program officer at The Pew Charitable Trusts for almost seven years focusing on improving elections, which included federal campaign finance reform, working to professionalize the political consulting profession and working to promote journalistic best practices.

Rick White, Liaison from GSPM Council on American Politics
President & CEO, Technet

Rick White, CEO of TechNet, was elected to the House of Representatives in 1994 as a Republican from Washington State’s 1st district. He was one of the leading promoters of an Internet free from government regulation and taxation and founded the Congressional Internet Caucus. He was the sponsor of the Internet Protection Act, which would have prevented the Federal Communications Commission from extending its regulatory grasp to the Internet, or any converging technologies, such as IP telephony. He was a co-sponsor and active booster of the Safety and Freedom through Encryption Act which guarantees the right of Americans to use and export strong encryption products. In the 104th Congress he worked on the Telecommunications Act of 1996.