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Biography

Micah L. Sifry is a writer, editor, and community organizer. From January 2015 through September 2020 he was President and Co-Founder of Civic Hall, New York City’s collaborative community center for civic tech. Civic Hall grew out of his work co-founding, editing and curating Personal Democracy Media, an independent media company that has focused since 2004 on the way technology is changing politics, government and civic life. He was also curator of the annual Personal Democracy Forum (PDF) conference, which gathers close to one thousand people every June in New York, from 2004-2019, and was also the editor of techPresident.com, PDM’s award-winning group news site. Upon founding Civic Hall, he created Civicist, its daily news site covering the field of civic tech, and along with Matt Stempeck has curated the Civic Tech Field Guide, a living repository of information on more than 4,000 projects, companies, tools, platforms and processes using technology for the public good. 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 nine books, most recently 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), which was published in February 2011 in the United States, the United Kingdom, Italy, Australia, New Zealand, South Korea and Japan. He is a 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 in Hastings-on-Hudson, New York. Sifry’s work with Personal Democracy Media 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 world’s “largest annual gathering of political technology geeks.” As a consultant, Sifry was a senior technology adviser to the Sunlight Foundation from its founding in 2006 through 2015, and played a central role in crafting its original mission and strategy. He also joined the board of directors of Consumer Reports in October 2010, and the board of the Public Laboratory for Open Technology and Science in January 2012. In the spring of 2012, he was a Visiting Lecturer at the Harvard Kennedy School, teaching a class on “The Politics of the Internet.”

Content

Total articles 813

• Available on paid plans

  Democrats are looking for the resistance in all the wrong places

  By Micah Sifry

  Apr. 08, 2025

• Available on paid plans

  Trump and Musk Have Created a New Kind of Opposition in Federal Workers

  By Micah Sifry

  Apr. 05, 2025

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