Micah L. Sifry, a Data & Society advisor, is a writer, editor, and community organizer. He co-founded Civic Hall, New York City’s collaborative community center for civic tech, and served as its president from 2015 through 2020. Upon founding Civic Hall, he created Civicist, its daily news site covering the field of civic tech, and along with Matt Stempeck curated the Civic Tech Field Guide, a living repository of information on more than 6,000 projects, companies, tools, platforms, and processes using technology for the public good. He was curator of the annual Personal Democracy Forum conference from 2004-2019, and the editor of techPresident.com, its award-winning group news site. 

Sifry speaks and writes widely on topics of technology, politics, and organizing, with a weekly newsletter on Substack called The Connector. He is the author or editor of nine books, including Civic Tech in the Global South (with Tiago Peixoto, World Bank Books, 2016), A Lever and a Place to Stand: How Civic Tech Can Move the World (PD Press, 2015), The Big Disconnect: Why the Internet Hasn’t Changed Politics (Yet) (OR Books, 2014), and WikiLeaks and the Age of Transparency (OR Books, 2011). He is a former associate editor of The Nation magazine, and earned a BA in politics from Princeton University and MA in politics from New York University.